Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Thanks for the link, Foxfyre. I looked up the Escalade. It is a Cadillac Escalade, Foxfyre, although I think "Escapade" is a more descriptive term for his vehicle. It is one of the largest SUV's around, a rich man's SUV would be my take on it, and it rates 13 city 19 highway, or 17 highway, somewhere in that range, so figure he gets less than 15 average, which is definitely a gas guzzler. The vehicle weighs 3 tons and costs an estimated 70 grand. Yes, old Al must be very worried about cutting back.

And as Foxfyre's link points out, Al also owns 3 homes, another sign that the guy is really dedicated to saving energy and preventing CO2 caused global warming.

Consider also how much Gore jets around the world. I read someplace that a typical airliner burns enough fuel to equal approximately the same consumption as if each and every passenger drove a car the same distance at about 35 mpg. So consider Gore fly


ing tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of miles per year and factor in all the fuel consumption for that. Most people drive their cars maybe 5, 000 to 25,000 miles per year or so. Jetsetters can accomplish that in a few short days, and I am sure Gore does.

There is no doubt about the hypocrisy of one of the leading so-called environmentalists that say the tipping point is near, Mr. Al Gore himself.

Of course, if someone doesn't believe in Global Warming, then they'd be a hypocrite if they drove a hybrid. Let's keep repeating... there is no problem. There is no pollution. There is no increase in CO2. There is nothing we need to worry about. Anyone who is worried is actually hoping for the worst-case scenario and are just jerks who want to create trouble.

We can and should continue to go on using more energy than we can make, buying oil from the Middle East, ripping up the Arctic, while belittling anyone who objects on the most personal of grounds. All the changes that we're seeing are just natural... too bad about the polar bears drowning. The important thing is that Al Gore is so fat he can't get into a hybrid; Al Gore's houses are too big and, (what a hateful, un-American pig) Al Gore bought his wife a vintage Mustang. Maybe we should send him to Guantanamo?

There is no doubt there's a lot of hypocrisy going around.

Piffka wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:

And yet if you observe their behavior from Al Gore to media types to environmental groups you don't see them altering their lifestyle much--maybe they buy a smaller or hybrid car--but that seems to be pretty much it. (Gore doesn't even do that.)

That's interesting. What kind of car does Gore drive?

When he's not jetting around making speeches, the last I heard he drove a Cadillac Escapade to most social functions. When interviewed about that he denies that he drives it much and instead drives a hybrid but did not specify make or model. He did admit he gave Tipper a 1965 Mustang for her birthday and they would be keeping that.

And there was this article in USAToday earlier this month:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

Peter Schweitzer, Al Gore, and hypocrisy
Posted by David Roberts at 1:36 PM on 17 Aug 2006
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About a week ago, USA Today published a piece by Peter Schweitzer, who's a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. It accused Al Gore of hypocrisy, for asking viewers of An Inconvenient Truth to scale back their lifestyles and carbon emissions while ... well, there were a number of charges. According to Schweitzer, Gore owns three homes and stock in Occidental Petroleum, still receives royalties from a zinc mine on his property, does not participate in the green-power option his utility offers in Nashville, and lets Paramount pay for his carbon offsets.

As per standard practice, the conservative media machine spread the charges far and wide -- most recently they popped up on Glenn Beck's show on CNN and, bizarrely, in a recurring poll on AOL's homepage.

Gore's communications director, Kalee Kreider, sent a letter to the editor to respond to the piece, but we all know only a fraction of the folks who read the original piece will read the letter.

First things first: I talked to some of Gore's people today, including Kreider, about the specific charges. Suffice to say, they're false. Gore receives no royalties from the mine, which shut down in 2003. (USA Today actually printed a correction about this, way down on page 10A.) Gore owns no stock in Occidental, and never has (his father did; it was all sold over six years ago). Gore does in fact take advantage of the green power options his utility offers, and was in the process of adding photovoltaic solar cells to his house when the article came out. He pays for his own personal carbon offsets, in addition to the institutional offsets purchased by Paramount (movie distributor) and Rodale (book publisher), which make both the book and the movie completely carbon neutral.

All that picayune nonsense aside, some might consider it more relevant that Gore has devoted his life to this problem, traveling around for years giving thousands of slideshows, co-founding an investment firm devoted to supporting green companies, making his book, movie, and new TV channel carbon neutral (Current will be carbon neutral by the end of the year), donating all the profits from the movie and book to the global-warming fight, and almost single-handedly raising the profile of the issue higher than it's ever been.

Also, if we're talking about hypocrisy, perhaps we should mention that Schweitzer's Hoover Institution -- home to professional climate cranks (and former tobacco cranks) like Fred Singer and Thomas Gale Moore -- is funded by the far-right Scaife Foundation along with, you guessed it, Exxon. Schweitzer is paid to launch baseless attacks on Al Gore; Al Gore donates the profits from his advocacy work to the issue he cares about. Who's being more honest with the public?

In the end, though, none of this matters. This kind of ad hominem back and forth is exactly what Gore's well-paid conservative attackers want. They want to drag the debate down to this level. It muddies the waters and causes the public to tune out.

The fact is, Al Gore is not perfect, environmentally or any other way. He does not claim otherwise.

Nobody is perfect on climate issues. Why? Because our political and cultural system makes it extraordinarily difficult. That's the issue: changing the system to make it easier to act in environmentally benign ways, and harder not to. That means pushing our leaders -- from the neighborhood level all the way up to the federal level -- to change public policy. It means pushing them to partner with business leaders to make eco-friendly products, power, homes, and transportation options more easily and readily available. It means pushing them to take a stand, to marshal the American people behind the grand historical quest to put our society on a sustainable path. It means pushing them to lead.

As I've argued again and again and again and again and again and again, the lifestyle choices of any given individual are beside the point. Those who try and fail to be righteous are better than those who are unapologetically wicked. Those who speak the truth and fail to fully live by it are better than those who speak lies. Those who advocate societal changes and fail to make individual changes are better than those who do the reverse, and better twice over than those who seek no change at all.

We need to change our laws, regulations, tax codes, and business practices. We need to change our minds about what is and isn't acceptable in a 21st century society. If Al Gore can help that process along, that will mean a hell of a lot more than all the carbon offsets and utility bills in the world.

Foxfyre, you spend a lot of time talking abut civil discourse, but when Okie came out with that pack of lies about Gore, you ate it up. In fact, you gleefully posted that lying smear by Schweitzer.

Posting lengthy smear pieces then tut-tutting about civil discourse. Spare us.

Excellent work, Roxxxanne. It certainly shows the reactionary position for what it is-a group of people who ran out of honest arguments a long time ago and have little left but lying attacks upon the people who dare to show the truth.

Adn Piffka-wonderful satire on these conservatives. Of course they deserve it-their endorsement of that lying examination of Al Gore's lifestyle proves it.

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Cover

Do As I Say (Not As I Do)
Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy

FREE OFFER - Get "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)" FREE, Click Here

Members of the liberal left exude an air of moral certitude. They pride themselves on being selflessly committed to the highest ideas and seem particularly confident of the purity of their motives and the evil nature of their opponents. To correct economic and social injustice, liberals support a whole litany of policies and principles: progressive taxes, affirmative action, greater regulation of corporations, raising the inheritance tax, strict environmental regulations, children's rights, consumer rights, and much, much more.

But do they actually live by these beliefs? Peter Schweizer decided to investigate in depth the private lives of some prominent liberals: Politicians like Ted Kennedy and other Kennedys, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Ralph Nader; commentators like Michael Moore, Al Franken, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West: entertainers and philanthropists like Barbara Streisand and George Soros. Using everything from real estate transactions, IRS records, court depositions, and their own public statements, he sought to examine whether they really live by the principles they so confidently advocate.

What he found was a long list of glaring contradictions. Michael Moore denounces oil and defense contractors as war profiteers. He also claims to have no stock portfolio, yet he owns shares in Halliburton, Boeing, and Honeywell and does his postproduction work in Canada to avoid paying union wages in the United States. Ted Kennedy's closets are chock full of hyprocrisy. For example, Schweizer reveals how Ted and the Kennedy clan have protected their assets from estate taxes - as Kennedy fights to keep this tax on other Americans! Kennedy also has fought an environmental program near his Cape Cod home. Noam Chomsky opposes the very concept of private property and calls the Pentagon "the worst institution in human history," yet he and his wife have made millions of dollars in contract work for the Department of Defense and own two luxurious homes. Barbra Streisand prides herself as an environmental activist, yet she owns shares in a notorious strip-mining company. Hillary Clinton supports the right of thirteen-year-old girls to have abortions without parental consent, yet she forbade thirteen-year-old Chelsea to pierce her ears and enrolled her in a school that would not distribute condoms to minors. Nancy Pelosi received the 2002 Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farm Workers, yet she and her husband own a Napa Valley vineyard that uses nonunion labor.

Schweizer's conclusion is simple: liberalism in the end forces its adherents to become hypocrites. They adopt one pose in public, but when it comes to what matters most in their own lives-their property, their privacy, and their children-they jettison their liberal principles and embrace conservative ones. Schweizer thus exposes the contradiction at the core of liberalism: if these ideas don't work for the very individuals who promote them, how can they work for the rest of us?

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Author Peter Schweizer
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From Publishers Weekly
Working with a broadly inclusive pantheon of "the Left" that places Ralph Nader and Barbra Streisand on equal footing with Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, Schweizer (The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty) suggests that liberalism's heroes conduct their lives in ways that prove their philosophy to be "ultimately self-defeating, self-destructive, and unworkable." While acknowledging that conservatives can be high-profile hypocrites as well, Schweizer employs a double standard, arguing that "when conservatives betray their publicly stated principles, they harm only themselves and their families," but when liberals misbehave, they harm their principles first and foremost. Sometimes his research uncovers significant contradictions, as when Schweizer points out that Noam Chomsky, who tends to demonize the military establishment, wrote his first book, Syntactic Structures, with grants from the U.S. Army, the Air Force and the Office of Naval Research. But many of his charges are egregiously hyperbolic, as when he suggests that Cornel West is a "segregationist" because he bought a home in a largely Caucasian suburb. Schweizer clearly knows the limitations of his argument, since he backpedals from many of his most damning statements in his closing remarks. For all its revelations, in the end, this volume reads less like a critique of liberal philosophy than a catalogue of ammunition for ad hominem bloggers. (Oct. 25)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

I say that the pro-AGW preachers aren't practicing what they preach and posted support for that opinion.

Foxfyre's source has been totally obliterated, I gave up trying to reason with her long ago and don't respond directly to her posts. Just see her fantastic "work" on the Gay Marriage thread in which she tries to rationalize her bigotry towards gays.

To quote (again) for the Publisher's Weekly review of the book:"For all its revelations, in the end, this volume reads less like a critique of liberal philosophy than a catalogue of ammunition for ad hominem bloggers."


Ammunition for ad hominem bloggers, indeed. BTW LSM started a thread on this piece of trash.

Profiles in Liberal Hypocricy

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=88586

And how is how is Gore's occupation of a seat on jetliner attributing any significant depletion of resources? You wll have to explain that one.

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island
For the first time, an inhabited island has disappeared beneath rising seas. Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports
Published: 24 December 2006
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Just a little research could shed a little light on this subject, blatham. Disappearing islands has been a phenomena from the beginning of time.