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bigflamer wrote:
His crazy environmentalism is a huge liability though.
hspder wrote:
With that, I disagree. More and more Americans are starting to “buy” environmentalism, and Gore is able to provide some very convincing arguments. When Gore was here at Stanford back in December doing his environmentalist spiel, he was extremely good and convincing with his presentation – he managed to actually impress a lot of the Hoover Institute guys, who are as conservative as it gets around these parts.
Everybody – and I mean EVERYBODY, left and right – was very impressed with him, and if he is able to pull off the same panache he showed over here in December and over there on SNL, I’m pretty sure he’d be VERY electable.
bigflamer wrote:
I will agree with you on the idea that americans as a whole are starting to become more environmentaly concious. There is a difference though, I believe, between environmental stewardship, and extreme environmentalism.
Now, I haven’t heard him personally so I can’t speak for his eloquence in the presentation of his ideas. I just think there’s really an environmentalist wacko hiding deep within him desperately wanting to expose himself.
I will say this though, I wold like to see from our government, a firm commitment to a viable bio-diesal. A commitment which is on par with JFK’s promise to put a man on the moon.[/quote]
Americans are buying into “environmentalism” writ large, meaning conservation, pollution, etc. – Al’s mistake is focusing intently on the global warming issue, which people are not buying into as much.
To quote from a recent article by Steven Hayward:
Underlying this effort is a sense of panic over two things: the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol, and frequent polls showing that Americans aren’t buying into global-warming alarmism. The latest Gallup poll on environmental issues found that only 36 percent of Americans say they “worry a great deal about global warming” ? a number that has hardly budged in years. Global warming, Gallup’s environmental-opinion analyst Riley Dunlap wrote, puts people to sleep. Even among those who tell pollsters that the environment is their main public-policy concern (who are usually less than 5 percent of all Americans), global warming ranks lower than air and water quality, toxic waste, and land conservation.