OPINION:
The truth keeps getting more and more inconvenient.
Just ask the inventor of the internet, the former vice president and America’s forever “next president” Albert Gore. The only thing expanding faster than his carbon footprint is his waistline.
When the guy isn’t zipping around the planet on private jets hawking his tired old “Inconvenient Truth” scam, he is apparently eating buckets of greasy fried chicken and McDonald’s Happy Meals.
Or, in his case, Unhappy Meals. Life on the road can be tough. And sad. Lonely.
To be fair, it ain’t easy to be happy once you have devoted your life to predicting the end of the world. Just as soon as his political career went down the tubes, Mr. Gore grew a beard, got fat, drove through Canada and turned himself into Dr. Doomsday.
Tipper Gore really dodged a bullet with that one.
But back when it all started a couple of decades ago, “Inconvenient Truth” sounded pretty believable. You can make all the predictions in the world on Day One. Mr. Gore made himself fabulously wealthy peddling the greatest horror show on earth.
Who isn’t going to pay to see tornados of wind fire, floods of burning lakes and clouds of black carbon choking out humanity? Then the riots of looting zombies to pick off anyone who survived the ecological collapse of Mother Earth?
All this punctuated with fire and brimstone preaching by a washed-up, fat, moralizing failed politician. Script-writers in Hollywood and internet scammers could not think up a more fantastical fraud.
The only problem is when it comes time to cash all those checks Mr. Gore predicted.
2012 came and went. The sun still rises and sets.
2015. Birds still chirp when you open the windows.
In 2018, clean spring rains still bring healing fresh air.
2021, and the seas still ebb and flow pretty much as they have for all of recorded time.
The only thing going extinct these days are the predictions from Mr. Gore and his fellow ministers of doom. As the kids say: “Awkward!”
Luckily for Mr. Gore, however, he spent enough time as a politician to be immune from shame.
Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well for the rest of the purveyors of Mr. Gore’s dark religion.
President Biden got into the White House, and apparently nobody told him that the whole lunatic green “inconvenient truth” agenda was a scam designed to shake down industrial corporations and make people like Mr. Gore fabulously corpulent.
Mr. Biden — or whoever is acting in loco parentis on his behalf inside the White House— took the whole thing seriously and launched a holy war on American energy independence just as soon as he got into office. The Biden administration jacked up oil and gas prices so high around the world that Mr. Gore wasn’t the only crazed autocrat making it filthy rich.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was suddenly drowning in wealth — after limping along in poverty during the previous administration. And like Jed Clampett and The Beverly Hillbillies, Mr. Putin loaded up his truck — and his tanks and his personnel carriers and his missile launchers — and invaded Ukraine.
You can call it Mr. Putin’s war. Or Mr. Biden’s war. Or the first war of the Green New Deal. But it is also Mr. Gore’s war.
Only Mr. Biden was dumb enough to fall for it all.
And now the rest of Europe is stuck paying the very real consequences of Mr. Gore’s giant scam that President Biden was just dumb enough to take seriously. As a result of Mr. Biden’s climate war and Mr. Putin’s Ukraine invasion, Europe cannot afford electricity.
It is so bad that this month Germany announced it will reverse plans to shut down nuclear power plants in order to keep the lights on in this brave new world created by Mr. Gore and Mr. Biden. (Yes, nuclear power is the cleanest mass energy source on earth, yet somehow fell out of favor in Mr. Gore’s church of climate change — probably because it actually solves the problems that have made Mr. Gore so wealthy.)
But even keeping the nuclear power plants running won’t repair all the damage Mr. Biden and Mr. Gore inflicted on Germany, long one of the most committed nations on earth to the “inconvenient truth” charade.
The country is even looking to restart 16 decommissioned power plants — that burn coal!
Now that Mr. Gore’s biggest scam is drying up, it is probably time for him to start investing in some coal mines. After all, it takes a lot of money to keep a guy like that fed and flying around on private jets.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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