Al Gore: What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You to Know [video] | Hacker News Reader

Al Gore: What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You to Know [video]

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47 pointswolfskaempf16 comments

To this day, I can’t read the Joy of Tech comic because I remember their response to Al Gore’s climate activism: “Al Gore is fat, haha”.

I can't take him seriously because of South Park.

Keep watching your cartoons and let the adults do climate politics.

when exactly was it al gore predicted the extreme sea rise? :)

They did try to back peddle in later episodes, but their apology amounted to mostly "we were a little bit wrong, but you (Al Gore) weren't completely right!"

I just heard a man who bought a multi-million dollar oceanfront home why crying about sea level rise accuse other people of fraud.

If sea levels are rising, why are ocean-front homes still a sound investment?

>, why are ocean-front homes still a sound investment?

Well they never were, simply because of coastal erosion. Climate change will just accelerate what was already happening.

It looks like for Al Gore climate change is an opportunity to wage class war. And definitely an opportunity to score political points.

Yes, oil drilling companies made a lot of money from extracting and selling fossil fuels. Yes, those fossil fuels, once burned, created the mess we are in now. But we were the guys who burned them, we are equally culpable.

Instead of appealing to moral outrage, a much simple and equitable solution would be to pass a carbon tax.

> It looks like for Al Gore climate change is an opportunity to wage class war.

I believe the class war maneuvers are coming from the other side, in making climate change a "liberal issue"; therefore it is something to be dismissed and derided.

And your answer is carbon tax? That's it? It may help a bit but doesn't address the core issue which is we need to stop using fossil fuels, which means actively investing in alternative energy production and management.

But we are actively investing in green energy production. This year (2023) 85% of the new generation capacity is the US is solar, wind, batteries and nuclear, the remaining 15% coming from natural gas [1]. Virtually all the retired capacity was coal (60%) and natural gas (30%). In the US we are moving away from fossil fuels, and we'll get to net zero well ahead of the 2050 target date.

What's Al Gore's problem then? It's easiest to score political points by stoking hate. "How can these guys murder the planet?", basically. Well, these guys are just engaging in a legal and profitable activity. If you don't want them to do that activity, make it illegal or unprofitable (by taxing it). Instead of that, he's trying to shame them out of doing it. Good luck with that.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=57340

Same companies made an ad with a wind turbine on top of Eiffel Tower to mock wind energy. Same companies had direct access to real studies and knew the truth. Meanwhile people were lied constantly. So no, we are not equally culpable.

The irony is that he literally helped bomb Iraq (he was Clinton's vice president) for the same oil he's critical about now... What solutions he suggests besides green capitalism ? Hypocrisy is an art

Are you talking about the First Gulf War that he was Clinton's VP for?

The one where Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we freed Kuwait from the Iraqi army, destroyed their scud missiles they rained on civilians, and then left keeping Iraq intact?

Also, the one that happened during George H.W. Bush's presidency?

Or maybe it's the second one, which happened during George W. Bush's presidency?

Do you understand what powers the VP has?

Do you realize that changing one's mind on new evidence is a sign of intelligence?

Do you understand what he's pitching and that the TED talk was just a focus on the fundamentals of the problem (e.g., fossil fuels are a problem and we need to get off them)?

Do you know what an ad-hominem attack is, and why they are used?

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