Massively wealthy climate fear prophet and green government subsidy profiteer Al Gore finally has something real to be alarmed about. And yes, it’s quite the opposite of rising sea levels. Responding to President-elect Trump’s pledge to drain the Washington, D.C. swamp of corruption, their Dec. 5 meeting must have tracked lots of muddy footprints onto plush Trump Tower carpets.
The discussion reportedly delved into murky science waters of manmade disaster concerning an inconvenient croc.
Just in case of any unlikely doubt, this is the very same former Sen. Gore who convened the famous 1988 Senate Committee on Science, Technology and Space hearings that produced a manmade global warming crisis media frenzy . . . an event which occurred about a dozen years after three decades of global cooling when many prominent scientists were predicting an arrival of the next ice age.
As his colleague Sen. Timothy Wirth who helped organize the meetings later stated in a PBS interview, "We called the weather bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer . . . so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it . . . we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room."
This same "Goracle" has repeatedly warned that increasing CO2 emissions would spur catastrophic global warming that will flood coastal areas and cause more extreme weather unless we immediately ditch fossil fuels which supply about 85 percent of America’s energy in favor of windmills and sunbeams which now intermittently provide about 4 percent.
Yet other than two naturally-occurring 1998 and 2014 to 2016 El Nino periods, satellites show that global temperatures have remained flat for nearly two decades despite those "record high" atmospheric CO2 emission levels.
Regarding that extreme weather, even the alarmist U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there has been no overall increasing trend in hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or droughts in the U.S. or globally. In fact, no Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane has made landfall in the U.S. since Wilma in 2005, the longest such lapse in more than a century.
Nevertheless, climate crusader Gore soon pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars from companies which were "going green." He was also poised to make windfall profits selling CO2 offsets through his stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange if and when Congress passed cap-and-trade legislation he promoted.
Speaking before a 2007 Joint House Hearing of the Energy Science Committee, Gore told members: "As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave [of investment] in it. . . There will be unchained investment."
Perhaps — but not to the benefit of energy consumers. Billionaire environmental investor Bill Gates has made himself non grata among many staunch green energy believers by stating that "renewable" energy sources "aren’t a viable solution for reducing CO2 levels," and that costs for continuing the current fad in subsidizing wind and sun energy sources "would be beyond astronomical."
Even a former presidential candidate who ran on a renewable energy platform later admitted at a 2010 green energy business conference in Athens that, "It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol."
As Al Gore explained to Reuters, "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa [the first in the nation caucuses state] because I was about to run for president."
Of course there’s still lots of green to be scored by practitioners of climate calamity and "free" renewable energy cash-ins — the many $ billions that fund the growth of government regulatory agencies that depend upon public fear; university departments that bend objectivity to secure research grants; activist environmental groups that rely upon crisis-premised donations to support lobbying and media programs; anti-fossil energy lobbies seeking taxpayer and ratepayer handouts; and a host of politicians and cronies who apply "save the world" hype to fill campaign coffers and personal bank accounts.
So finally, just how influential was Gore in convincing the new president-elect about a fossil-fueled climate menace?
To be very generous, not so much.
Only two days later, Trump picked Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a carbon-caused Armageddon skeptic and fierce EPA regulatory overreach critic, to head the agency. For example, he led a legal suit by attorneys general of 28 states which produced a Supreme Court stay of the Obama administration’s war on coal (aka, "Clean Power Plan").
Fittingly, Pruitt can also be counted on to drain EPA’s swamp of wetland regulations, including its claimed authority over farm ponds as navigable waterways.
More about this welcome EPA climate change in next week’s column. . . .
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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