Al Gore’s Multi-Million-Dollar Business of Deception

It pays off to tell lies

When Al Gore left politics, he was unaware that he had just made the best decision of his career. A couple of years after he moved away from the Washington Swamp, he started to get rich off the green industry, the new gold mine of capitalism.

Among Gore’s main cash cows is Generation Investment Management, a firm that integrates finance with sustainability, which he set up in 2004. The same year, he founded Current TV, a network he sold to Al-Jazeera 9 years later, pocketing $70 million in the deal. At that time, his holdings with Apple already stood at $45.6 million, which was in addition to other holdings in various companies such as Google and Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Worth mentioning is his work as a public speaker in the environmental field for which he gets over $200,000 for each engagement, according to The Daily Mail.

But is Gore as green as he claims?

Green Hypocrisy

The former U.S. VP likes to drape himself in a cloak of environmental virtue, but he cannot hide the fact that his carbon footprint is disastrous. Last we heard, he owned four properties.

First: a $13 million Italian-style waterfront villa in Montecito, California, which features, among other things, a wine cellar, terraces, six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms in over 6,500 square feet of living space.

Second: an equally luxurious 10,070 square-foot mansion in Nashville, Tennessee, which consumes nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, more than twenty times the national average. According to the National Center for Public Policy Research, in 2016, 66,159 kilowatt-hours of electricity were needed just to heat the pool of that villa, for which Gore spent almost $22,000 on electricity bills between August 2016 and July 2017 (the bills, however, are said to have gone down 40% after a makeover made the property greener).

The ex-VP’s real estate stock also includes a $3 million residence in Virginia and a $3 million “pied-à-terre” in San Francisco at the St. Regis Residence Club.

A Business of Deception

We all remember Gore’s starring role in the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. A documentary that contained significant errors, if not lies, which British High Court judge Michael Burton rightfully pointed out in a case brought by a UK school official who refused to show the film to students.

An Inconvenient Truth, for instance, suggested that the sea level would rise up to 20 feet in the near future because of the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland, a scenario that, if it ever happens, will take place over thousands of years. Gore, in the documentary, also said that some low-lying Pacific islands have been so inundated that their citizens have all had to evacuate to New Zealand. The problem is that such a thing never happened.

Another thesis put forward by An Inconvenient Truth: global warming will shut down the Ocean Conveyor Belt, a constantly moving system of deep-ocean circulation driven by temperature and salinity. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is very unlikely that such an event will occur in the future.

One more example: Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans were due to global warming, while no evidence shows that this was the case.

In all, Judge Michael Burton highlighted nine factual errors in the documentary.

Gore’s tendency to oversimplify the environmental issue did not end there. While promoting his famous documentary in 2006, he had argued that humanity had only 10 years left before it reached a point of no return, a claim we’ve heard time and again over the years.

Then in 2008, he had stated that the North Pole’s ice cap would have disappeared by 2013. And in December 2009, during the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, he had claimed that, as early as 2014, the Arctic Ocean would be almost free of ice during summers.

Controlling the Crowd

Speaking on the sidelines of the 2021 COP 26 summit, Gore took the opportunity to promote a turnkey solution that, according to him, should curb carbon emissions. The solution in question: mass surveillance, of course, through high technologies, including artificial intelligence.

As a matter of fact, the technology has already been developed. It is called Climate TRACE, which stands for Tracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions.

Basically, Climate TRACE keeps a close eye on greenhouse gas emissions in order to target the culprits, that is, the “polluters”. “We get data consistently from 300 existing satellites, more than 11,000 ground-based, air-based, sea-based sensors, multiple internet data streams and using artificial intelligence”, Gore told MSNBC in November 2021. “All that information is combined, visible light, infrared, all of the other information that is brought in, and we can now accurately determine where the greenhouse gas emissions are coming from.”

What will happen to the offenders? The former politician did not want to provide details on the subject.

Sources

ABC News, Al Gore, Eric Pilon, Summit News, The Atlantic, The Daily Mail, The Los Angeles Times, The Telegraph #1, #2,