At the annual World Economic Forum last week, former Vice President Al Gore melted down faster than any glacier he and his fellow eco-alarmists have ever pointed to as supposed evidence of global warming.
In a panel discussion on Jan. 18 at the five-day gathering of his fellow globalist elites in Davos, Switzerland, the former vice president went on a rant that can only be described as “unhinged.” If anything, that might be an understatement.
“We’re still putting 162 million tons [of greenhouse gases] into [the atmosphere] every single day, and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth!” Gore thundered.
As if that weren’t hysterical enough, he added: “That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice, and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.”
Apparently, the former senator and failed 2000 Democratic nominee for president-turned-eco-warrior’s documentary sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth” is “Apocalypse Now 2.”
The apocalyptic claims in his tirade were enough to keep the self-appointed media fact-checkers scrambling for weeks, but Gore wasn’t through.
“Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million [climate] refugees,” he raged. “What about a billion? We would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world. We have to act!”
Gore has had to ratchet up his Chicken Little-style screeds because of how badly his previous predictions of cataclysmic global warming have failed. In 2006, for example, he forecast that “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of [Tanzania’s Mount] Kilimanjaro.” In 2009, he predicted that “the North Pole will be ice-free in the summer by 2013 because of man-made global warming.”
Nostradamus, he’s not. Why anyone still takes him seriously is beyond puzzling.
Gore’s return to the public spotlight last week prompted speculation as to whether he’s dialed back his own conspicuous consumption — for which he excoriates others — since being exposed as an energy-hogging hypocrite in August 2017.
An analysis from the National Center for Public Policy Research at the time found that Gore’s Nashville, Tennessee, home was consuming vastly more energy than the average dwelling.
The report claimed that Gore’s home energy consumption averaged 19,241-kilowatt hours per month — fully 34 times as much as the average home’s usage of 901 kWh per month. According to the research center’s calculation, “Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.”
But Gore can easily afford what is surely an astronomical monthly electric bill (as well as his private jet to Davos) because his post-VP career as an eco-alarmist has been extraordinarily lucrative, enabling him to amass a personal fortune estimated at $330 million, according to the Daily Mail.
At least by comparison with Gore’s delusional ravings, President Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, was almost circumspect in his remarks to the New World Order gathering the day before.
“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives—are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” said Kerry, another former senator, who lost his own bid for president in 2004, four years after Gore’s defeat.
“I mean, it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about saving the planet,” Kerry said. “If you say that to most people, most people think you’re just a crazy, tree-hugging, lefty liberal — you know, do-gooder, or whatever — and there’s no relationship. But really, that’s where we are.”
No, where Messrs. Kerry and Gore and the rest of the elitist cabal were was an Alpine village, flown there on more than 1,000 private jets. According to a study commissioned by Greenpeace International, Yahoo News reported, “The carbon dioxide emissions from these extra flights were equal to putting roughly 350,000 gasoline-powered cars on the road for the same weeklong period.”
But in Kerry’s telling, he has no choice but to forgo flying commercial. He once defended his Godzilla-sized carbon footprint when asked about his having traveled to Iceland by private jet in 2019 — ironically, to receive an environmental award.
“If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle,” he said. “I believe, the time it takes me to get somewhere, I can’t sail across the ocean. I have to fly, meet with people, and get things done.”
Notice how he didn’t explain why he couldn’t take a commercial flight, but that’s what we’ve come to expect of the condescending attitude of Messrs. Gore and Kerry and the rest of the corps d’elites at Davos.
But Kerry did acknowledge that the lifestyle sacrifices he demands the rest of us make won’t make much of a difference in the fight against the phantom menace of climate change.
Two years ago this week, on Jan. 27, 2021, he acknowledged the Biden administration’s rejoining the flawed Paris Climate Agreement “alone is not enough, not when 90% of all of the planet’s global emissions come from outside of U.S. borders.”
“We could go to zero tomorrow, and the problem isn’t solved,” he conceded.
So, with the 2023 World Economic Forum in the rearview mirror, what’s the takeaway? Simply this: We should thank God every day that neither of these do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do globalist grifters ever became president.
Originally published at The Washington Times
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