Gore Derangement Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street
Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore's
name.
Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they
thought
deserved the prize more.
And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should
have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden,
who
implicitly endorsed Gore's stance." You see, bin Laden once said something
about climate change - therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is
a
friend of the terrorists.
What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?
Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people
chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both
the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and
the
often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely
motivated
by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush
administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job
-
to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped
for - the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more
extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is
that
he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone
man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to
the
ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we
invaded Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger
to
the United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has
proved.
But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to
name
its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the
message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling
about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just
inconvenient.
For conservatives, it's deeply threatening.
Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.
"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said
F.D.R. "We know now that it is bad economics." These words apply perfectly
to climate change. It's in the interest of most people (and especially
their
descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that
somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few
generations Florida will be underwater.
The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good
is
to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this
case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas
emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by
requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same
effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S.
"cap
and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly
successful at reducing acid rain.
Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because
the
causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from
coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air
comes from coal and oil burned around the planet - and a ton of coal
burned
in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned
here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their
equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the
United
States will have to give as well as get.
Everything I've just said should be uncontroversial - but imagine the
reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he
acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good
Republican
means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also
means
believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with
them.
So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with
tax
cuts or bombs - well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists
must
be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that
the
prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate
change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious
schemes of - who else? - George Soros.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his
case
the smear campaign has failed. He's taken everything they could throw at
him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it
drives
them crazy.
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