Author: Guest Contributor

Al Gore’s environmental activism is designed never to threaten the supremacy of the market

John Harris
Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2062314,00.html

According to Vanity Fair magazine’s second Green Issue, he is “the man of the hour” – photographed by Annie Leibovitz at Iceland’s Jokulsarlon glacier, and pictured on the cover next to a Photoshopped-in polar bear cub named Knut. His cherubic features etched with a half-beard and hardened into an expression of concern, Leonardo DiCaprio is the Upper West Side’s new green poster-boy, and in the ensuing pictorial portfolio his fellow “global citizens” line up behind him: ex-Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, musicians such as Alanis Morissette and Jack Johnson, and a motley assortment of scientists, activists, fashionistas and entrepreneurs. Elsewhere, there is a fawning feature about our own Charles Windsor – “a prince whose time has come”, transformed “from eco-scold to green hero”.

Recent headlines about the greening of US politics still look distinctly premature, but in the last two years or so the country’s newsstands have undergone a real transformation. With the US’s collective weather-eye opening ever wider, that great climate-change denier George Bush falling fast and US celebrities noisily expressing interest in the issue, its media class now at least know what time it is. Given its symbiotic bond with the metropolitan liberati, Vanity Fair can perhaps be discounted, but the kind of publications that sit much closer to the mainstream now run environmental splashes on what seems like a weekly basis.

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