WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Failure Of Al Gore, Part Three: Singing The Climate Blues.

My interest in the decay of the former vice president’s public position is partly because — like Jimmy Carter — he has had such an active post-Washington career. Not even Ronald Reagan won an Oscar, and Reagan (though he deserved it) never got a Nobel. Gore’s signature issue, the climate, is a major one, and Al Gore has been at the center of the most important movement of international civil society since the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s.

The serial rise and fall of these vacuous civil society movements and the peculiar grip they exercise over the minds of some otherwise intelligent people is an important subject: why do so many people who want to help solve global problems waste so much time and money and, sometimes, do so much harm?

Read the whole thing.