There must be something in the water at the vice-presidential residence that causes a slow but significant diminution of brain function. Vice-President Albert Gore nurtures the notion that he is a serious man with serious well-considered and forward-looking ideas. He is the lead Administration techno-nerd who not only champions the "Information Highway" but actually checks his own e-mail. He seeks to "reinvent" an efficient government able to do more for less. Before he was elected vice-president, Gore penned a book about the environment. Though criticized, the book proved that Gore could write and think in entire paragraphs and even chapters - not a small feat for a vice-president. Why then has Gore recently become so silly? Why is Gore earnestly attempting to fill the space cadet role in American politics once occupied so well by Jerry Brown.
Recently Gore proposed, and has NASA scrambling to scrounge up a scientific rationalization for, a satellite to provide real-time images of the Earth, images available instantly on the World Wide Web. Many people were inspired by the brilliant photographs of the Earth taken by astronauts on their journeys to the Moon. Gore reasons that more such images will inspire proportionately more. This is the same logic that suggests that if man lands on the moon once, subsequent Moon landings will have the same emotional effect. Gore could just not resist the opportunity to marry the beauty of the Earth and instant Internet access.
What make this notion of a new 20 million to 50 million dollar satellite (probably too conservative an estimate) so unremarkable and frivolous is the fact that similar imagery is already available on line from geostationary weather satellites. The GOES satellites now routinely image the earth at 4-km resolution at both visible and infrared frequencies. Anyone on the web is only a few clicks from full-Earth images. Pictures of the Earth, though beautiful, are already routine. Where does Gore think the satellite images of clouds moving across the U.S. seen on TV weather news reports every night come from?
The republic will survive the squandering of money on an ill-considered hastily-constructed satellite. The question is what do Gore's notions reveal to us about the way Gore thinks. Liberal economist Paul Krugman in the on-line magazine Slate observed that Gore often is burdened with an amateur's
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