GORE WATCH. When I started this up, I had no idea it would be such a massive undertaking. But Gore's popping up all over the place. He hit John Tierney's column Monday, forming the inspiration for a fairly bizarre effort that lambasted Gore for getting global warming right before others did. "As therapeutic as this history may be for Gore," writes Tierney, "it has certain problems. Scientists recognized the greenhouse effect long ago, but the question was how much difference it would make. And until fairly recently, when evidence of global warming accumulated, many non-evil economists doubted that the risks justified the costs of the proposed remedies." So Gore was right -- his sin was not waiting for others to catch up. Quite a resounding critique Tierney's got. Meanwhile, he blasts Gore for "avoid[ing] any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries." Over at Grist, David Roberts slaps his forehead "duh," writing that "Gore might not have needed to spend so much time on basic climate science if boneheads like Tierney hadn't taken so long to board the clue train. It appears one can never convince Americans too much." Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd thinks Hillary Clinton's big speech on the environment was an attempt to steal Gore's thunder. "[Hillary] made it clear who's in power and who's in Cannes when she ostentatiously promised to take her motorcade back to Capitol Hill and introduce legislation for a strategic energy fund to jolt inert government and insatiable Big Oil into action." Elsewhere in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani thinks Gore's book -- a companion to his film -- is great. "[A]s a user-friendly introduction to global warming and a succinct summary of many of the central arguments laid out in those other volumes, 'An Inconvenient Truth, '" Kakutani writes, "is lucid, harrowing and bluntly effective." The Exxon-Mobil funded National Center for Policy Analysis certainly thinks so. They're comparing Gore to Joseph Goebbels. He certainly didn't seem to be speaking German on the Today Show (which you can watch here), but that may just prove how tricky he is.
--Ezra Klein
