Gore's Technological Determinism

From Joel Kovel's critique of Al Gore's thesis:

....An Inconvenient Truth fails to mention the word, capitalism, that it oozes with technological determinism, does not take into sufficient account the global South, never questions the industrial model, promises that his approach will generate a lot of wealth, and offers no real way out beyond voting the proper people, ie, people like himself, into office. Thus neither capital, nor the capitalist state, is at all questioned, nor is any authentic democratisation offered. Salvation for the troubled bourgeois masses will come through choosing the best representatives among liberal politicians and technocrats, then letting them guide the people to the ecological Promised Land.

Gore and Volunteerism

This is a demonstration against the Clinton-Gore proposal for an incinerator in Ohio.

From Joel Kovel's critique of Al Gore in "A Really Inconvenient Truth"

While there is nothing wrong with any ecologically voluntarist act so long as it is done with a good heart and a mind toward restoring the earth, there is nothing inherent to it, either, that leads anywhere. Moral exhortations may feel as though they generate larger purposes, but this is an illusion. There is no solidarity inherent to the moral impulse; and unless that which makes for solidarity is added, voluntarism will stop at its own border.

Gore has never ceased

For throughout this whole process of awakening and evangelism Gore has never ceased carrying water for global capital. As valuable as his advocacy of serious change to combat global warming undoubtedly is, by setting the logic of that change within the dominant system Gore commits an error of literally fatal proportions.

Gore has gone as far as anyone in the system

Joel Kovel wrote:
Gore has gone as far as anyone in the system to challenge its ecological implications. He is the first—and still the only—instance of a kind of ecocentrism breaking into the consciousness of an official in capital’s stronghold. For whatever reasons—he himself emphasizes the shock of his sister’s death from lung cancer induced by the consumption of tobacco, a crop from which his family had grown wealthy—Gore became sensitized to the large-scale environmental effects of the economic system. He began to see these in ecological terms, and to focus on the overarching menace of global warming.