KEY POINTS:
The morning after Al Gore collected the best documentary Oscar for his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research spoiled his celebrations.
Researchers for the right-wing think-tank in Gore's home state used freedom of information legislation to access the fuel bills of his Nashville mansion.
They found while Gore was filming pleas for Americans to save energy, the Gore family consumed more electricity in a month than the average American household did in a year.
The story went round the world but, sensibly, the media treated it as a joke. Exposing a politician or anyone else as a hypocrite damages his standing but not his argument.
The case that man-made global warming is causing climate change stands whether Gore leaves his lights on all night or not.
The centre hadn't denied global warming; if anything, its call for Gore to practise what he preached was a small contribution to the campaign to mitigate its worst effects.
The furious reaction of American environmentalists, therefore, took it aback. Nicole Williams, the think-tank's vice-president, had to go ex-directory after receiving death threats. Someone posted her old home address on the net, and caller after caller phoned to scream at her.
"I was accused several times of being a 'redneck bitch'," she said. "I was repeatedly called a 'whore'."
The American conservative magazine, the National Review, went through 3000 abusive emails and pointed out how quickly the veneer of political correctness dissolved.
To spare the feelings of delicate readers, I won't quote the choicest messages, but even the publishable insults show an almost racist hatred of American southerners.
"You are the most despicable and pathetic type of people of all time. I hope you all die slowly and have your hearts and brains trampled to pieces, you small-minded, ignorant, backwoods ideologues," one correspondent declared.
There was also homophobia: "You guys are the faggiest fags I've ever come across"; and murderous fantasies: "You are a total waste of skin and air. Help the environment and jump off a cliff."
Part of the American hysterical style has been exported.
Newspaper travel editors I know in Britain, for example, now receive hate mail of the "you are promoting the murder of the planet" variety and environmental protesters have chained the doors of branches of the Trailfinders travel agency in London and stuck up posters announcing: "Closed for a total rethink".
Still, you shouldn't underestimate how subliminally relieved many will be if today's low-level intimidation and messages spin off into violence.
For all the tut-tutting the death threats in Tennessee provoked, there was a note of triumph in American conservatives' reports on the case as they sensed the destructive possibilities of eco-extremism for their liberal opponents.
An issue as great as climate change shows the extent of the damage they could inflict.
We are living through one of evolutionary history's mass extinctions. Yet few people think about man's destruction of species or, indeed, about the more prosaic subject of how farmers raise and slaughter the meat on our tables.
Animal liberationists have tarnished their cause and made it seem the preserve of gruesome fanatics.
The effect of their efforts has been to make it easier for the mainstream to suppress doubts and avoid difficult questions about the treatment of animals.
There are many who would be more than happy to see difficult decisions about global warming go the same way - and not all of them from the American right.
This year, Dr David Reiner of Cambridge University in England commissioned a poll of public attitudes towards energy and the environment.
He found readers of liberal newspapers like The Guardian, The Independent and The Observer, for example, were no more likely to have taken specific energy-saving measures than readers of the tabloids.
And they were less likely to have insulated their homes.
Liberal newspaper buyers talked about their fears of climate change and fervently expressed their support for green policies.
Yet when it came to making personal sacrifices, they imitated Al Gore and backed away.
Dr Reiner finds their double standards understandable and thinks incredibly ambitious the Government's target of a 60 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050 because the tangible benefits from altering behaviour will be so nebulous.
Leave aside for the moment that the largest increases in greenhouse gases in the next decades will come from China and India and look at the deal on offer for wealthy Europeans and North Americans.
They will have to transform how they travel to work and play and how they manage their homes.
Even if they make enormous changes - and for their sacrifices to have any impact, enormous changes will be required - all that will happen is that the rate of global warming will slow.
It will still get worse, but will not be as bad as it would have been if we carried on as before.
The absence of visible improvements sets climate-change legislation apart from every other anti-pollution measure.
The prohibitions tackling climate change will stand in stark contrast. They will hurt, but they won't produce observable results.
In these circumstances, the last thing the developed world needs is the environmental movement's lunatic fringe trumping Gore's inconvenient truth with a convenient excuse for doing nothing.
- OBSERVER
