Al Gore Backed by Oil Industry Group

Gore backed by group linked to oil industry?
By QMI AGENCY
Monday, May 3, 2010

MONTREAL - Five months after saying the exploitation of the tar sands was "one of the most serious threats to the human race,” former U.S. vice-president Al Gore came back to Montreal this week with financial backing from Investors Group, a Power Corporation affiliate that is indirectly involved in Alberta's oil industry.

The man behind the documentary An Inconvenient Truth will participate Thursday in an international conference organized during the 2010 Millennium Summit. The event will also include Sarah Ferguson, duchess of York, and actress Kristin Davis of Sex and the City fame.

The event's main sponsor is Investors Group, a Power Corp. company owned by the Desmarais family. The Desmarais family and their Belgian partner, Albert Frere, are the largest shareholders in oil company Total, which hopes to take three billion barrels of oil from the Alberta tar sands over the next 30 years.

During a trip to Toronto at the end of November, Gore said the exploitation of the tar sands is the "largest source of polluting energy on earth" and represents "one of the most serious threats to the human race."

"The oil pulled from the tar sands gives a Toyota Prius the carbon footprint of a Hummer," Gore said at the time, after blasting the Canadian government for its soft position on the exploitation of the tar sands.

Daniel Germain, the president and founder of the Millennium Summit, an international development conference that attracts big-name speakers, said he doesn't know all the issues concerning the tar sands.

"I understand that there is a debate on (the issue) but it is not my debate," he said. "That said, Investors Group has been an extraordinary partner for two years at the summit. It is a very active company in Quebec, very engaged, that supports food banks."

An Inconvenient Fraud

I don't know what I think about the issue of Global Warming/Climate Change. I say "Climate Change" because I think that is a better term than Global Warming, simply because "global warming" implies that the whole planet gets noticeably hotter, and that's not the issue in many areas. It is actually when abnormal weather patterns in a particular region becoming more common. For example, it seldom snows in Dallas Texas, but this past winter 2010 (and the first day of spring), Dallas set a record for snowfall and colder temperatures. It snowed last year, too. If climate change is a real phenomenon, that sort of weather will become more common. Climate change also occurs  as a case of extremes: winters becoming colder with more storms, summers becoming hotter with less rainfall. In Dallas, you can make a case that both those seasons have been extreme recently, even a few years ago when Dallas had its coolest summer ever due to record rainfall (and flooding). Extremes in seasonal  weather, uncommon weather patterns, increased number of extremely severe storms - these are the red flags of climate change, rather than a "noticeable case of global warming." It's a very real possibility that "global warming" can trigger an ice age in the future, too, which REALLY blows the minds of people who deny climate change/global warming outright.

Those who proclaim it's real have taken some hits in credibility lately, and some of them seem to be the potential beneficiaries of climate change legislation, for instance, like Al Gore, who stands to gain billions of dollars in the carbon credit swap/tax legislation being considered by congress. What I've read of that plan, regardless of whether climate change is real or not, is that this is a really bad way to fix the problem while making rich corporations/individuals even richer. How does it help the planet for major polluters to swap carbon credits with low or no polluters when it still results in the same amount of pollution entering the atmosphere? It amounts to a tax which goes into the pockets of private account holders. Screw that.

So while I lean more to the possibility that climate change is real but that no feasible method of preventing it has been proposed, I do cast a skeptical eye at the motivations of those championing climate change legislation. They seem like snake oil salesmen exploiting a real cause for their own benefit. Like television evangelists...

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