Attack on President Bush to Highlight Al Gore's Green Extremism
Free Market Environmental Policy Analysts Available for Interviews
by CEI Staff
January 15, 2004
Contact for Interviews:
Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273
Washington, D.C., January 15, 2004—Former Vice President Al Gore is scheduled to deliver a speech in New York this afternoon attacking the Bush administration’s environmental policy and its response to global warming in particular. Political observers familiar with Gore’s ideas on the environment will know to expect the same kind of hysterical predictions of doom and contempt for modern civilization that first brought him to national prominence in 1992 with the publication of his book Earth in the Balance.
Gore’s acceptance of alarmist global warming predictions, opposition to technologies as basic as the internal combustion engine, and comparisons of environmental degradation to Nazism earned him a great deal of deserved criticism while he held office and during his run for presidency in 2000. So radical were his assessments of the state of the natural world and recommendations for fixing it they inspired a popular website which challenged readers to read several passages of text and guess whether they were from Earth in the Balance or the manifesto of the “Unabomber,” Theodore Kaczynski—a task which confounded many of the site’s visitors.
Gore’s lack of perspective on the legitimate environmental challenges that confront the world has also long been acknowledged by those in his own political party. As early 1992, a Democratic campaign advisor was warning that Gore “has no sense of proportion: He equates the failure to recycle aluminum cans with the Holocaust—and equation that parodies the former and dishonors the latter.” When asked about the content of Earth in the Balance, Gore asserted in the 2000 presidential campaign that he still stands by its entire content.
“Because of his reputation as a boring technocrat, most of the public is still not aware of the loony extent of Gore’s green ideology,” said Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming Policy at CEI. “Not even Howard Dean—the presidential candidate Gore has endorsed—is supportive of the Kyoto global warming treaty which Gore negotiated in 1997 when he was vice president.”
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