Forgotten or semi-forgotten in the hullabaloo over Al Gore netting a cool hundred million from the sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera is that back in 2009 the ex-veep was on his way to being the first carbon billionaire off global warming.
It’s unclear how close he came to accomplishing that goal, but it’s a safe bet he didn’t do badly, considering his lifestyle. (Well, this house apparently went to Tipper in the breakup.)
Whatever else he is, Gore is arguably a business genius when it comes to generating massive amounts of income from dubious enterprises and, unlike Bernie Madoff, getting away with it.
Okay, Current TV wasn’t completely a scam. It was just a boring television network that hardly anybody wanted to watch. Nevertheless, when Gore and his partners sold it to Al Jazeera for 500 million they were selling the network (and its U.S. bandwidth) to a company owned by the state of Qatar, a country that derives fifty percent of its income from the one thing Al Gore supposedly most reviles — fossil fuels. Not only that, Al Jazeera, especially in its Arabic broadcasts, excuses al-Qaeda and consistently supports Sharia law and its consequent extreme misogyny and homophobia. And, of course, opposes the separation of church and state. How very “progressive”!
If, in the words of La Rochefoucauld, “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” then Gore is one of the greatest “homageurs” or all time.
But does he deserve to be compared to the felonious Madoff? Well, consider this: Bernie Madoff undoubtedly did not set out to bilk a number of rich people, not to mention several not so rich and also some charities, out of their savings. He probably thought his great financial expertise was going to make them all a lot of money. It is only when his expertise deserted him, that he went down the road to perdition, failing to notify his clients of impending economic disaster, robbing Peter to pay Paul, while pretending all was well.
Gore is oddly similar. Years ago, he undoubtedly believed anthropogenic global warming was taking us to planetary armageddon. (Ironically, he had much less right to his conclusions than Madoff, because Gore was less of an expert in his field by considerable degrees. In fact, he was a failure in science as an undergraduate and had to rely entirely on the opinions of others, scientists who had everything to gain from the subvention of the global warming industry.)
When revelations like the Climategate emails appeared, Gore ignored or derided them. After all, by that point, he was deeply involved in setting up carbon exchanges in Europe and the USA. Billions of dollars were involved and international policies at play that would cost billions, even trillions, more while dominating and distorting the global economy. These numbers made Madoff seem trivial.
The recent dispute over the latest warming figures from the British MET office make the commitment of sums of this titanic size seem like a form of mega-theft from global (largely American, one assumes) taxpayers.
And yet that is what Al Gore wanted.
He has been on the wrong side of everything — first making AGW into a phony catastrophe and now introducing the mouthpiece of Sharia into American homes, while personally gaining hundreds of millions in the process.
What a guy.
And you thought Bernie Madoff was bad.
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