Oct 18 2008
But Will King Al Stop Global Warming Aboard WWF’s Private Plane?
It’s damning, and it’s got footnotes. It’s from Pajamas Media and Gal Luft, via Instapundit. It’s this:
Gore’s call to arms is typical of his environmental conduct: asking others to do [3] what he himself wouldn’t — sacrifice. His massive [4] carbon footprint, his frequent use of [5] private jets, and his inflated [6] electricity bill — more than 20 times the national average — have all been widely reported. Calling for young climate activists to engage in unlawful, albeit non-violent, action takes the hypocrisy to a whole new level. Unlike the symbol of non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi, who led millions of freedom seekers and who spent years in prison for his convictions — Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times but was never awarded — or civil rights activists who through their personal sacrifice won equality for blacks in South Africa and the U.S., Gore prefers to send young activists to chain themselves to bulldozers and potentially spend their best months, if not years, in prison while he himself continues to tour the world and attend carbon-neutral Hollywood parties.
And here are some numbers to keep in mind:
Gore’s anti-coal campaign is a threat to our economic well-being as it inspires activists all over the world to deny working families the cheapest source of base load electricity. Earlier this month a British court [7] cleared six Greenpeace activists of causing more than $50,000 of criminal damage to a coal-fired power plant. In the U.S., anti-coal activists have derailed scores of coal-fired power plant projects in 2007 alone. For the greens this is stunning success, but for the rest of us it is trouble in the making.
Despite Gore’s challenge to America in a July speech to commit to producing 100 percent of our energy from renewable sources in 10 years, over 60 percent of U.S. electricity is still made from coal while non-hydro renewable energy barely constitutes two percent. The much-hyped carbon-capture and sequestration, the precondition to Gore’s tolerance of coal, is nowhere on the horizon. Just this year, the Department of Energy scrapped its flagship carbon-capture project called FutureGen, admitting that even experimental plants capable of sequestering carbon dioxide will not be operational before 2015. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, today’s commercially available capture and storage technologies will add approximately 80 percent to the cost of electricity for a new pulverized coal plant, and about 35 percent to the cost of electricity for a new advanced gasification plant. Meanwhile U.S. electricity demand is growing by leaps and bounds, and in the absence of new power-generating capacity, large parts of the U.S. including New England, New York, Texas, and California are likely to experience brownouts in the next few years. So when your AC goes off in the middle of the summer or when your energy costs skyrocket due to utilities’ shift to more expensive power sources, remember Al Gore.



