Gore Has Read the Playbook

Al Gore says the debate is over. He wants things his way. He wants social division. He wants fear and hate. He has read the anti-smoking playbook.

Al Gore is flush with cash from his scaremongering global warming documentary film and from private donations too. He wants to spend up to two hundred million dollars annually on an advertising campaign promoting awareness that global warming doom awaits. He wants to fix things, fix them his way, the new progressive way, the anti-smoking way.

"It’s about communicating the urgency and solvability of the climate crises," says a Gore spokesman. Solvability? You mean we’re not irretrievably doomed? There is just one possible path to salvation, explains Public Communications Professor Sue Alessandrini, that being widespread advertising which will "associate using energy with a character flaw, something that makes it very personal."

Bruce Vanden Bergh, a "professor of advertising" (when did they start making those?), agrees. He points out that the anti-smoking crusade started in the 1960s and gradually accomplished the smoker vilification we all support. As Bruce’s view is described, "[S]mokers were once considered the heroes, and you were a loser if you complained about someone smoking at the table next to you. Now that dynamic is reversed. The same mentality … needs to be established toward energy use."

Al Gore is hiring the Martin Agency to advertise his pathological fear for him. Martin also promotes Geico Insurance, UPS Shipping, and Wal-Mart stores. Real science today is Madison Avenue science. Real scientific progress today is making opposition to pathological fear a character flaw. Social progress is setting neighbor against neighbor, making sure all the losers are defined, very personally.

Two hundred million dollars per annum will pay for a lot of insanity. It’s certainly enough to cover all bases. We are told that Gore’s panic campaign "won’t focus solely on energy — it will address other factors, from deforestation to methane from cows." People who worried about methane from cows were once considered crazy. Now that dynamic is being reversed. Anti-smoking showed the way to the Asylum Society. Don’t accept a bit of it. Fight it. It’s past time to lock up the crazies and take charge again.