Gore says facts not reported on Iraq, global warming
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The lack of basic information cripples democracy and makes it impossible for citizens to develop informed opinions or make rational decisions about the choices before them, Gore said.
“When our grandchildren say to us in our elderly years, ‘Why did you let this happen?’ Didn’t you know?'” Gore told students at Middle Tennessee State University. “We all support them (soldiers in Iraq) but the fact that they’re there stems from a public debate that was one-sided in the extreme that led to our democracy being crippled.”
Gore said there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York or the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Yet an overwhelming majority of the public believed President Bush’s argument that Iraq was at the center of the plot and supported the decision to go to war.
Gore said misinformation is nothing new in American politics or in major questions of the day. He said the 1964 Surgeon General’s report linking smoking to cancer was met with doubters paid for by the tobacco industry and by a barrage of blatantly misleading advertising, including a print ad that proclaimed, “More doctors smoke Camels.”
He said a similar barrage of questions and half-truths is offered in support of the war in Iraq and to cast doubt on global warming. He urged students to study the facts to arrive at their own decisions.
The former vice president from 1993 to 2001 said it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to define the issue of global warming or to determine what needs to be done to combat it. The problem, he said, is political.
But once the “old way of thinking” is shed, new industries will arise that will generate profits without polluting the environment, he said.
Asked what he would do if he were president — a question that brought applause from the largely student audience — Gore said he would push for passage of the Kyoto Protocol to limit the emission of greenhouse gases and develop clean hydrogen fuel.
“It’s all a question of political will,” Gore said.
The United States produces about 30 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, he said, the downside of the scientific and technological revolution. New technology added to old habits could completely change the daily lives of everyone in the world, he said.
Gore said the usual arguments that the world is too big to be polluted or the problem is too large to be fixed are both wrong. He said the hole in the ozone has improved since chlorofluorocarbons were banned — an example of what can be done if there’s the political will to do it.
“Do we have the capacity?” he said. “You bet we have the capacity because we have a democracy and the ability to reason together and to deal with the truth of this issue.”
Gore, author of “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,” spoke to the students under the auspices of the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Students. The chair was established in 1986 to honor John Seigenthaler, a former editor of The Tennessean and an advocate for First Amendment freedoms.
Gore, a former U.S. senator and congressman from Tennessee, narrowly lost the 2000 election to President Bush.
Students praised Gore’s presentation.
“I think it was very intelligent,” said Jessica Causey, 21, a junior majoring in accounting. “There was no Bush bashing. It was very academic. He made good arguments.”