It wouldn’t be a World Economic Forum without environmentalist histrionics, and this year’s Davos conclave is no exception. Former vice president and environmentalist Al Gore was this year’s climate alarmist headliner at a special panel discussion on saving the planet. Sounding like a secular evangelist preaching climate change fire and brimstone, Gore harangued those in attendance for more than seven minutes, insisting that environmental Ragnarok is nigh at hand if we do not immediately forsake our destructive ways.
First, the good news, according to Gore. The “Inflation Reduction Act” recently passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Biden on August 16, 2022, is “primarily a climate act,” Gore maintained. Indeed, the $738 billion act is the largest climate-change boondoggle in U.S. history, allocating a whopping $391 billion for that conceit. So outrageous was the bill that even normally conciliatory RINOs in the House and Senate panned it, with the likes of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell calling it “reckless spending.” Not a single Republican in either house voted for it, and every Democrat supported it. Almost every serious pundit agrees that the deceptively-named bill will do nothing to reduce inflation. But as a payout to radical environmentalists and their anti-American agenda, it was certainly an unprecedented act, as Gore observed.
Next, Gore praised the overthrow of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil by Marxist Lula da Silva, proclaiming it a victory for rain forest preservation. And he waxed effusive about all the new renewable-energy technology, which is replacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources all over the world (except, of course, in Communist China, which neither Gore nor anyone else in global environmentalist circles ever seems to mention). Finally, Gore commended the many CEOs and other people of influence in business circles for their increased “passion” about the climate crisis.
But, Gore continued, his voice rising with emotion, “we are still losing.” Emissions are still going up, he noted, once again failing to mention that China is the chief culprit. Erroneously claiming that the troposphere is “only five to seven kilometers thick” (it actually averages 13 kilometers, or 8.1 miles, thick), Gore, in an odd choice of metaphor, claimed that we have turned it into “an open sewer.”
And the claims got “curioser and curioser” as Gore warmed to his subject before a backdrop of a satellite photo of Amazonia. “We’re still putting 162 million tons of greenhouse gas pollution into [the troposphere] 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. 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 predicted to reach one billion in this century!” “Rain bomb,” for the environmentally uninitiated, is non-scientific scare-speak for what used to be called a “downpour” or “cloud burst.” “Atmospheric river” is a recent coinage for what used to be called “cloud bands,” the long strung-out cloud formations that convey moisture from one region to another — since, it turns out, weather does not stand still. As for “boiling oceans,” we have no idea what Gore was referring to.
Turning to geopolitics, Gore implored his audience to “look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion? We would lose our capacity for self-governance!” The not-so-subtle swipe at those opposed to Biden’s unhinged immigration policies seemed to imply that the MAGA movement, January 6, and the general rise in populism and desire to return to limited government are, in fact, products of the climate crisis.
Gore expressed hope that the young people will achieve what his generation could not: stopping human progress in its tracks. He applauded Greta Thunberg and her recent police detention on the site of a German coal mine. He excoriated the World Bank for having a “climate denier” in charge (a reference to World Bank president David Malpass, who last year had the audacity to cast doubt on the dogma that fossil fuels are warming the planet), and for “completely failing to do its job.” Gore also railed against the UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber (without naming him), the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, who, in a delicious twist of Oriental irony, was recently named president of next year’s UN Climate Conference (COP28) in Dubai. “We cannot let the oil companies and gas companies and petro states tell us what is permissible,” Gore thundered. “In the last COP, we were not even allowed to discuss scaling down oil and gas!”
Gore concluded with a lengthy tantrum about the oil and gas industry and their woeful tendency to fight back against the efforts of enviro-extremists to shut them down completely, all to approving nods and applause from those assembled.
Gore’s “seven minutes of terror” were a welcome dose of sincerity in an event typically dominated by word-parsing, well-groomed elites careful to avoid referring too overtly to their radical globalist designs. Al Gore, by contrast, was open and artless in his fiery denunciations of human progress, and particularly the energy sector that has elevated incalculably the standard of living for the entire human race. By Gore’s logic, all gas, oil, coal, and petroleum products such as plastics need to be abolished or, at very least, scaled back to 19th-century levels of production and consumption, a mindset that would, inevitably, entail a return to 19th-century standards of living. This mindset, and a plan to bring it to fruition, are pervasive among globalist elites, including Davos attendees. Gore’s diatribe was a welcome reminder to the sane of just how high the stakes are, and how unhinged the radical opposition is.
