Jan. 24 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Al Gore’s alarmist global warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore has surfed the movie and climate alarmism to a net worth estimated at $300 million and a Nobel Peace Prize.
But the rest of us have been saddled with: (1) a hoax that has debased the field of science; (2) an energy scam that has cost the world more than $10-20 trillion dollars and threatens our national security; and (3) a political power grab that has reduced our freedoms.
Gore’s movie was junk from the get-go. I attended a meeting in early January 2006 where Gore presented the slide show that was the basis for the movie to a group of conservatives at a weekly meeting sponsored by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. After the presentation, I approached Gore and asked if he was interested in participating in some sort of debate about his claims. Although he said he was interested, his staff later declined.
The movie premiered weeks later at the Sundance Film Festival, and the rest is history. And here’s what that history is.
The “documentary” was initially a hit, grossing $50 million in theaters. Problematically, though, the film soon became part of many secondary school curriculums. Its credibility took a major hit in 2007 when a British court ruled that the movie could not be shown to school children with a warning label about its factual errors.
As I noted in a FOX news column at the time, the judge ruled that Gore’s claims about global warming drying up Lake Chad, causing polar bears to drown while being forced to swim farther for food; and shutting down the Gulf Stream were false and/or impossible. Based on the judge’s ruling, I estimated that “the footage that ought to be excised adds up to about 25 minutes or so out of the 98-minute film. What’s left is largely Gore personal drama and cinematic fluff that has nothing to do with the science of climate change.”
Despite the embarrassing ruling, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that December. His acceptance speech doubled down on the movie claims and added a few more. None of his predictions came true.
His most well-known prediction was that the Arctic might be ice-free during the summer of 2014. But at its 2025 summer minimum, the Arctic still had more than 5 million square kilometers of sea ice — about the same as in 2007. His lesser known but equally erroneous predictions relate to global temperature, drought and glaciers, agriculture, wildfires, hurricanes, deforestation, and species extinction.
Al Gore inspired former-Marxist-turned-normal-person film director Martin Durkin to produce a counter to “An Inconvenient Truth” called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” that I also reviewed in a FOX News column. Though Gore dodged my debate challenge, I was able to make him “debate” by splicing together clips from Gore’s movie with opposing experts from Durkin’s film. Though now blocked for copyright claims, this “debate” can still be found on YouTube.
After all these years, the one thing Gore has been partially correct about is this: At the beginning of the United Nation’s COP-27 meeting in Egypt in 2022, Gore said “We have a credibility problem, all of us: We’re talking and we’re starting to act, but we’re not doing enough.” He’s correct about his credibility problem. It’s never gone away.
President Trump has certainly shaken up, if not severely damaged, the climate hoax and Green New Scam in just 10 short months. Here’s a list of his 10 top climate-related accomplishments for which we should all be thankful this holiday season:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed to end the government’s “scientific” basis for the climate hoax by rescinding the Obama EPA’s 2009 illegal and incorrect determination that emissions of greenhouse gases endanger the public welfare. As part of this effort, the Department of Energy issued a report by top climate scientists concluding that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions will have no detectable effect on global climate change.
President Trump, again, pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, an unconstitutional effort by Presidents Obama and Biden to adopt a United Nations treaty without ratification by the Senate.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act terminated hundreds of billions of dollars of the climate-related “Green New Scam” spending of the (so-called) Inflation Reduction Act, including all subsidies for electric vehicle purchases.
President Trump has directed his administration to reduce Green New Scam spending that survived the One Big Beautiful Bill by means of bureaucratic review, red tape and delay. The rent-seeking and piratical thieves who want to steal from taxpayers played hardball to save some of their ill-gotten gains. The President is now showing, rather impressively, that he can play hardball right back.
President Trump signed into law a bill terminating California’s electric vehicle mandate. Greens had tried to mandate EVs in California to force carmakers to only make EVs for the entire nation. Thanks to the President, that will not happen in the foreseeable future.
The EPA scored an appellate court victory in its effort to reclaim $20 billion in Biden EPA Green New Scam panic spending made infamous by the Project Veritas video, “We’re Throwing Gold Bars Off the Titanic.”
President Trump halted a number of offshore wind projects and cut funding for many others. There are other projects that deserve to be terminated, such as the largest U.S. offshore wind farm being built by Virginia’s Dominion Energy, but a great start has been made so far.
Stunningly, President Trump stopped cold a U.N. treaty to implement a global tax on shipping emissions by threatening would-be signatories with tariffs. This treaty would have been the first global climate tax.
President Trump boycotted and sent no delegation to the United Nations climate conference (COP-30) in Brazil, rendering the annual meeting even more confused and meaningless than it usually is.
President Trump delivered a blistering speech to the United Nations blasting the climate hoax for about 15 minutes or so. The President summed up his views on climate in this one memorable sentence: “The carbon footprint is a hoax, made up by people with evil intentions and they’re heading down a path of total destruction.”
That’s quite a list. But much is left to be done. Some of the big items are as follows:
The EPA must finalize its rescission of the endangerment finding and then successfully defend the rescission in the Supreme Court.
All the Green New Scam spending must be terminated as soon as possible. Every dollar spent is a dollar stolen from taxpayers and invested in making us more energy dependent on Communist China.
It is not enough to withdraw only from the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump must withdraw the United States from the 1992 parent treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
And it would be really awesome if President Trump also withdrew the U.S. from the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the bogus treaty allegedly addressing the imaginary “ozone hole.” That treaty, the follow-on Kigali Amendment ratified during the Biden administration, and language in the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 signed by President Trump, has only been used to make refrigeration and air conditioning pointlessly more expensive.
I heard Al Gore tell a group of conservatives in January 2006 that the real purpose of the Montreal Protocol was to demonstrate that a global environmental treaty could be implemented. That “success” was then subsequently used as precedent for the UNFCCC and its spinoff climate treaties, the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Climate Accord. The ozone hole hoax paved the way for the climate hoax and Green New Scam. It’s all been a multi-trillion-dollar fraud on American consumers and taxpayers.
America became great before these pointless environmental treaties. It has been greatly harmed and dangerously hamstrung by them since their ratification. If MAGA means anything, it means exiting international efforts to cripple the U.S. with junk science-based environmental treaties. And it would make a great Christmas present to the nation. Just a suggestion.
In public discourse, it’s considered bad form to insult your opponent’s integrity. But it’s almost impossible to believe that climate alarmists believe their own apocalyptic predictions.
Greta Thunberg, Al Gore and other experts sternly warned that our planet will be an uninhabitable, unsalvageable oven unless within 15 years (now 10 or 12) we bend all human activity to the goal of eliminating carbon emissions. If true, this creates an obvious moral imperative.
So on his first day in office, President Biden terminated the extension of the Keystone pipeline, created to export shale oil from Alberta to the US. It was, uh, controversial.
Union leaders were upset that 60,000 good jobs were lost. The pipeline’s demise threatened America’s energy independence. There were safety and environmental concerns too. Even Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitted that pipelines are the best, lowest carbon means of transporting fuels.
But no matter. Keystone made feasible the transport and use of fossil fuels and had to be stopped, no matter the impact on the welfare of Americans.
Maybe not smart, but at least ideologically consistent. To the environmental Left calling the shots, it signified America’s willingness to sacrifice for a carbon-free future.
But then in May, Biden did an about face and gave the go ahead to a similar Russian project transporting natural gas to Germany and other European countries via an immense underseas pipeline. It’s a huge win for Russia, cementing the economic dependence of fuel-starved Europe and circumventing the necessity of paying transit fees to Ukraine.
But waiving the Trump-era sanctions on Nordstream was an expensive concession. Russia’s gain is America’s loss of an export market. Our value to our European allies is diminished. Moreover, all the arguments against supporting fossil fuel use that shut down Keystone apply equally to Nordstream.
The effects of carbon emissions on global temperature is obviously the same regardless of their origin. Russia and China have paid only thinly disguised lip service to participating in reduction efforts. For us to aid expansion of Russian fossil fuel production is nuts.
So what did good old Joe get for this precious gift to Putin? Nothing.
But even in a world where the unthinkable keeps morphing into reality, Biden would never have agreed to open the pipeline if he really believed our continued existence depended on radically transforming away from fossil fuels in the next few years.(“Biden“ is used here to denote whoever the deciders are behind the curtain in the current administration).
More suspect thinking surrounds the current fad for electric car subsidies. The subsidies are popular with wealthy beneficiaries, of course, the manufacturers and drivers.
The US spends about $10,000 per car on these “temporary“ handouts intended to promote the development of the electric car market. Nations around the world are charging ahead with plans to eliminate fossil-fuel powered cars within the foreseeable future.
But electric cars aren’t all that green. First, manufacturing the large batteries is an energy intensive process they can emit a quarter as much greenhouse gases as a gasoline car produces in a lifetime.
Second, the electricity to operate a clean vehicle must be generated somewhere. Solar and wind are not yet technically developed to the point of being adequate contributors and non-emitting nuclear has been shunned by self-styled environmentalists. For now, that leaves fossil fuels.
Electric cars in sum have little or no effect on net emissions. The International Energy Agency estimates that if all the players follow through and we get to 140 million electric cars by 2030 – a highly ambitious goal – the net reduction would be only 0.4% of global emissions.
The alarmists wouldn’t be wasting their time on cars if they really believed the end was near. “Biden“ just sees a chance to make a politically astute move that corresponds with environmental groupthink.
It’s pretty obvious that the enviros don’t believe their own BS (sorry, ladies). The Thunberg/Gore 15-years-and-out prophecy is one of 50 hair-raising expert predictions documented by the American Enterprise Institute, all meant to induce panic and soften us up to accept the attendant necessary sacrifices.
Relax. Not one of them has come true.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
