Op-Ed Columnist
Gore Derangement Syndrome
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 15, 2007
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.
