% The Flaming Right by paul murphy

Prosecuting Al Gore for crimes against humanity

Crimes against humanity are the business of the world court currently constituted under the 2002 treaty of Rome.

Although the treaty incorporates several definitions of what constitutes a crime against humanity the reality is that rules on what is, or is not, a crime against humanity are politically determined and correspondingly highly flexible. Thus Obama communications director Anita Dunn considers perhaps forty million Chinese and Tibetan deaths (and the subjugation of a billion humans) mere collateral damage in Mao's great social experiment - while the President's mentor, Bill Ayers, exonerates Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, and Kim il Sung on the same grounds.

In principle, however, the "crimes against humanity" charge can be brought if:

• the alleged crime directly or indirectly involves a widespread attack on a civilian population resulting in the deaths of persons in more than one political jurisdiction;

• none of the governmental actors in the affected jurisdictions both considers the alleged crime criminal under its own national statutes and has both the power and the will to prosecute and possibly punish the offender or offenders; and,

• there is reason to believe that one or more persons knowingly committed the actions leading to the deaths and those actions were not undertaken in response to national purpose or necessity.

If it can be proven that the alleged crime has been committed and falls under the jurisdiction of the world court, the elements of proof require either public acknowledgement of guilt by those accused or:

• proof that the accused did take whatever actions are alleged;

• proof that the actions taken produced the harm to humanity;

• proof that the accused could reasonably foresee that the actions taken would result in the harm to humanity; and,

• proof that the accused had some personal motive for taking the actions despite their consequences.

In Mr. Gore's case:

• the harm is the starvation of millions today and possibly billions tomorrow.

• the proximate cause of the harm is the policies sold the world under the global warming banner.

  Specifically, the conversion of a major portion of the world's food production capability to fuel production and the diversion of social resources to counter-productive uses such as carbon sequestration, led directly to both higher prices for available foods and to absolute food scarcities while enormously increasing world wide population vulnerabilities to crop failures.

• Mr. Gore's role in this is widely known and well documented.

• that the results were foreseable is proven by the fact that many people did foresee them and did loudly, repeatedly, and publically warn Mr. Gore and his followers of these consequences.

• Mr. Gore's motivations may be imputed from a combination of:
  1. the consistencies between his aspirations as a politician and the world wide recognition and power he's gained from leading the global warming advocates;

  2. the fact that his assets were valued in millions of dollars on leaving office as Vice President of the United States and are now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; and,

  3. the fact that his own actions, everything from his use of personal jets to water and power consumption rates at his Tennessee estate, show that he does not practice - and therefore presumably does not actually believe in the value of - the constraints he preaches.

In his legal defence Mr. Gore can be expected to argue necessity: basically that the deaths are due to economic dislocation incident on saving the rest of humanity from the horrors of global warming and worldwide energy resource depletion. Unfortunately for that defence, however:

• global warming would actually be net positive for the earth's life carrying capacity;

• there is no evidence that greenhouse gases affect the earth's climate in any significant way (the supporting material presented as "evidence" in his movie was largely fabricated); and,

• There is no worldwide energy shortage. Not only does the petrochemical supply respond to price, but we have nuclear power available to us.

  More generally, the earth is not a lifeboat - we cannot significantly reduce the supply of resources on earth by using them. When we burn petrochemicals, for example, nothing is lost: one set of chemical bonds is replaced by another at a marginally lower energy state - meaning that, Gore et al to the contrary, the present petrochemical supply is infinitely renewable through the application of nuclear energy to petrochemical reconstitution from little more than air and water.

Since this situation speaks for itself: the harm has been done and he's clearly the leader and chief beneficiary among those who did it; the conclusion is inescapable: if brought to trial on crimes against humanity, Mr. Gore would surely be convicted.

And one more thing: if the present solar minimum does signal sufficient global cooling to significantly affect worldwide food production next year, history may eventually credit Mr. Gore with more than two billion deaths - ten times the direct totals achieved by all of the left's favorite facists together.