Sunday, on NBC’s Meet the Press, former vice-president Al Gore launched an unhinged attack at people he called “climate deniers.” Gore compared climate realists to the police officers in Uvalde, Texas, who stood behind unlocked doors and did nothing while 21 innocents were needlessly killed.
The world’s foremost carbon-credit salesman has a penchant for the dramatic.
Speaking to NBC’s Chuck Todd, Gore said, “You know, the climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers in Uvalde, Texas, who were waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred. They heard the screams, they heard the gunshots, and nobody stepped forward.”
”God bless those families who’ve suffered so much,” the loser of the 2000 presidential election was gracious enough to add.
Gore claimed that politics was getting in the way of significant action and that addressing what he called the “global emergency” of climate change “shouldn’t be a partisan issue.”
“We have to have unity as a nation to come together and stop making this a political football,” Gore said.
“Confronted with this global emergency, what we’re doing with our inaction and failing to walk through the door and stop the killing is not typical of what we are capable of as human beings. We do have the solutions. And I think these extreme events that are getting steadily worse and more severe are really beginning to change minds,” he said.
After laying out a series of events, including heat waves, drought, and even the erroneous claim that Monarch butterflies are set to go extinct, Todd claimed that climate change “is here,” and asked Gore how it felt to be right about everything.
“I wish the scientists had been wrong in their predictions,” Gore said. “All I have done is really convey the scientific facts as the scientists have patiently explained them to me. It’s due to get much, much worse and quickly,” Gore said.
“But we have the ability to stop temperatures from going up,” the producer of 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth claimed.
In a separate interview on ABC’s This Week, Gore claimed that civilization was in peril unless we act in a political way on climate change right now.
“They’re saying that if we don’t stop using our atmosphere as an open sewer, and if we don’t stop these heat trapping emissions, things are gonna get a lot worse,” Gore said. “More people will be killed and the survival of our civilization is at stake.”
Before his Covid-19 diagnosis last week, President Joe Biden announced that he would be taking executive action on climate change since he and Democrats have not been able to get much done legislatively. Among those possible actions would be to declare a “climate emergency,” which the White House says is definitely on the table in the next few weeks.
Biden has called climate change an “emergency,” but has yet to declare one. Climate crusaders believe that such a declaration will give Biden the freedom to act unilaterally on climate change and simply ignore the legislature.
Asked on ABC about the possible emergency declaration, Gore said, “Well mother nature has already declared it a global emergency and I’ll leave it to others to parse the pros and cons of what an emergency declaration would lead to.”
Gore referenced the recent Supreme Court decision, which limited the EPA’s power to restrict carbon emissions.
“But there are other things he can do right now. The EPA can take action to further limit emissions from power plants and from tail pipes, and the Supreme Court decision did not take all their power away,” Gore said.
Gore would also like to see Biden further restrict oil drilling and replace World Bank president David Malpass with someone more climate friendly.
“We could stop allowing oil and gas drilling on public lands and … he could appoint a new head of the World Bank instead of the climate denier that leads it now appointed by his predecessor,” Gore said.
NBC’s Todd floated the possibility that Gore could run for president in 2024 on a climate platform but the former vice-president shunned that idea.
“Thank you for making the suggestion,” Gore said. “But, you know, I’m a recovering politician and the longer I go without a relapse, the less likely one becomes.”
