Lorne Calvert announced today that Al Gore is coming to Regina. On the radio this morning, I heard talk show host John Gormley and some of his listeners apparently expressing some doubt about whether the tickets would sell.
Of course they will -- he sold out at the University of Toronto in minutes.
And don't I wish that I could go, too.
I also heard a lot of claptrap on the radio about whether people "believe" in global warming or not.
It's not a religion, people. It's not a political party.
It's just the truth, though an inconvenient one.
I don't get why some right-wingers insist on trying to turn global warming into a partisan issue. Reading the comments over at Small Dead Animals and listening to the phone calls on Gormley, some people act like global warming is just another political belief --like, say, marketing boards and single-payer health care and proportional representation -- rather than a scientific reality. Just because a Democrat, Al Gore, is trying to educate people about global warming, they seem to think only "lefties" could "believe" in global warming just like only "lefties" "believe" in taxing corporate profits, while the right-thinking right wing has to scorn and deride global warming just like it scorns and derides business tax increases.
Discuss the science, if you will -- as scientists have been doing for the last decade, finally concluding that the evidence is overwhelming and unmistakable -- but global warming is simply not a "left-right" issue. More a "life-death" issue, really
And don't get me started on the manufactured "controversy" about how much energy Al Gore uses personally.
How much do you use -- yes, you there with the SUV and the boat and the cabin? Or how about you over there, hiding behind the washer-dryer set you got after your vacation in Mexico?
Al Gore lives in a large house and wears a tuxedo and charges a speaking fee, so his political opponents seem to think they can accuse him of being some sort of hypocrite -- I guess he's supposed to be holier than thou and travel by horse and buggy (or at least fly coach) and wear some ratty old tweed jacket and live in a crummy house, just to conform to some archaic stereotype of what a "leftie" is -- how dare a "leftie" be wealthy?
Gore does set an example by paying more than $5,000 a year for energy offsets, a poorly-understood concept which is basically what Kyoto also promotes on a much larger scale, I think, with the goal of reducing overall world energy usage. And it's the whole world that Gore cares about -- he doesn't seem to be the least bit interested in wasting his personal energies on taking cheap shots at his political opponents.
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