OPINION:
Almost 13 years ago, former Vice President and amateur climatologist Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The alarmist global warming movie was full of alarming predictions, all of which Weatherman Gore said would be happening in the next decade. Sea levels would rise 20 feet. Massive hurricanes and severe tornadoes would be the new norm. The arctic and Antarctica would melt and polar bears would disappear.
None of that happened.
At the film’s debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, Mr. Gore said: “Global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life.” And the guy who once claimed he invented the internet added that “within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return” — which he called “a true planetary emergency” — because of global warming.
Wrong again, Al. Still, the movie won an Oscar and Mr. Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize.
That wasn’t the first time climate alarmists missed the mark. When “Earth Day” debuted, Harvard biologist George Wald said “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was 49 years ago, and, weirdly, we’re all still here.
The day after that first Earth Day in 1970, The New York Times editorial page said: “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” Yeah, not so much.
There’s a reason fake climatologists keep making outrageous predictions based on flimsy science: Money. Mr. Gore’s net worth is in excess of $200 million. He jets everywhere to give his doomsday speeches (often $100,000 per), and he lives in a 10,000-square-foot mansion that expends 21 times more energy than the average U.S. household. But do as he says, not as he does.
Enter Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29-year-old former bartender who’s putting the “socialist” back in the Democratic Party. At a Martin Luther King Day forum in New York City this week, she said this: “I think the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people, in Gen Z, and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re, like, ’The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.’ Your biggest issue, your biggest issue is how are going to pay for it?” she said incredulously.
“And, like, this is the war, this is our World War II. And I think for younger people looking at this are more, like, how are we saying ’let’s take it easy’ when 3,000 Americans died last year. How are we saying ’let’s take it easy’ when the Nth person died from our cruel and unjust criminal justice system?”
Like, totally.
But don’t bother fact-checking anything Ms. Ocasio-Cortez says. She don’t like that. “Facts are facts, America. We should care about getting things right. Yet standards of who gets fact-checked, how often + why are unclear,” she tweeted. “This is where false equivalency + bias creeps in, allowing climate deniers to be put on par w/ scientists, for example.”
Yup, if there’s one thing liberals don’t like, it’s a debate using facts.
But then again, the Democratic socialist said she gives “zero” f—-s about what “more established members” of her party say about her.
“Right now, with the current administration, with the current circumstances, with the abdication of responsibility that we’ve seen from so many powerful people, even people who abdicate that responsibility by calling themselves liberal or a Democrat, or whatever it is, I feel a need for all of us to breathe fire,” she said.
Here’s one thing you can take to the bank: Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is about to get very rich. She makes $174,000 a year, but just watch. She’ll be rolling in dough in no time — like her fellow Democratic socialist Sen. Bernard Sanders, who owns three houses.
There’s big money in being a climate alarmist. Just ask Al Gore.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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