Gore plans Sleepathon

Ex-Vice President Al Gore, who did precisely nothing for the environment during his eight years in power, has unveiled plans for another ego-stroking exercise in climate change politics.

His Climate Reality project announced it would kick off with a 24-hour live streamed event on 14 September. The day’s schedule will include a new multimedia presentation by Gore, who unbelievably won an Oscar for his Inconvenient Truth slide show.

The danger is that he brings real, sincere environmental campaigns into disrepute.

In a world that is about to collapse due to the economic crimes of the financial community of which Gore is now a leading member, Climate change is off the agenda.  Gore knows perfectly well there is no chance that the reforms demanded by Climate change campaigners will be implemented.  Economic growth is the only thing that will delay the  collapse of the dollar, and with it Western economic supremacy.  And economic growth is the enemy of environmental campaigns since it is inevitably carbon intensive.

Nor does Gore ever admit that to really tackle climate change would require a massive increase in cost of living (ie decline in American living standards, although not in quality of life).

If Gore was really sincere in his wish to help the world, as opposed to merely inflating his own profile, then the Inconvenient Truth is that he should join with existing campaigns to end population growth.

As it is his new campaign aims at exposing “the full scale” of the climate crisis.

Gore came back into the spotlight last month in an essay in Rolling Stone in which he also accused Obama of failing to fight hard enough for climate action.

Gore’s talent for sickening hypocrisy is fully on display in the Rolling Stone article. He moralises against those who attack the integrity of climate change scientists, but it was those scientists who deliberately falsified, or ignored, or failed to report evidence, the most serious possible crimes in science.

He bemoans the pitiful level of debate in the United States on this and many other subject, but what did he or any other Democrat do to improve the quality of information available to the American people?  A few hundred million dollars a year for NPR would have given the nation a reliable, impartial news service, but that option has never been considered.

Tuesday’s announcement, which echoed some of the themes in Gore’s Rolling Stone piece, suggests the former vice-president needs publicity for some ulterior business motive.

“As the impacts of climate change are growing more prevalent, so is the resistance to finding the truth and implementing solutions. Just like the tobacco companies that spent decades in denial that smoking causes cancer, oil and coal companies are determined to sow denial and confusion about the science of climate change, ignore its impacts, and create apathy among our leaders,” the release said.

“This event is the first step in a larger, multifaceted campaign to tell the truth about the climate crisis and reject the misinformation we hear every day.

Gore gave further details of the project in an interview with the climate blogger Joe Romm, saying the event would feature a new 30-minute slideshow with video on extreme weather events. Gore will host the event from New York City, but new content will be added to the slide show for the 24 locations used in each time zone.

“Each site where a presentation originates will have basically the same 30-minute slide show, but with slides used in each time zone that illustrate particular impacts and particular efforts towards solutions at the venue representing than that time zone. And then the second 30 minutes of each hour will include a panel discussion focused on the climate crisis and the solutions to it from the perspective of leaders and scientists and others in that particular location. So it will be a 24-hour event,” he told Romm.