More on Gore (this time its a zinc mine)

The Nashville, TN newspaper has a substantive article on a zinc mine that uses mineral rights under property that has been in the Gore family for several decades. Evidently for these decades the zinc mining has enriched the Gore family and also emitted many tons of nasty stuff into the air and water.

The article is:

http://tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070318/NEWS01/70316074

I don't think former VP Gore has ever said that nobody should own zinc mines. Furthermore, it is certainly possible, that the fact that zinc exists allows steel to be made more durable (certainly more corrosion resistant) and thus is a net good for the environment. Also the article doesn't give the relative tons of emission to tons of production of various zinc mines so its essentially impossible to tell if the mine using the Gore property was a relatively 'clean' mining operation or not. Thus I'm not going to call hypocrisy on this.

Notwithstanding the non- hypocrisy call the fact that Gore has this property shows the difficulty in being a truly environmentally benign person (also the ownership of the mansion that consumes so much electricity shows this). This wouldn't be an issue except that Gore has lent his name to a quasi religious anti global warming movement and has also stated that relatively painless steps can be done to reduce the impact on the environment. While the zinc mine issue is not a case of hypocrisy by itself, the insinuation of 'easy environmentalism' certainly is. Thus, it makes me a little sick in the stomach to hear Gore again and again on this general theme.

Glenn Greenwald with an amusing but inconsequential hypocrisy

A blogger named Patterico makes a convincing case that a fellow blogger named Glenn Greenwald is a hypocrite. The basic charge is that Greenwald accused various bloggers (LGF and Michelle Maukin) as operating a hate site because unmoderated comments were, uh... immoderate. However Greenwald also says that conservatives shouldn't look 'deep into the comments' in, say, the Huffington Post for immoderate comments.

What makes this especially amusing is that Patterico traces the IP address to show that someone using Greenwald's computer has made immoderate comments himself using pseudonyms. This detective word is explained at:

http://patterico.com/2006/07/27/4900/annotated-wuzzadem-the-facts-
behind-the-greenwald-sock-puppetry/

and a explanation of the commenters at left vs commenters at right sites is at:

http://patterico.com/2007/02/27/5886/glenn-greenwald-thomas-ellers-
and-rick-ellensburg-the-three-most-hypocritical-men-on-the-planet/

So Greenwald pretty obviously has done what he has said should not be done without an explanation, or an admission, of why he changed his position.

However since Glenn Greewald is not a very important character this bit of hypocrisy is not very important either.