Al Gore evident dropped into the Aspen Institute's confab last week to rail against corporate evildoers doing to the climate change debate exactly what they did to the tobacco debate 40 years ago.
The tobacco lobbyists, he says,
succeeded in delaying the implementation of the surgeon general’s report for 40 years – 40 years! In every one of those 40 years the average number of Americans killed by cigarettes each year exceeded the total number of Americans killed in all of World War II: 450,000 per year. My sister was one of them. … It was evil, evil, evil.
And he was just warming up.
The Colorado Independent states that
Gore said, “[that model of manipulation] was transported whole cloth into the climate debate. And some of the exact same people — I can go down a list of their names — are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!” Gore exclaimed.
“When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again,” he continued. “There’s no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea! … It’s no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate. It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.”
He widened the discussion then to take in the current economic 'debate' in DC, decrying the hyperpartisan, lack of fact based debate:
“And we made better decisions because we used shared consciousness, shared reality, rule of reason, best evidence, democratic discourse, free debate to figure out what’s more likely than not to be the best decision here. It didn’t always work, but it worked a hell of a lot better. Since we adopted this new system we are making catastrophic decisions that have massive consequences.
Way to go, Mr. Gore!