It’s damning, and it’s got footnotes. It’s from Pajamas Media and Gal Luft, via Instapundit. It’s this:

Gore’s call to arms is typical of his environmental conduct: asking others to do [3] what he himself wouldn’t — sacrifice. His massive [4] carbon footprint, his frequent use of [5] private jets, and his inflated [6] electricity bill — more than 20 times the national average — have all been widely reported. Calling for young climate activists to engage in unlawful, albeit non-violent, action takes the hypocrisy to a whole new level. Unlike the symbol of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, who led millions of freedom seekers and who spent years in prison for his convictions — Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times but was never awarded — or civil rights activists who through their personal sacrifice won equality for blacks in South Africa and the U.S., Gore prefers to send young activists to chain themselves to bulldozers and potentially spend their best months, if not years, in prison while he himself continues to tour the world and attend carbon-neutral Hollywood parties.

And here are some numbers to keep in mind:

Gore’s anti-coal campaign is a threat to our economic well-being as it inspires activists all over the world to deny working families the cheapest source of base load electricity. Earlier this month a British court [7] cleared six Greenpeace activists of causing more than $50,000 of criminal damage to a coal-fired power plant. In the U.S., anti-coal activists have derailed scores of coal-fired power plant projects in 2007 alone. For the greens this is stunning success, but for the rest of us it is trouble in the making.

Despite Gore’s challenge to America in a July speech to commit to producing 100 percent of our energy from renewable sources in 10 years, over 60 percent of U.S. electricity is still made from coal while non-hydro renewable energy barely constitutes two percent. The much-hyped carbon-capture and sequestration, the precondition to Gore’s tolerance of coal, is nowhere on the horizon. Just this year, the Department of Energy scrapped its flagship carbon-capture project called FutureGen, admitting that even experimental plants capable of sequestering carbon dioxide will not be operational before 2015. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, today’s commercially available capture and storage technologies will add approximately 80 percent to the cost of electricity for a new pulverized coal plant, and about 35 percent to the cost of electricity for a new advanced gasification plant. Meanwhile U.S. electricity demand is growing by leaps and bounds, and in the absence of new power-generating capacity, large parts of the U.S. including New England, New York, Texas, and California are likely to experience brownouts in the next few years. So when your AC goes off in the middle of the summer or when your energy costs skyrocket due to utilities’ shift to more expensive power sources, remember Al Gore.

We’ve mused on public opinion before, since it (along with the ridiculous notion that there is complete consensus among scientists) is used to justify draconian and economically absurd global warming remedies. But check out this piece running in the LA Times from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger:

As the election enters its endgame, Democrats and their environmental allies face a political challenge they could hardly have imagined just a few months ago. America’s growing dependence on fossil fuels, once viewed as a Democratic trump card held alongside the Iraq war and the deflating economy, has become a lodestone instead. Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling — particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling — to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted “Drill, baby, drill!” Obama’s point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.

Democrats and greens ended up in this predicament because they believed their own press clippings — or, perhaps more accurately, Al Gore’s. After the release of the documentary film and book “An Inconvenient Truth,” greens convinced themselves that U.S. public opinion on climate change had shifted dramatically, despite having no empirical evidence that was the case. In fact, public concern about global warming was about the same before the movie — 65% told a Gallup poll in 2007 that global warming was a somewhat or very important concern in comparison to 63% in 1989. Global warming remains a low-priority issue, hovering near the bottom of the Pew Center for People and the Press’ top 20 priorities.

In case you missed it, Al Gore made his latest news splash last week at the Clinton Global Initiative where he encouraged today’s youth to engage in “civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”  You can read our post on it here.

And see this week’s cartoon here:

Slightly dated, but we overlooked this May survey from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.  Still worth pointing out where global warming stacks against the other big issues weighing on voters.

Since we got such an overwhelming response from readers when we shared the video of HIPPIES CRYING OVER TREES AND ROCKS we thought we’d share the first part of Penn & Teller’s episode on the absurdity of some who consider themselves green. That’s not to say that things like recycling and conservation are bad — they’re not. But some people take things too far. So enjoy!

The Associated Press has an interesting story outlining the way shareholder activists are claiming small victories for their strategy:

Support for climate-change proposals may be growing among investors in big U.S. companies.

Shareholder resolutions related to climate change more than doubled over the past five years, according to statistics gathered by a coalition of public interest groups, environmental organizations and pension funds. Moreover, the coalition, Boston-based Ceres, says support for those measures averaged more than 23 percent in 2008, a new high.

While that’s not enough to pass a resolution, Ceres contends rising vote totals compel companies to act, like a plan by Ford Motor Co. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2020.

Remember, these are truly “proxy” fights. They are not trying to make companies operate better, for the most part, they are attempting to use the machinery and actors of a capitalist system to move along their social agenda. While many supporters of this tactic believe their cause to be just, because they believe global warming is a real and present danger, what happens if they are wrong (as so many scares have been proved wrong before)? When you look at these fights for what they really are, they become much less supportable.

There’s a theory that in a democracy policy will tend to be the best over the longer term. Over at National Journal they’re saying “Americans Aim To Reduce Carbon Footprints, Despite Drop In Concern For Climate Change” — which sees about right to us. Nobody’s saying we gotta go out there and pump more greenhouse gases into the air for fun, but we’re big believers that it’s not government action that is the big problem. National Journal notes public opinion has taken an interesting turn:

According to a survey [PDF] from ABC News, Planet Green and Stanford University, fewer than half — 47 percent — of Americans consider global warming an important issue to them personally, down from 52 percent in April 2007. Although a vast majority still think the planet is warming — 8 in 10 respondents — that figure is also down from last year, having dropped 4 percentage points. Furthermore, in an open-ended question, the number of respondents who called global warming the biggest environmental challenge facing the world fell 8 points from 2007 and currently hovers at 25 percent.

According to an analysis by ABC News’ Gary Langer, the drop in these numbers coincides with decreased media attention to climate change, in favor of the election and economy. “A database search finds 50 percent fewer news stories on global warming in the month before this poll was conducted, compared with the month before last year’s survey,” Langer wrote.

That dimmer media spotlight could explain respondents’ lack of knowledge about how John McCain and Barack Obama measure up on global warming. About 8 in 10 respondents said they knew little or nothing about the candidates’ positions on the issue. Nevertheless, the Democratic contender has a clear advantage: Fifty-five percent of respondents said Obama would do a better job of reducing global warming, while only 23 percent said so of the GOP nominee.

Hat tip to one of our favorite readers.

Two graphs worth noting:

This is Gallup’s analysis:

Although there is no direct evidence proving that this decrease in economic negativity is a result of the drop in gas prices, such a causal connection is certainly a reasonable explanation. The current data showing that a majority of Americans project static or lower gas prices by the end of the year presumably suggest the possibility of an even more positive consumer outlook — which in turn could have a salutary effect on consumer spending.

It’s no surprise that many Americans don’t like oil companies — those damn, dirty oil companies! — and it’s no surprise to anyone reading the news lately that Americans aren’t thrilled with Congressional inaction. Gallup has the latest numbers, and this graph is hard to understand unless you assume the citizenry is just really, really angry. Then it makes sense.