Writing recently in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times, Al Gore said: “I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion.”
Funny, that’s exactly what I wish about Al Gore.
Now reduced to preaching climate hysteria to the converted in the echo chamber of the liberal, warmist Times, the paper at least identified Gore thusly: “As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.”
Bingo! Gore, our would-be carbon billionaire, has a dog in this hunt, dressed in the colour of money — green.
This is a major reason I haven’t been able to take him seriously on man-made global warming since the first time I saw An Inconvenient Truth.
If the science of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change a la Gore is correct, and if we all lived as obscenely high-energy consumption lifestyles as Gore does, it’s quite possible we would already be dead.
Killed by either too much snow, or not enough, or cold snaps, or heat waves, or droughts, or floods, all of which and more have been blamed on global warming by the increasingly demoralized and petulant-sounding Al Gore Nation and its warmist media shills.
Gore — who doesn’t tolerate much questioning by non-sycophantic media — always dances around the key point made by British warmist George Monbiot in his book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.
That is, that the campaign to fight man-made global warming — such as it is — is a campaign for austerity. A rapidly decarbonized world will be a poorer one.
For you, that is. But not, alas, for Gore.
Think of Gore and his celebrity pals jetting around the world, hopping between their large and luxurious homes, attending never-ending global warming conferences and giving interminable high-priced speeches, while buying carbon offsets (the greatest scam since religious indulgences) to claim they’ve reduced their carbon footprint to zero.
Flying is particularly bad for the environment, according to the science of global warming, because it injects greenhouse gases (GHGs) high into the atmosphere, multiplying their effect.
What hypocrisy! Especially given that renewable energy projects like wind and solar power, prolific generators of carbon credits and offsets, need fossil fuel energy to back them up due to their intermittent nature, and only last for as long as the huge public subsidies it takes to keep them financially afloat.
To anyone who understands the science of man-made global warming, a carbon offset is as big a farce as, well, a carbon credit — the backbone of the world’s biggest cap-and-trade market in Europe, which is now embroiled in multi-billion-dollar frauds.
And that’s to say nothing of the rampant corruption in the United Nations’ carbon credit-generating Clean Development Mechanism.
The only real way not to emit GHGs is not to emit them. Period. Full stop.
You can’t emit them, then claim you cancelled them out after the fact by purchasing offsets or credits — essentially an accounting trick.
Once you emit GHGs into the atmosphere, you can’t recall them. Emissions remain in the atmosphere for anywhere from several years to thousands.
If it’s true, as warmists like Gore claim, that we only have a few years left before triggering irreversible, catastrophic climate change, then offsets make no sense from an environmental perspective.
Symbolically, they’re even worse — a way for the rich (and/or naive) to buy cover for their hypocrisy in preaching a low-energy consumption lifestyle for everyone else, while pursuing a high-energy consumption lifestyle for themselves.
Offsets contribute to the myth we can significantly reduce man-made GHG emissions and yet go on living much as we have.
If Gore and Co. want to know why they’re losing the public on climate change, they should stop whining about Climategate, Himalayagate, climate deniers and the Copenhagen fiasco.
They’re losing because “do as I say, not as I do,” is a lousy way to inspire the troops.
Personally, I haven’t flown anywhere in three years. I will fly again at some point, sure.
But not as much as I used to. You can talk the talk, or walk the walk.
lorrie.goldstein@sunmedia.ca
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