It is Monday morning, and I am surfing the all-news networks. As I forage for any scrap of rumor about Bill and Monica and Kenneth and the grand jury, I am thinking the thought that should make us all pause.
It is the thought that makes me silently beg the president to take his medicine but stay in office. And the thought is this: We are one tick away from Al Gore and a national agenda that cares more for trees than for people.
In our lust for sordid details of the defining "sources-say-he-might-have-said, close- friends-and-former-confidants-say-she-said" story of our times, we have forgotten all about the man who stands to gain the most from the completion of Ken Starr's investigation. And it occurs to me that instead of asking whether the president's actions warrant impeachment, we should be asking whether anything Bill Clinton did or could do is worth trading him in for a man arrogant enough to believe that he is capable of saving the planet.
Some similarities exist between Clinton and the man who stands an impeachment vote away from the presidency, but not many. The biggest is that both are consumed by a single subject.
With Clinton, the subject is one that should not be discussed in a family newspaper, but instead should be relegated to the traditional venues for talk of smutty sex, such as the locker room, AM radio, and network television. With Gore, the subject is the favorite bete noire of people who have nothing better to worry about, global warming.
Let me get one thing clear. I like trees as much as the next guy.
Unlike most next guys, I've actually spent time in several rain forests, and I found them to be places worth preserving.
Now let me get something else clear. The idea that humans are contributing to a general warming of the atmosphere and that this is a bad thing is not proved, and probably can't be proved until it has already happened. This was pointed out to me more than 15 years ago by a meteorologist who worked for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and it hasn't changed.
As the meteorologist explained, the climate is always either warming or cooling. Even before humans showed up and discovered ways to inject carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the climate ran in cycles.
The most recent was an age of glaciers, the latest of which left these environs 10,000 years ago.
Modern humans have been around for more than 100,000 years, and unmodern ones for 4 million years or more. But it is only since the glaciers retreated that civilization has emerged.
Long-term trends, which are as inevitable as continental drift, require that the earth's climate get warmer or colder. It can't stay the same forever. Both global warming and global cooling have occurred without the aid of homo sapiens, and will continue to do so not matter how many blue-ribbon panels Gore creates.
And even if we can affect the climate, do we want to halt warming if the result is another ice age? I don't know about you, but I'm really not big on the thought of digging through 5,000 feet of ice to get to a Yankees game. In the Middle Ages, the earth experienced a mini-ice age that, in some latitudes, resulted in massive crop failure. Do we want that? And whether we do or not, do we have a choice?
History says we don't have a choice. And what worries me about Gore is that he has the arrogance not only to presume he has the answers that serious scientists admit they don't have, but also to believe that humans can both destroy the planet and save it. The truth is that the earth has survived fire and ice; it has absorbed the blows of giant comets and meteors; it has seen rain forests in Antarctica and ice sheets in Manhattan. It can certainly survive Al Gore.
What Bill Clinton most assuredly knows today that Al Gore may never know is that we can destroy only ourselves, and we can do it in an infinite variety of ways. Watching his personal self-destruction hasn't been pretty, but as bad as it has been, it's better than President Green Jeans.
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