Originally posted by Tzeentch
Your sentiments are moronic as neither Al Gore nor most people who are environment advocates have said that individuals living their lives are to blame. No one is interested in forcing you to walk 20 miles to your job and back. Where most of the blame lies is in industrial-scale pollution and with developing countries who are trying to catch up with the West's tech-level with suck reckless abandon that they're skyrocketing through infrastructure growth with no checks and balances. China for example is not wrong for wanting its billion+ citizens to have cars, but there's no reason for those 1 billion cars to be pumping out pollution at 1970's levels. An issue that China has acknowledged and is working on"durrr AL Gore and Obama said I'm a bad person for driving my car" is a smokescreen tactic.
Glad to see you posting. Please post more.
But you're wrong.
Gore has made his position quite clear many times and those positions directly impact those "little people" you say are not the target.
Such as...
1. Imposing a carbon tax which would be footed by the very much average American.
2. Overhaul home and building, heating and cooling systems.
3. He wants to make gasoline much more expensive to incentivize consumers out of wanting to use it.
4. "Broad-based energy tax", which, when you look into it, is going to primarily impact the 126 million households in the US.
http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Al_Gore_Energy_+_Oil.htm
So while you talk about Al Gore not targeting the average everyday person in your rebuttal, many of his ideas and policies directly target those people.
Your reply actually failed from the onset because you argued a very bad position to begin with. If we choose to move people towards clean and renewable energy sources, we SHOULD target the average everyday person AND businesses like Al Gore has done. It's not one or the other: it's both. The solution has to come from both supply and demand, not just supply.
Also, you're arguing against the idea that he's targeting just the average person by saying he's targeting the big industry. But to be fair to SquallX, he never took the position that Al Gore is only targeting average everyday Americans: your representation of his position is a strawman.
And here's a point that makes my butt hurt:
Some argue that Al Gore needs to operate such a huge carbon footprint so he can spread his message. If he convinces 100 people to change and reduce carbon emissions with a talk, then the flight he took to give that talk has a net negative, as the argument goes. That's just asinine. Let's reframe that argument to put it in context with how stupid it is: If I am an anti-rapist speaker that travels all over the world and I have to rape a couple of people to get to each of my speaking engagements....BUT!!! It convinces 100 people not to rape someone every time I speak, I STILL RAPED 2 PEOPLE. This is still hypocritical as f*ck.
What if Al Gore gave his speeches remotely using a very clean renewable energy source to power his electronics? Then he'd be living his message. Wonder what the big oil apologists would come up with, then? "He's operating his home almost purely through clean renewable energy sources, he travels to all domestic talks with a hydrogen fuel cell bus, and he gives almost all international speeches with video conferencing software from his clean energy home. That f*ckin' hypocrite."