The Rise And Continuing Fall Of Al Gore

It’s been a bad year for environmentalists. The Earth cooled. Climategate exposed them. And now their Prophet Al Gore has admitted that his push for corn-based ethanol was nothing but pandering to Iowa farmers. In fact, Al Gore seems to keep imploding.

There is little doubt that Al Gore has become a prophet for the environmental movement. In fact, Penn and Teller did an interesting piece where they asked people to describe Al Gore, and to a liberal they all used religious terminology. He was Kool-Aid Obama before Obama.

But the right spotted Al Gore as a charlatan immediately. For one thing, he was known for telling whoppers, like how he invented the internet. But he also showed that he had no qualms with changing his positions to whatever profited him personally. For example, back when he was a mere Senator from Tennessee, sitting in the Senate seat he inherited from his father, Al Gore used to talk about being a tobacco farmer. In fact, he would go around describing how he lovingly planted tobacco plants. This made him sound like a real man of the Earth, which played well in Tennessee. But then he learned that there was more political cache to be earned by being anti-tobacco. So he became the world’s biggest opponent of cigarette companies. . . a position he suddenly claimed to always hold.

At the end of the 1980s, Al Gore adopted environmentalism when he wrote "Earth In The Balance." This was in stark contrast to his ownership interest in Occidental Petroleum or when his family entered the zinc mining business. But he saw environmentalism as his future ticket. So when the opportunity came up, in 1994, he cast the tie vote in the Senate to authorize a subsidized ethanol program in the U.S. This program would eventually spend about $7.7 billion a year to subsidize the production of corn-based ethanol in the U.S.

From the start, everyone knew this program was a bad idea. The environmental value of corn-based ethanol was dubious because the amount of energy required to make this ethanol was only slightly less (or possibly even more) than using oil. A much better alternative was Brazilian sugar-based ethanol, but that would not help US farmers. But since Al Gore wanted to be known as the environmentalist, he wasn't going to let this opportunity pass him by, and he attacked the program's critics as oil-industry stooges. The environmentalists fell in love.

Then Al Gore set about becoming a full-on environmental profit... er, prophet. No, actually, profit is right. For while Al Gore jetted all over the Earth lecturing people about saving the environment, it was soon discovered that he owned a home with the carbon footprint of a small city. And when Al Gore started pushing the idea that people could offset their carbon footprints by buying indulgences, it was discovered that he owned the company that was selling them. Even the offsets he claimed to have purchased himself, were bought from. . . himself. Then Al Gore and Goldman Sachs got into the carbon permit game, trying to buy up carbon permits and using our government to force through a cap and trade scheme that would make these valuable. With the election of the Republicans these things lost more than 90% of their value.

Then a Canadian mathematician (Steven McIntyre) proved that the science behind Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (specifically his famous hockey stick graph) was fraudulent, and it would produce a hockey stick no matter what data you entered. This was followed by a British judge ruling that Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth contained enough errors that it could not be used as a learning tool in schools. Then the Earth entered a cooling trend that should never have happened according to Al Gore's teachings. This was followed by Climategate, which showed that the whole global warming industry was based on faked data.

Things were not looking good for Al Gore. (Not to mention he was suddenly facing personal problems, like the investigation into possible sex crimes and his surprise divorce.)

And now, Al Gore has admitted that the corn-based ethanol policy that got him started wasn’t a good idea. It has little environmental merit and it created a $7.7 billion a year subsidy that just won’t go away to make room for better environmental programs. . . just as the critics warned. That’s bad. Not to mention that, by diverting all this corn to ethanol, the price of food has been skyrocketing the world over.

But it gets worse because Al also admitted that the only reason he supported this program (which he knew was not a good idea) was that he wanted the votes of farmers in Iowa for his presidential run. In other words, he pushed a policy he knew was bad, while telling us it had benefits it didn’t and unfairly attacking the program's critics, because he knew it would get him votes. Some prophet!

Well, don't worry about poor Al Gore. He's not out of schemes just yet. In fact, he has a new plan for saving the planet that we should all trust: Al wants us to subsidize "second generation ethanol." What do you think are the odds that he already owns stock?