By Julie Kelly
Monday, July 17, 2017
At least one environmentalist is capitalizing on
President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord: Al Gore.
The former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner is
back in the public eye whether you like it or not. Since Trump’s announcement
last month that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate pact, Gore has
been on a media blitz to reprise his role as the prophet of planetary doom. The
timing couldn’t be better for him. Next week, Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,
will debut. It’s the follow-up to An
Inconvenient Truth, his 2006 documentary that won two Oscars and became the
rallying cry for climate-change activists around the world.
Gore has mostly avoided politics and kept a relatively
low public profile the past several years, heading up the Climate Reality
Project, a nonprofit he founded on the heels of the movie’s success. (He also
divorced his wife, Tipper, and sold his Current TV channel to Al Jazeera in
2013 for a reported $100 million.) But Trump’s presidency is now breathing new
life into this aging climate crusader, and he is poised to play the Climate
Good Cop to Trump’s Bad Climate Cop.
On June 4, Gore appeared on Fox News Sunday for the first time since he ran for president in
2000. He told Chris Wallace that Trump’s move to exit the Paris pact
“undermines our nation’s standing in the world and isolates us and threatens to
harm humanity’s ability to solve this crisis in time.” While Gore blasted
Trump’s action as “reckless and indefensible” and compared the Paris agreement
to the post–World War II Marshall Plan, he also acknowledged that the accord
would not have solved climate change but was rather a “powerful signal to the
world.”
For a fleeting moment while watching the interview, one
could reminisce about the era when Democrats didn’t sound off-the-rails
hysterical, as Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders often do. Gore still has his
signature monotone, robotic cadence that can temporarily lull one into
believing anything he says. But then he quickly pivots to the same apocalyptic
rhetoric that made him a climate cult hero after his failed presidential bid.
He said humans are putting “110 million tons of heat-trapping global-warming
pollution up into the sky every day as if it’s an open sewer.” He urged viewers
to listen not only to scientists but also to Mother Nature: “You don’t have to
rely on the virtually unanimous opinion of the scientific community anymore.
Mother Nature is telling us. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike
through the Book of Revelation.” He rambled on about wildfires, droughts and downpours, and claimed he saw “fish
from the ocean swimming in the streets” in Miami.
In an obsequious interview yesterday on CBS News Sunday Morning to promote his new movie,
Gore doubled down on his global-warming proselytizing despite his record of
failed predictions: Manhattan was going to be under water because of Greenland
ice melt, Kilimanjaro was going to be snow-free, we would be battling rapidly
rising temperatures and stronger, more frequent storms, just to name a few.
Even as late as last week, Gore erroneously blamed climate change for the
break-off of a massive iceberg in Antarctica, though scientists said the iceberg’s “calving” was due to
natural causes.
Gore talked about meeting with Trump during the transition
and told CBS’s Lee Cowan that he had thought the president would “come to his
senses” and remain in the pact. In fact, much of Gore’s new film takes place at
the Paris conference. The trailer opens with a clip in which Trump mocks
global-warming orthodoxy; this is followed by a rapid-fire sequence of scary
weather videos narrated by Gore in a mournful voice-over. Cameras followed Gore
for two years as he flew around the world from Greenland to Miami, recording
the planet’s demise from carbon-emitting airplanes.
In excerpts from the book that will accompany the film’s
premiere, Gore ranks climate change among the great moral causes of our time —
equating it with abolition, suffrage, and gay rights — a claim with more than a
tad of self-serving interest. Gore (again) says that we are at a tipping point
and that “every day now, millions more are awakening to the realization that it
is wrong to destroy the future of the human race.” He promotes a so-called
sustainability revolution that purports to both solve climate change and create
“hundreds of millions of jobs” now threatened by automation and a stagnant
global economy. In perhaps the scariest of all prospects, Gore says that
today’s youth will play a special role in “focusing the attention of their elders
on the clear distinction between right and wrong.”
If we don’t act now, Gore warns, our children will
inherit a world of “stronger storms, worsening floods, deeper droughts,
mega-fires, tropical diseases spreading through vulnerable populations in all
parts of the earth, melting ice caps flooding coastal cities, unsurvivable [sic] heat extremes, and hundreds of
millions of climate refugees.” Apparently neither age nor inaccuracy has
mellowed Gore’s penchant for the apocalyptic.
In many ways, Gore is the perfect archetype of the
modern-day climate movement: monotonous, hyperbolic, and opportunistic. For the
first time in a decade, the climate crusade is on its heels and desperate for a
cogent message and strong leadership. We’ll see if recycling Gore as the hero
will work.
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