“An Inconvenient Truth” (and its inauspicious start)
posted by Eric Muller
While at the beach this weekend, I read Al Gore’s new book “An Inconvenient Truth.” It’s sobering and effective. I recommend it highly.
Be advised, though, that the book is not just about global warming. It’s also very much about Al Gore. He intersperses his scientific material, diagrams, photographs, and big-font explanations with family snapshots and small-font autobiography. Coming from a lifelong politician, this material really can be seen as nothing other than campaign literature.
I myself didn’t mind the personal stuff too much, because I admire much of what Gore has done with his life, and I learned some things about his family that I didn’t know. But I do think it would have been smarter for him to leave this material out; including it just makes the job of those who wish to discredit the science he’s advancing that much easier.
I’ll confess, though, to one moment of eye-rolling. And it came early — in the very first column on the very first page. Gore alludes to his son’s near-fatal accident in 1989, and then says this: “[D]uring that traumatic period … I made at least two enduring changes. I vowed always to put my family first, and I also vowed to make the climate crisis the top priority of my professional life.”
I recognize that “putting one’s family first” can mean lots of different things to lots of different families. But I’ll go out on a limb and say that one thing “putting your family first” just can’t mean is being President of the United States.
This opening passage of the book rang false to me — a politician’s platitude. Not a good start for a book about truth.
June 13, 2006 at 9:32 pm
Posted in: Articles and Books
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Responses (5)
Christine Hurt - June 14, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I, too, am sympathetic to both the book and the movie, but certain aspects of the messenger make my eyes roll, too. In People magazine last week, I think, Al Gore was asked what five things he was doing to cut down on greenhouse emissions. His answers were very lame. One answer was that he was “going to” buy a hybrid. Another was that he turns lights out when he leaves the room. Number five was that he made this movie to get his message across rather than fly everywhere in person. Isn’t he still flying around in person?
s gerber - June 14, 2006 at 12:23 pm
In 1989 he made the climate his top priority????
I don’t think so.
Jamison Colburn - June 22, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Well I guess I can’t resist the compulsion to ask, then (because I really don’t have any love loss for Gore), what is your “top priority” in life? I have children too, am a proud environmentalist, teach environmental law, don’t own a hybrid (but do live close to work and try to drive as little as possible) and would probably give equally lame answers about what I’m doing to cut my GHG emissions. But I will say that Gore’s record on climate change is better than any other national politician’s since 1989 (and I was at EPA during that administration) and that some people genuinely do seek public office and to serve because they love their kids. The presidency is just the boldest extension of that, isn’t it? Let’s leave it to Republican cynics and reporters to think that the only reason people seek power is because they’re corrupt.
Eric Muller - June 22, 2006 at 4:10 pm
My top priority in life is my wife and children — by which I mean that I would never dream of seeking a job that would inevitably set my interests markedly against theirs. In other words, I wouldn’t seek a job that would me require of me that I say to my wife or child in the hospital, “sweetie, I’m sorry, I know you’re frightened of this surgery you’re having tomorrow. But I have to go to Hawaii to negotiate a trade treaty with the Prime Minister of Japan. I’ll try to give you a call.”
The presidency is one of the few jobs in the world where sometimes you just can’t cancel a commitment for a family emergency.
I believe that being present and available at times of family crisis is at the heart of “putting my family first”–and I think that most people believe that.
So when Al Gore says he decided in 1989 “always to put family first” and then ran for President in 2000, I think he showed that in fact he has priorities that, in the event of a direct conflict, he’d put above his family.
That doesn’t make him a bad guy by any stretch. But it does make his “family first” thing a bit of a politician’s platitude, as I said.
Dale - June 29, 2006 at 11:42 pm
You neo-nazis can’t stop can you? Al Gore shows you how George Bush-it is destroying this planet and all you can do is comment about how Gore talks about his family? No wonder this country is in such back shape. I knew all you snakes went under your rock in the 70’s, but then you all came out from under your rock when that brain dead Ronald Regan became our so called President. I hope that the draft comes back because that is the only way that you will care, and then your kids will be going off to war to be sacrificed for the Rich to get Richer. You people are a sorry piece of crap.
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