It's OK to Discuss Pickens' Windmill Investments but Not Gore's

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

It's OK to Discuss Pickens' Windmill Investments but Not Gore's
by Noel Sheppard


For many months, NewsBusters has been reporting the financial interest Nobel Laureate Al Gore has in advancing global warming hysteria, and has continually wondered when media will raise this issue to the American people.

On Sunday's "Meet the Press," Gore gave host Tom Brokaw the perfect setup to ask him about his investments in renewable fuel technology when the former Vice President mentioned how much money T. Boone Pickens has put into windmill farms.

Predictably, Brokaw missed this opportunity to be the first major, mainstream media member to ask the Global Warmingist-in-Chief about his own investments, and just how much he stands to make if America does indeed shift all of its electricity production to renewable sources of energy.

Here's the exchange in question. (right after links)

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TOM BROKAW, HOST: I don't have to tell you that there are a good many political fights going on right now, to say nothing of what's going to happen in the future, and also you have some competition. Anyone who's been watching this broadcast or television recently has seen a familiar American figure and what he has in mind. Let's listen to some of that.



MR. T. BOONE PICKENS: (From political advertisement) I'm T. Boone Pickens. I've been an oil man my whole life, but this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of. And I have a plan. In the coming weeks, I'm going to share the details of that plan to use American technology and alternative energy to slash our dependency and break foreign oil's stranglehold on us.



MR. BROKAW: If you go to his Web site, he'll tell you that he wants to shift to wind to produce electricity and then shift natural gas to public transportation. And when he took a look at your plan, this is what he had to say. "Former Vice President Al Gore's put forward a framework of a plan that is focused on global warming and climate issues. My plan is aimed squarely at breaking the stranglehold that foreign oil has on our country and the $700 billion annual impact it has on our economy. We import 70 percent of our oil and that number is growing larger every year." As you know. "Vice President Gore's plan does not address this enormous problem. It is clear that he and I have two different objectives, and our plans should be viewed with that in mind." Don't you like the idea that T. Boone Pickens is out there on the playing field now and has what appears to be an innovative idea?

VICE PRES. GORE: I do. And, and I think it's really significant that one of the most successful oil industry figures is now investing a billion dollars of his own money in windmills. He's looked at the figures that I was sharing with you a moment ago. Wind is competitive. Just this past week, we, we saw Texas approve massive new transmission lines to use wind power for--as a substitute for the old ways of producing electricity. Now, the--I don't see him as a competitor on this. There are really a lot of common features in, in what he's saying. Now, the, the idea of using natural gas for, for cars, natural gas, I think, is an important transition fuel. It has fewer CO2 emissions than either coal or oil, especially coal. I think that it makes more sense to put the bulk of our effort to transform the car and truck fleet towards electricity because electricity can be produced from renewable sources indefinitely. It's inexhaustible. There's enough solar energy that hits this--the surface of the planet in 40 minutes to provide a full year's worth of energy for the entire world. We just have to listen to what the engineers and scientists are telling us about the advances in the efficiency and the reductions in cost of how we can use solar and wind and also geothermal.

Now, with Gore having mentioned Pickens' investments in windmills, wouldn't this have been the perfect time for Brokaw to ask him about his own financial stake in such things?

After all, as NewsBusters reported on April 11, Gore admitted to this back in March:

There are a lot of great investments you can make. If you are investing in tar sands, or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. And it is based on an old model. Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments I personally think make sense. I have a stake in these so I’ll have a disclaimer there. But geo-thermal concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency, and conservation.

As Gore spoke these words, pictures of electric cars, windmills and solar panels appeared in multiple slides on the screen with company names at the bottom such as Amyris (biofuels), Altra (biofuels), Bloom Energy (solid oxide fuel cells), Mascoma (cellulosic biofuels), GreatPoint Energy (catalytic gasification), Miasole (solar cells), Ausra (utility scale solar panels), GEM (battery operated cars), Smart (electric cars), and AltaRock Energy (geothermal power).

Since Gore brought up Pickens' investments, why didn't Brokaw ask Gore about his own? Instead, Brokaw continued:

MR. BROKAW: But when it comes to T. Boone Pickens, shouldn't it be "all hands on deck"?

VICE PRES. GORE: Yep.

MR. BROKAW: And don't you approve of the idea that he should go forward with this?

VICE PRES. GORE: He, he, he wants to, to move...

MR. BROKAW: Natural gas.

VICE PRES. GORE: ...natural gas in one direction and move wind in another direction and convert the fleet. The wind is producing electricity and the--then he wants to move natural gas into cars. But if we're going to convert cars and trucks, we, we should do it one time toward electricity.

But there are vehicles running today on natural gas. Chattanooga, Tennessee, has natural gas buses. It's, it's a respectable option. But I think that, I, I think that in the long term the better approach is to make this investment in a unified national grid that has low losses in transmission, that has the Smart Grid features that allows individuals to put up photovoltaic solar panels and sell electricity back into the grid and shift over to renewable sources.

Stop the tape. So, Gore doesn't want to use natural gas for cars. Instead, he wants to go electric -- which he's admitted to investing in. Wouldn't this be another opportunity for Brokaw to question Gore's possible financial motivation? It appears not:

MR. GORE: Now, the other thing that Boone Pickens agrees on is when he says we really "can't drill our way out" of this because the new discoveries--and he knows about the new discoveries, he's got chapter and verse--they have been coming in at a much slower rate than the demand for oil and coal have been increasing.

MR. BROKAW: This comes under the heading of politics makes strange bedfellows. You have common cause with T. Boone Pickens, who four years ago was a principal financier of the swift boat attack ads...

VICE PRES. GORE: Yeah.

MR. BROKAW: ...against your friend John Kerry.

VICE PRES. GORE: Yeah. And, and I think it's an illustration of how this, this climate crisis has to, to push us as Americans to take this issue out of the old partisan squabbling and political fighting that we're--we have to be in this as Americans. And America should be leading the world community to confront this climate crisis.

MR. BROKAW: Speaking of which, it was not so long ago that you called President Bush a "moral coward" on this issue for not standing up to his financial interests. For the last two years Democrats have dominated the Congress of the United States--the Senate and the House of Representatives. There have been no major, sweeping initiatives coming out of this Democratic-controlled Congress. How would you characterize that?

And that, as they say, was that.

This leads me to ask once again: will anybody in the mainstream media EVER question Gore about his financial interests concerning global warming and converting America's electricity usage to renewable fuels? Ever?

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.


35 Errors Discovered in Al Gore’s Film


NewsBusters readers are well aware of the recent controversy involving Al Gore’s schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

A few weeks ago, a British judge cited nine errors in the film. Team Gore responded Thursday in a rebuttal published at the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog.

Now, famed climate change skeptic Christopher Monckton, in a detailed report published by the Science and Public Policy Institute, not only refuted Gore’s defense of the movie's contents, but also listed a total of 35 errors in the award-winning abomination responsible for most of the global warming hysteria sweeping the planet

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Al Gore’s spokesman and “environment advisor,” Ms. Kalee Kreider, begins by saying that the film presented “thousands and thousands of facts.” It did not: just 2,000 “facts” in 93 minutes would have been one fact every three seconds. The film contained only a few dozen points, most of which will be seen to have been substantially inaccurate.

The judge concentrated only on nine points which even the UK Government, to which Gore is a climate-change advisor, had to admit did not represent mainstream scientific opinion.

Ms. Kreider then states, incorrectly, that the judge himself had never used the term “errors.” In fact, the judge used the term “errors,” in inverted commas, throughout his judgment.

[…]

Ms. Kreider then says, “The process of creating a 90-minute documentary from the original peer-reviewed science for an audience of moviegoers in the U.S. and around the world is complex.”

However, the single web-page entitled “The Science” on the movie’s official website contains only two references to articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. There is also a reference to a document of the IPCC, but its documents are not independently peer-reviewed in the usual understanding of the term.

Ms. Kreider then says, “The judge stated clearly that he was not attempting to perform an analysis of the scientific questions in his ruling.” He did not need to. Each of the nine “errors” which he identified had been admitted by the UK Government to be inconsistent with the mainstream of scientific opinion.

Ms. Kreider says the IPCC’s results are sometimes “conservative,” and continues: “Vice President Gore tried to convey in good faith those threats that he views as the most serious.” Readers of the long list of errors described in this memorandum will decide for themselves whether Mr. Gore was acting in good faith. However, in this connection it is significant that each of the 35 errors listed below misstates the conclusions of the scientific literature or states that there is a threat where there is none or exaggerates the threat where there may be one. All of the errors point in one direction – towards undue alarmism. Not one of the errors falls in the direction of underestimating the degree of concern in the scientific community. The likelihood that all 35 of the errors listed below could have fallen in one direction purely by inadvertence is less than 1 in 34 billion.

Readers are strongly encouraged to review the entire report, as well as all 35 errors chronicled by Monckton. Your attention is critical, for Gore’s film, though powerfully and convincingly presented, is indeed a work of fiction, and its veracity should be questioned with every conceivable opportunity.

Any other conclusion is facile and devoid of logic.

Make no mistake: as was clearly intended by the film’s producers, its star, and our woefully biased media, this celluloid canard has provoked tremendous international alarm concerning global warming that is neither warranted nor beneficial.

It should come as no great surprise that such was forecast in April when NewsBusters warned readers of the dangers associated with Gore’s propaganda. For those that have forgotten, a federal judge cited “An Inconvenient Truth” in his ruling against the government for its financing of overseas projects that supposedly contribute to climate change.

At the time, I cautioned (emphasis added): “[T]he alarmism running through society concerning this issue, and being flamed by Gore and his sycophant cadre in the media and Hollywood, clearly carries risks that an obedient and complicit press ignore.”

Six months later, these warnings seem rather prescient, as the hysteria has now officially begun to impact energy policy as evidenced by Thursday’s decision in Kansas to deny a license to an electricity producer for the construction of a new coal-fired power plant. Ominously, concerns over carbon emissions and their supposed impact on climate change were cited in the state's announcement regarding the matter.

Maybe just as cautionary, it appears Europe is going to start requiring carbon dioxide emissions warnings in advertisements for new cars, as well as imposing taxes on automobiles releasing the greatest amount of "greenhouse gases."

As a result, it should be crystal clear that the efforts on the left and by the media are beginning to have a policy impact not just here, but across the globe.

Sadly, this is just the beginning. Consider the proposal by House Energy and Commerce Committee chair John Dingell (D-MI) who in September offered a rather painful carbon emissions plan that would establish an additional 50 cent tax on gasoline as well as scale back the deductability of the interest on mortgages for some homeowners.

Lest we not forget House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Cal.) call for a European-style cap-and-trade program that reins in corporate carbon dioxide emissions.

These are but two of the dangerous schemes being tossed around Washington that would have potentially catastrophic impacts upon the economy, and have gained steam as a direct consequence of Gore's indoctrination campaign aided and abetted by a green media.

It has therefore become imperative for all supporters of liberty, democracy, and capitalism to fight the propagandist forces in our nation seeking to undermine our very way of life.

If you think that's putting too fine a point on the situation, ask yourself how you're going to provide electricity to your home, and what it's going to cost, if the warm-mongers have their way, and no more coal-fired OR nuclear power plants are built in this country.

Try also to imagine how our economy, and, therefore, your personal finances, are going to suffer as countries like China, India, Russia, and Brazil are allowed unfettered expansion of their energy creation while America curtails its own all to solve a problem that has yet to be proved either exists or can be mitigated by anything under man's control.

If you don't think one movie can cause this much political and economic upheaval, please recall what "The China Syndrome" did to catalyze the No Nukes movement in the '80s, and how America is still suffering from the hysteria it provoked 28 years ago.

The only remaining question is whether we are going to learn from this horrendous past mistake, or once again allow our economic and energy policies to be controlled by misplaced and erroneous environmental alarmism.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.