Al Gore is speaking tonight at Rice University with a lot of institutional support from a cabal of university professors wed to the tiring notion of climate alarmism–really, at this point, climate hysteria. Think of Neil Lane,

Gore will not take questions from the audience. He could embarrass himself on the science–or with his personal life.

“What is your personal carbon footprint,” would be one question. He might say he buys carbon credits (indulgances) and has solar panels at his homes, but what about that Jetstream to get to Houston? And that huge electric bill? “EXCLUSIVE: Al Gore’s

Palatial Energy

Back in 2007

 

Just in time for his sequel, the story broke that Gore’s 10,070-square-foot Nashville residence consumed twenty times more energy than the average U.S. home. His swimming pool alone accounted for six times more.

“With an average consumption of 22.9 kWh per square foot over the past year, Gore’s home classifies as an ‘energy hog’ under standards developed by Energy Vanguard—a company specializing in energy efficiency methods,” one writer noted.

Indeed. While Gore’s mansion is about four times larger than the average American house of 2,700-square feet, in some months (for example, September of last year) it has used as much as 34 times more energy than the average American house.

Hypocrisy and irony turn into mystery with another fact: the Gore mansion is certificated energy efficient, and it is partly powered by renewable energy. Appliance retrofits, an array of solar panels, and a geothermal system were installed in 2007 when Gore’s energy bill became a national issue. The U.S. Green Building Council, in fact, gave the property a Gold LEED certification after the quarter-million-dollar renovation.

Offset “Monkey Business”

In damage control, Gore’s spokesperson Betsy McManus stated this month that her boss “leads a carbon-neutral life by purchasing green energy, reducing carbon impacts, and offsetting any emissions that can’t be avoided.” But carbon neutral is not the same as carbon free—and in this case, it’s quite the opposite.

McManus refused to provide data on Gore’s alleged offsets, much less the reasons that Gore’s (Gold LEED) electricity usage is off the charts. (Gore’s other residences in San Francisco and Carthage, Tennessee, are at issue here too.) But even assuming substantive purchases, Gore is supporting a fossil-fueled present and future according to Gore’s go-to climate scientist, James Hansen.

“A successful new policy cannot include any offsets,” Hansen stated in his global warming manifesto, Storms of My Grandchildren (p. 206):

The public must be firm and unwavering in demanding “no offsets,” because this sort of monkey business is exactly the type of thing that politicians love and will try to keep. Offsets are like the indulgences that were sold by the church in the Middle Ages. People of means loved indulgences, because they could practice any hanky-panky or worse, then simply purchase an indulgence to avoid punishment for their sins.

Bishops loved them too, because they brought in lots of moola. Anybody who argues for offsets today is either a sinner who wants to pretend he or she has done adequate penance or a bishop collecting moola.

As government mitigation policy, the Gore approach should be rejected. Hansen continues (ibid.):

A successful new policy cannot include any offsets. We specified the carbon limit based on the geophysics. The physics does not compromise—it is what it is. And planting additional trees cannot be factored into the fossil fuel limitations. The plan for getting back to 350 ppm assumes major reforestation, but that is in addition to the fossil fuel limit, not instead of. Forest preservation and reforestation should be handled separately from fossil fuels in a sound approach to solve the climate problem.

Climate stabilization requires no less than “a global phaseout of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions,” Hansen insists (p. 205). Yet the majority of energy molecules used at Gore’s Belle Meade residence are fossil-fuel generated, as much as the former vice president would like to claim carbon neutrality.[1]

Candidate Gore’s Hypocracy

“I think we need to bring gasoline prices down. . . . I have made it clear in this campaign that I am not calling for any tax increase on gasoline, on oil, on natural gas, or anything else. I am calling for tax cuts to stimulate the production of new sources of domestic energy and new technologies to improve efficiency.”

– Al Gore, quoted in Bennett Roth, “Gore Drops Fuel Tax Proposal, Introduces Tax Credit Incentives,” Houston Chronicle, June 29, 2000, p. 10A.

“No American politician can bear to do anything to restrict our piggish use of coal and gas and oil–not to raise energy prices or legislate against the plague of gas-guzzling SUV’s.   During the campaign, Mr. Gore even demanded that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve be opened to keep fuel prices down.”

– Bill McKibben, “Too Hot to Handle,” New York Times, January 5, 2001, p. A21.

“Vice President Al Gore, who labored under eternal suspicion in the crucial state of Michigan for his writings on the environment, responded to last year’s gas price hikes in the Midwest with consumer-pitying rhetoric that touched on everything but the suggestion that Americans might drive less or consider smaller, more efficient cars.”

– Marjorie Williams, “America’s Energy Amnesia,” The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, May 7-13, 2001, p. 26.

No, Al Will Not Debate or Go Ad Lib

Al Gore will not dare debate climate change issues—the very ones he cares about the most. Joseph Bast at the Heartland Institute tried a decade ago with a national advertising campaign—to no avail. Alex Epstein last year offered $100,000 for Gore to publicly debate—the very amount that Gore charges for his speaking engagements.

While Gore dare not put his own knowledge and convictions to the test, sometimes things can go awry. When a reporter brought up a mainstream climate scientist’s caution about Gore’s (exaggerated) sea-level rise claim in An Inconvenient Sequel, Gore snapped.

As recounted by reporter Ross Clark:

As soon as I mention Professor Wdowinski’s name, he counters: “Never heard of him — is he a denier?” Then, as I continue to make the point, he starts to answer before directing it at me: “Are you a denier?” When I say I am sure that climate change is a problem, but how big a one I don’t know, he jumps in: “You are a denier.”

Professor Shimon Wdowinski, associate professor of marine geology and geophysics at the Florida International University, specializes in the study of flooding in Miami. He is, states Clark, “exactly the sort of expert, one might think, with whom Gore or his team of researchers might have been in touch before making a documentary film involving the issue of flooding in Miami.”

Conclusion

A quarter century ago, in Earth in the Balance, Al Gore offered a stern diagnosis and gloomy prognosis of the natural state of things. “I believe that our civilization is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself,” he complained. The ensuing environmental crisis, he added, was a very difficult “war with ourselves” (pp. 220, 275).

Al Gore is at war with himself. Little wonder that his hypocritical, hyperbolic message goes backward with his every push.

It is all political theater, as Jerry Taylor posited in “Global Warming: The Anatomy of a Debate.” And in this show, actor Al is “the gift that keeps on giving.”

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Appendix: Earth in the Balance Quotations

Remember the strictures from his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance? Gore could be asked a whole lot of ‘do you still believe …’ questions.  Here are some quotations:

 

“The global environmental crisis is rooted in the dysfunctional pattern of our civilization’s relationship to the natural world.”

– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York: Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 237.

 “It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year-period.”

– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, pp. 325-26.

“We now know that [the automobile’s] cumulative impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 325.

“Adopting a central organizing principle—one agreed to voluntarily—means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action—to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 274.

“Minor shifts in policy, marginal adjustments in ongoing programs, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change—these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 274.

“The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis,”

– Al Gore, Washington, D..C. July 17, 2008 at http://ift.tt/2hWADy4

“I hope and trust we will all find a way to resist the accumulated momentum of all the habits, patterns, and distractions that divert us from what is true and honest, spinning us first this way, then that, whirling us like a carnival ride until our very souls are dizzy and confused.”

– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York:  Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 367.

 “Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 269.

“We are now, in effect, corruptly imposing our own dysfunctional design and discordant rhythms on future generations, and these persistent burdens will be terribly difficult to carry.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 236.

“The global environmental crisis is rooted in the dysfunctional pattern of our civilization’s relationship to the natural world.”

– Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 237.

“Our civilization is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself. This addictive relationship distracts us from the pain of what we have lost:  a direct experience of our connection to the vividness, vibrancy, and aliveness of the rest of the natural world.  The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself.”

 

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York:

Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 220-21.

 

 

“We have become so successful at controlling nature that we have lost our connection to it.”
–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York:

Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 225.

 

 

“The world’s ecological balance depends on more than just our ability to restore a balance between civilization’s ravenous appetite for resources and the fragile equilibrium of the earth’s environment. . . . We must restore a balance within ourselves between who we are and what we are doing.”

 

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York:                              Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 12.

 

 

“Our ecological system is crumpling as it suffers a powerful collision with the hard surfaces of a civilization speeding toward it out of control.”
–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New York:

Plume/Penguin, 1992, 1993), p. 42.

 

 

“The potential for true catastrophe lies in the future, but the downslope that pulls us toward it is becoming recognizably steeper with each passing year. . . . Sooner or later the steepness of the slope and our momentum down its curve will take us beyond a point of no return.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 49.

“Now warnings of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent. . . . Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.  We are still reluctant to believe that our worst nightmares of a global ecological collapse could come true; much depends on how quickly we can recognize the danger.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, pp. 177-78.

 “When economics enters the picture, the environment can be threatened by new kinds of feedback loops that are just as complex and dangerous as some of those found in the natural world.”

–     Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, p. 54.