A great question at the Christian Science Monitor’s green blog:

Leaving aside whether breaking the law is ever justified, it seems odd that Gore doesn’t seem to include himself in the category of the “young people” he thinks should risk jail to halt global warming. After all, at age 71, Ghandi was arrested and served two years in prison. The US labor organizer Mother Jones was still facing charges of sedition in her 80s. Even TV president Martin Sheen, who is eight years older than Gore, managed to get himself arrested at an antinuclear action in Nevada last year, for what he says is the 65th time. Civil disobedience has never been the exclusive province of the young. And, anyway, as these and many other nonviolent resisters have demonstrated, you’re only as old as you feel. Maybe Gore was thinking about those six Greenpeace activists in Britain who last October rappelled down the side of a smokestack at the Kingsnorth coal plant and defaced it. They were found not guilty two weeks ago when a jury deemed their actions justified. I’ll admit that I’m having trouble picturing the former vice president dangling from a Kernmantle rope 600 feet off the ground. But acts of civil disobedience need not be strenuous. Gore could have joined the 14 protesters in Wise County, Va., who were arrested last week after chaining themselves to steel drums to block the construction of the Dominion coal-fired power plant. As this video of the demonstration shows, this was an all-ages event. Indeed, the Rainforest Action Network, which helped organize the demonstration, invited Gore to get arrested with them last October. The response from his spokeswoman: “He has not accepted any of their offers to date.”

Maybe Al Gore can buy civil disobedience credits that will pay some hippie to get arrested for him?