Meanwhile, if Al Gore had become president in 2001, he would have immediately stepped into gridlock. He would have had to battle a unified and semi-principled Republican Party in Congress for every stupid, paleo-liberal social and economic thing he wanted -- just like Bill Clinton had to during the 1990s.

America's first Green president also would have had to confront the cost-benefit realities of greenhouse-gas-cutting schemes like the 1997 Kyoto Protocol -- and quickly discover that no Congress would approve anything so economically harmful and environmentally useless.

Another blessing we'd have enjoyed if Al Gore had been elected president is purely psychological. As president, he never would have had time to put together his sci-fi docu-comedy, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Therefore, he never would have won an Oscar or half a Nobel Peace Prize. Global warming wouldn’t be a religious issue. And Al would still be known a pontificating career politician, not a pontificating savior of the planet.

Not everything would have been perfect under President Gore, of course. When 9/11 occurred, he too probably would have gone to Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and destroy al-Qaida's training camps.

We'd no doubt be just as bogged down there as we are today. But under President Gore our soldiers wouldn't be chasing al-Qaida -- they'd be trying to force Afghan tribesmen to reduce their carbon hoofprints by using solar panels instead of firewood to heat their tents and trading in their horses for mountain bikes.