I feel I should apologize, dear reader, for something I fear I might have set in motion two decades ago.  Whether my "sin" is something for which a reasonable person would think I should apologize I cannot be certain, because though I try to be reasonable in all things, I might be a bit too close to the situation to judge myself fairly.  And so, to be on the safe side, I will apologize.

And for what, you ask, is this apology owed?  I can't help but harbor a sneaking suspicion that I might have had a hand in creating the monster that is the high priest of the hysterical global-warming cult, Al Gore.  This insufferable, cynical, anti-capitalist gasbag is one of the most ridiculous characters on the national scene, and because there is nothing noble about the Nobel Peace Prize anymore, as is readily ascertained from its most recent winners (or should I say "whiners"?), we are all doomed to suffer even more of Mr. Gore's officially sanctioned silliness masquerading as seriousness.

Back to my confession:

During a hiatus from Capitol Hill in 1986, I worked under contract to the Department of Energy's Office of Carbon Dioxide Research.  The growing awareness that man might be causing a "greenhouse effect" was starting to affect public opinion.  The Environmental Protection Agency, which was set up to identify threats, considered global warming a threat, because any change from the status quo is considered a threat in the environmentalists' playbook.  On the other hand, the Department of Energy, which was set up to monitor and solve energy problems, knew that we could not simply stop burning fossil fuels, so DOE wanted to determine what the greenhouse effect really was all about and what really should be done about it.

Clearly, there was no immediate market incentive to stop burning fossil fuels, but if we waited until there were, would it be too late to "save the planet"?  The big question was what should Congress do now to stave off a possible catastrophe fifty years in the future.  Wrecking our economy was not a viable option, according to the DOE.  (The EPA didn't care about viability, because even though the driving force behind the environmental movement has always been misguided anti-capitalism, the EPA's mission was to identify all possible threats, not to do cost-benefit analysis.)

Scientists and politicians don't speak the same language, and, for reasons I won't get into here, I was one of the precious few who could translate.  Most politicians don't have the time, education, or inclination to grasp the details necessary to understand what the scientists are trying to tell them.  If they did, they probably wouldn't have gone into politics in the first place.  My job was to come up with a process whereby scientists could communicate effectively with policymakers in a way that would convey knowledge (not just information!) to the policymakers so that they could understand the problem enough to legislate appropriate policy in a timely manner.  

[If you don't know the difference between knowledge and information, just think about how much more information we have at our fingertips today than we did just ten years ago.  Now think about how today's college graduates seem stupider than ever.  They have lots of information, but they don't have enough knowledge to interpret it.]

I wrote a "thought paper" framing the problem about the effects of human activities on our "global village" and sent it out to a carefully considered list of distinguished intellectuals from a broad range of disciplines: science, engineering, ethics, psychology, journalism, and philosophy.  DOE flew these deep thinkers into Washington to brainstorm the problem from every possible angle.

How does a scientist with a long-term concern (that is, one that will come to a head so far after the next election that most of the current crop of legislators would have died) get the attention of today's lawmakers and convey enough knowledge to them to do the right thing before the problem gets out of hand?  To make a long story short, my conclusion was that he couldn't.  A legislator has so much on his to-do list that he must focus on the things that need to be taken care of now.  If global warming won't be a problem for fifty years, what's the rush?  Come back when the matter is urgent.

The only way to get a lawmaker's attention off of someone else's crisis du jour and onto yours is to claim that your crisis is more urgent that anything else on the lawmaker's plate right now.  No one really enjoys working under crisis conditions, but at least the pressure of a crisis affords lawmakers cover by absolving them of their duty to make the best possible decisions.  They can explain to their constituents that they cast what turned out to be a bad vote based on the best information available at the time:  "Well, maybe it wasn't the best decision I could have made, but Congress had to do something!"

[Acting in the heat of the moment excuses a lot of bad decisions; that's why, for example, the punishment for second-degree murder isn't as severe as for first-degree murder.]

Like Lenin's "useful idiots," the naive, emotional environmentalists oppose global warming because it threatens them with the specter of something different from the status quo, so, as is their wont, they become hysterical in their demands that something be done about it.  The deliberate, leftist, anti-capitalist environmentalists, on the other hand, want to elevate the nature of the phenomenon to "threat" status and blame the United States so that our shining city will fall off its hill.  None of this has anything to do with science or the environment, but it has everything to do with politics.  If these people were really concerned about pollution from fossil fuels, they would be pushing for nuclear power.

I can't help but think that then-Senator Gore, who was deliberately building his reputation as a forward-thinker on the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology & Space, had became aware of what the Department of Energy was doing about research into the greenhouse effect, which loomed either as a great threat or as a great opportunity for a bright politician.   

As strange as it might seem, I really do have pangs of guilt about somehow inadvertently giving Gore "permission" to use a cynical phony crisis to hoodwink the American people into surrendering their economy and their freedom to power-hungry, self-serving, anti-capitalists.  Fortunately these guilty thoughts are alleviated somewhat when I realize that any experienced politician, and certainly anyone with more than half a brain, already knows about exaggerating his needs when begging other people for money.

(To be continued . . . .)