Miguel A. Murado

WHEN David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives in the UK, decided to go green, he announced that from then on he would be cycling to the Parliament every day. Of course, trailing behind him were the two cars with his staff and the documents he needs for his work, plus another car with his bodyguards. Opening the way ahead of him, rode the police mobile unit to protect the opposition leader from being overrun either by accident or by a Labourite. Since the story captivated the media, Cameron was followed by four or five press cars too, and even a helicopter with a TV crew on board. As some British comedian would later comment, “by the time Cameron reached his destination that day, a glacier, somewhere, had melted.”

I had this story in the back of my mind when I saw Al Gore at the Oscar ceremony, receiving the award for best documentary for his film An Inconvenient Truth, which, as you may know, is a more or less well documented environmentalist piece. Gore was the vice President of the US, when he could have done a lot for the environment; but he didn’t. He preferred to wait until he lost the elections to turn into a prophet, and now he travels the World preaching the End of Time like a Jeremiah or an Oseas of the Greenhouse Effect. Then, when his workday is up, he returns to his home in Nashville (Tennessee), where his electricity bill marks something around 221.000 Kw/h per year, about twenty times the expense of an average family and enough to finish of Antarctica if we followed Gore’s example rather than that of his film.

Does Gore’s electricity bill detract credibility from the cause he preaches? I don’t think so. Actually, I’d go as far as to say that it does not detract even from Gore’s own credibility either. We just mentioned Oseas. That biblical prophet used to live with a prostitute and, when asked by his disciples about the perceived inconsistency of preaching moral rectitude while not practicing it, he excused himself by saying that what he wanted was to “become a metaphor of Israel”, who also lived in sin a degradation (luckily for Oseas, the Bible does not provide any comment by the prostitute).

Both Cameron and Gore can make a similar claim. After all, their inconsistency is a lesson too in its own right: a lesson about how difficult it is to be “green” and rich at the same time, and how is it that, between environmental-friendly poverty and the wastage of wealth, so many people (when given a choice) choose the former. That, maybe, and not whether there’s more or less CO2 in the atmosphere, is the real inconvenient truth for all of us.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel A. Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 05 April 2005