>What I'm ridiculing is the notion that we can have meaningful environmental change without radical changes in lifestyle.

I don't believe Al Gore or any other credible environmentalist has ever said that we could. I completely agree that we each have an individual responsibility to lead a sustainable lifestyle, and I recognize that virtually all of us fall short of that, in some cases (probably including Al Gore's) VERY short of that. And I completely agree with you that things must change radically or horrifying results will surely be in the near future.

But the way we get meaningful change is to each do what we can, BOTH in our personal life and in how we try to influence events in the larger society. We're living in a nation where a great many people with a loud voice in the media and a large presence in government are still denying that global warming even exists, much less that it's caused or seriously exacerbated by human activity. Our federal government even still encourages, through tax breaks and other legislation, large families, and refuses to do hardly anything to slow our carbon emissions.

There are only two times in which major change ever takes place in large bureaucracies and fairly stable societies--when there is a major disaster or when there is massive and focused public education. We're getting frighteningly close to a major disaster right now. With a large amount of luck, we can perhaps get enough people mobilized through education to get started BEFORE this disaster. But this will only be possible if those of us aware of the problem work together, rather than sniping at our teammates and making it easy for those working against ANY change to prevail.

Each and every one of us must develop a much more sustainable lifestyle. As you note, the rich and famous squander energy and all kinds of natural resources to support huge houses and luxury transportation, and should be much more mindful of their effects and DO something about it. But each of us is responsible for OUR actions, not for judging or policing anyone else. We should first take care of our own carbon footprint (and also our other uses of natural resources), and second focus on ways that our talents, personal resources, and other gifts can allow us to effectively work on the larger problem facing our society.

This is precisely where Al Gore is doing great work. He understands government. He understands the scientific issues surrounding climate and carbon, and is excellent at communicating them to a variety of audiences. His focus has been to stir up huge numbers of individuals to amass the political will to make large changes. This is a good thing. In his personal life he certainly uses orders of magnitude more natural resources than I do. He could probably make some serious improvements (though the media has distorted so many stories about him that I do not doubt for a second that they've gotten a lot about his "hypocritical lifestyle" wrong, too). But he's using a huge amount of his time, energy, unique talents, and unique expertise to effect real change. He has been committed to the environment for decades, and been as effective as anyone could be in this corporatist society in effecting real changes. Not enough, for sure. But I'd submit that to make enough changes, we need MORE Al Gores, not one fewer.

As usual, the left is so idealistic that we yearn for everyone to be perfect, and get mad when people do less than what we think they can or should do to improve things. But I firmly believe that "united we stand, divided we fall." I'm tired of our circular firing squads shooting people on our own team--people who are equally concerned about stopping global warming--just because they are not doing one particular thing that we have put at the top of our own priority list. There are plenty enough people out there ridiculing all of us for "believing" in what has been scientifically established.

Shooting each other down is strengthening the climate change denial team. If we can't work together and must actually snipe at each other, how can we possibly expect our badly polarized government and our badly polarized general population to work together to do a damned thing to solve this huge problem?