The former vice president dropped in on an Aspen Institute media forum titled “Networks an Citizenship” on Thursday and railed against corporate evildoers who put profit above society.
August 9, 2011

Via Troy Hooper at Real Aspen. Audio by Aspen Journalism.

Al Gore is pissed.

The former vice president dropped in on an Aspen Institute media forum titled “Networks and Citizenship” on Thursday and railed against corporate evildoers who put profit above society.

Gore referenced the book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which tells of how petroleum, steel, utilities and other industries enlisted lobbyists to cloud the climate debate.

The vice president recalled how not long ago tobacco giants “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.”

That same model of media manipulation, Gore said, “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.' Bullsh*t! 'It may be sun spots.' Bullshit! 'It's not getting warmer.' Bullsh*t!

“... 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. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it.”

Perhaps if Gore had shown this much fire in his belly in 2000 he would have become president, and the disaster known as the George Bush presidency been averted.

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