Just so somebody sticks to the topic. . .

I read the Boehlert report, and it is both thorough and brilliant.  Beyond the article, I encourage people to follow the links in it.  The Rolling Stone piece is a fine piece of reportage.  So are a number of the other ones.

While you're at it, visit Bob Somersby's Daily Howler.  He's been fighting an unrelenting war against media attacks on Gore for years now.  A thankless, but necessary task. 

In the meantime, could I suggest that people who want to discuss something other than the Gore Book or the Reportage on it find a more appropriate thread to do it in?  Thankee very much.

aMike

For anyone who has read or is reading Gore's new book I offer the following: Although most of the things Gore has to say have been reported on in one way or another before, it is great to have it all there between two covers--chapter and verse of the gross iniquities we have suffered since the Gore v Bush diktat was handed down in 2000.

Gore presents the events with elegance and dignity.

The early chapters have an analysis of propaganda techniques and brain physiology that I found to be fascinating.

The case of the MSM is the real puzzler in this whole situation we find ourselves in.

Surely such publications as the NYT and Washington Post as well as the cable news outlets must know that the average Joe is NOT their audience. Their audience is us. And we are not stupid. We are well-informed by multiple sources including the internet. Why on earth they would try to slime Gore's book is beyond my comprehension. Their future does not lie with those who can't wait to find out what is next in the saga of Paris Hilton, their future is with us. I estimate that the "us" is about 1/3 or so of the American people. A very influential 1/3. A 1/3 of movers-and shakers.
Continuing to insult our intelligence cannot possibly be motivated by their bottom line.

Boehlert's piece is terrific. One thing I was really interested in: Dana Milbank accusing Gore of "pompously reminding listeners that he was the 'smartest guy in the room'". This is a really interesting meme, which also came up in Sean Hannity's confrontation with Christopher Hitchens after Falwell died. Hitchens ripped apart the smarmy piety of Hannity and Colmes alike, and Hannity could respond with nothing better than "you obviously think you're the smartest guy in the room."

I happen to think this particular insult is a massive loser. It reinforces everyone's impression that the other guy actually IS the smartest guy in the room, while making the person uttering the remark seem whiny, insecure, and kind of dumb. People who use it THINK they're going to get a populist "Yeah, to hell with that pointy-headed pansy" sympathy vote from regular Joes; but I don't think they do. I think pretty much everyone just pegs them for insecure, second-rate losers.

Accumulating Peripherals

Everyone knows people who worked for Ken Lay were the smartest guys in the room.

They were going to take dumb dubya and advise him and make him smart, along with Colin, Condi.

So where are those Energy Task Force notes?

It's been beyond five years. They can be FOIA'd now.

BTW, amike, I did read the references. Quite telling indeed what a job the press did on Al Gore for things he wasn't guilty of.

Can they never get anything right?

Best, Terry

A comfortably deregulated industry will always suck up to the party committed to keep it that way. The infotainment industry is no different. The more the "airwaves" have been privatized, the more news desks are accountable to their corporate shareholders than to the public interest.

You had a point here?

Continuing to insult our intelligence cannot possibly be motivated by their bottom line.

They'll always have Sung Yung Moon to bail them out. :-)
I can see it now, the Washington Post Times, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Unification church!

Yeah, it can't be about the profits, else the Washington Times would have made a profit by now. And what about all the right wing rags being published as "magazines" that never make a dime of profit? And the "books" by Regnery Press, etc.?

You had a point here?

I thought it was rather obvious.

Guess not.

Al Gore was attacked for being stiff. He was subjected to specious charges of fibbing about his background. He was too wonkish compared to the affable Bush. He was maybe worst of all a liberal environment whacko.

None of it was true. Well maybe he was stiff but hey he got away with being a Vietnam veteran. Not bad.

The facts were quite different and are different today.

Al Gore was a handy tool of Clinton's. Even Al Gore admits to some of that as in his announced regret for supporting trade agreements that did damage to unions and workers.

But the worst damage Al Gore did was to help Clinton dismantle the Protection of Species Act to become little more than a relic.

Maybe I missed something but I can find no place in his writings ever that he paid attention to the most potent green energy source of them all.

It is a curiosity that the U.S. is the largest producer of electricity from geothermal sources and yet it is lightly regarded in this country. The premiere company in the field is Israeli. Much of the development funding comes from sources outside the U.S.. Harry Reid bemoans the lack of interest. The DOE has attempted to end completely govenment funded R&D for a "mature technology" in geothermal but not for oil and gas as well as wind and solar.

In the meantime there are real environmental hurdles. A very rare, endangered fish is one.

What has environmentalist Al Gore to say about all this?

As far as I know, nothing at all. He is MIA where it counts most.

Best, Terry

Ego-ridden media types are afraid of Gore and the Media Matters article reveals that their fear is justified.

Planned or not - Al Gore, cagey? - their book reviews, their made-for-television interviews of him do a bang-up job of revealing them to be the empty-headed nincompoops Gore suggests they are.

Is it possible that in pushing his book Al agreed to be interviewed specifically by the babbling TV personalities who would best reveal their nincompoopishness and thus make his point regarding the media?

Thank you for elaborating.
I am enlightened.

As for the geothermal, it is a very good thing. I had a geothermal heat pump installed recently, in spite of the high cost. And no noisy external heat transfer unit is the unexpected added value. Hear those birds?

Its "The Shoebox Mentality of the MSM."

The MSM all live in a Shoebox, (I call them the Munchkins) and in that Shoebox, they socialize, gossip, trade life stories, befriend, intermarry and commiserate. Their motto; "Group Think Rocks" can be seen in all they say as none of them ever think outside The Shoebox, originality not being their forte'. If one Munchkin opines that Gore is a bore, then this is the subject spoken of and reinforced at the next Soiree in the Shoebox. Shoebox denizens, Munchkins, rarely speak ill of Republicans, and when they do its usually constructive criticism administered with empathy, after all, they "know" what the Democrats are, blue collar people, ICK!.

The Chief Shoe is The Dean, David Broder, who's latest pearl of wisdom was the idea that Bush was well situated for a surge in the polls. Mister Broder feels that Washington DC is "his" town and Democrats simply sully the pavements and think outside the box, while Republicans like Scooter Libby, who supplies the Munchkins with Group Think Material, bring respect, honor and respectibility to The Shoebox. The Washington Press Corps honors Mister Broder.

Tim Russert wants to replace Mister Broder as Chief Shoe and Chris Matthews wants to replace Russert. The Shoeshine boy in The Shoebox, Wolf Blitzer, is not in the running. Bob Schieffer, Katie Couric and Chris Wallace practice Shoebox Mentality religiously, regularly dipping into the Shoebox for today's Group Think Items.

The Munchkins in The Shoebox are engaged in this utterly surreal dance where the morally blind are leading the self centered.

Actually, they didn't take a shot at Gore. Very positive, fair and well done feature.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

That post is lame on a number of levels.

For one thing, vaguely equating Gore with Romney is sloppy, obnoxious, and sounds like Rt Wing baloney to me. You sound like you just have an axe to grind against Gore.

And regarding geothermal: it has almost zero public enthusiasm, and we produce very little per capita. We have tremendous wind, solar and biofuel possibilities and companies already set up to leverage them. In the case of solar it also has the possibility of being deployed in both a centralized and decentralized manner, and efficiency is increasing logarithmically.

So emphasizing geothermal sounds like you're just trying to derail the topic, the way Bush always brought up the "future hydrogen economy" as a diversionary tactic whenever somebody mentioned CAFE standards.

Geothermal?Nuclear.

The USA is not the largest geothermal energy producer, per capita.

I note you did not contradict the fact that the U.S. is the world's largest producer of electricity from geothermal resources despite near zero enthusiasm and vast ignorance.

In some areas with known geothermal activity, like parts of NorCal nearby San Francisco, geothermal is known and being used.

Just the beginning.

Even if you doubt for some reason that geothermal power stations can be developed economically most anywhere on earth, you could not deny that geothermal heat pumps can be.

Do you give a damn about global warming or not?

Are facts too bothersome for you?

Kinda funny is that wingers are busting a gut talking about Dubya's ranch in Crawford being heated (could we say mainly cooled?) by a heat pump. Of course Dubya had nothing to do with it. Wonder if he even knew?

Best, Terry

I already pointed out the problems with geothermal, why it's not as great as you seem to think. It's expensive to build for another problem. Hard to survey for another. Anyways, you seem to just be babbling on the issue as a pretense to attack Gore.

Google: "terry hallinan" + Chevron
or
"terry hallinan" + geothermal

Results in a number of interesting Chevron, geothermal related messages, including investment related forum, from another poster named "Terry Hallinan" who signs "Best, Terry."

Some posts had an interest in foreign geothermal in places like Nicaragua threatened by the idea of nationalized power production.

So, Terry Hallinan is not exactly a typical greenie just happening to mention geothermal in passing. Apparently TH is a geothermal enthusiast, very likely with material interest in Chevron or other geothermal company. That would explain the Gore bashing and otherwise skewed mental state as well as the Rt wing talking points. I think his/her opinion has lost all credibility, or should at least be taken with a huge grain of salt. Or perhaps a lump of sulfur would better explain the smell.

Regardless, TH should go peddle his/her agenda and marketing material elsewhere.

BTW,

Power generation should be public owned and operated, including geothermal, so we get Wall Street and their associated lobbiests and assorted lying shills out of the equation. Even better is distributed power generation, user owned, which can sell surplus back to the market, such as solar.

Does TH have a problem with that too?

I already pointed out the problems with geothermal, why it's not as great as you seem to think. It's expensive to build for another problem. Hard to survey for another.

Your penetrating analysis is - hilarious.

Did you forget earthquakes or is it news to you?

It's a lot cheaper to whomp up ethanol or bio-oil on the kitchen stove no doubt. Fine to avoid the dang old utilities altogether if you have a mind to. You can put in windmills, run of river generators, all sorts of things - if you have the money. Maybe like Dubya you can even have had somebody install a geothermal heat pump for the ranch when you bought it.

There is a reason underdeveloped countries from Kenya to Guatemala, from the Philippines to Indonesia are in love with geothermal. There is a reason Chinese and English are developing "Geothermal Cities." There is no reason I can think of that the U.S. has little interest except vast ignorance - even with the old pump by the like of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. (Those two wingers too you think, Kozmik, just trying to do hurt to Al Gore?)

There might even be a reason Danny Ortega and his Sandinistas determined it would be best to develop Nicaragua's geothermal assets while resisting friendly Hugo Chavez's offers of cheap oil and refineries and power stations.

I will let you work on the solution as homework.

Best, Terry

Being nitpicky, we should include the latent heat of compression following Earth's formation. Radioactivity is a the larger part of the heat budget, but not all of it.

An easier and very immediately effective use of the ground is groundwater, or rather groundwater as either heat sink in summer or heat source in winter. The heat pump that takes its heat from groundwater uses half or less of the electricity needed to run an air-supplied pump, and around a quarter of that needed for cooling.

As we find increased efficiencies in delivering the needed task, such as heating/cooling or lighting, we find it easier to supply the whole job with wind and solar. True geothermal is only possible on a large scale, but wind and solar can be home-sized.

Still, I'm with you on promoting it. It should be a much higher priority than coal or nuclear. We have the large area around Yellowstone, as well as the Pacific Rim plate boundary vulcanism available.

Higher primates only? Don't go insulting cats and dogs like that!

Terry Hallinan has way too many posts to energy and especially geothermal investment related fora that are Google searchable. He also has a decidedly Rt Winger tone to a lot of his posts in other fora, and if you read between he lines, does here as well, such as his Gore bashing.

That he's now calling me a "socialist" for believing in decentralized power production and state run centralized power grids in the USA (which is a natural monopoly) and comparing me to Hugo Chavez and the Ayatollah of Iran for even suggesting it, also shows the colors of a Rt Winger reactionary. He sounds just like Bill Kristol or such.

Geothermal heat is derived from radioactivity in the earth's crust

It's not appropriate to refer to it as "radioactivity" in a general discussion in context of nuclear reactors. That's like saying a sunny day, or rubbing your hands together on a cold day are all "radioactive" in the same manner as a nuclear plant. Nuclear reactors based on radioactive decay emit gamma radiation called "radioactive." Geothermal heat is based on friction and pressure, and is not commonly referred to as "radioactive."

Big Oil wrote off geothermal decades ago.

Not true. Chevron is the US's largest geothermal developer, and while it has downplayed any green technology, preferring huge oil profits, it is of course presently looking to capitalize in any way it can on global climate change. In large scale US geothermal edvelopment, a company like Chevron would quickly move to expand their geothermal and acquire smaller companies (such as the one you hold, as I'm sure you're aware of) to monopolize the market while lobbying Washington for sweetheart deals and long term leases to rape the public good as they always have.