The scam and the scammer

Perry Vs. Gore

Junk Science: The governor of a state under assault by the EPA takes on the patron saint of climate change over whether "warmers" or "deniers" benefit financially from the debate. Meanwhile, the nation loses.

Is Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry a racist? According to the increasingly bombastic Al "expletive deleted" Gore, who was interviewed by Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky on Ustream last Friday, Perry's global warming skepticism qualifies him as one.

Gore related how his "generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators" and that it was when racists could not answer the question of why blacks were inferior "with integrity" that "the change really started."

We shall overcome climate skeptics as well, he believes. "We have to win the conversation on climate," Gore said, just as the conversation on race was won.

After Gore equated climate change skepticism with racism, Bogusky prompted Gore: "Gov. Perry suggests that scientists have gotten together to foil the American public, or the global public." In fact, what Perry told an audience in New Hampshire was that our climate has been "changing ever since the earth was formed" due to largely natural forces and that "there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects."

Perry was Gore's Texas campaign manager in 1988, a fact that many purists say should disqualify him for the GOP nomination. Back then, Perry was a Democrat and Gore was a relatively conservative Democrat who had not yet invented the Internet or beheld an Earth hanging in the balance.

Perry has seen the error of his ways. Gore has not.

"This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity, and to slander them with a lie that they are making up the science in order to make money," Gore said in the online interview. Of course, Gore hasn't shied away from accusing skeptics of being financed by coal and oil companies.

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We and others have documented the manipulated and edited data used by Britain's Climate Research Unit to "hide the decline" in global temperature, and fraudulent assessments by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with conclusions based on single-source anecdotes from obscure journals. They all have been well-funded.

No one has made more money from climate change hype than Gore. According to the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper, just one of the "green" companies in which Gore has invested has received over half a billion dollars in subsidies from the Energy Department.

Financial disclosure documents released before the 2000 election put the Gore family's net worth at $1 million to $2 million. A mere decade later, estimates are that he is worth $100 million. He's been touted in the press as one day becoming the first "carbon billionaire."

According to the Science & Public Policy Institute, the U.S. government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid and tax breaks.

Compare that with, say, Exxon-Mobil Corp., which is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skeptics.

According to the World Bank, the value of carbon trading doubled from $63 billion in 2007 to $126 billion in 2008. Big money has been and can be made by conning governments into formulating policies based on fraudulently hyped climate hysteria.

Monday's endorsement of Perry by Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., should come as no surprise. Inhofe recognizes that what Perry calls "anti-carbon programs" are scams based on fraudulent science and that Perry is right.

While many like Gore have profited handsomely, these policies cost the nation dearly in terms of jobs and economic growth.

This deserves to be an issue in 2012.