Al Gore is a bitter man. In a conference call with his supporters Tuesday night, Gore all but conceded defeat over getting a climate bill out of Congress this year while unleashing a tirade against cap-and-trade’s opponents.
In a somber and seething voice, Gore told callers that, “this battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year.” He bitterly denounced the Senate and federal government stating several times, “the U.S. Senate has failed us” and “the federal government has failed us.” Gore even seemed to blame President Obama, emphasizing that “the government as a whole has failed us… although the House did its job. [emphasis added]”
Gore also offered up some venom for his own team, urging his listeners to take the “realistic view that they had failed badly.”
“Comprehensive legislation is not likely to be debated” and that a “lame duck debate” is a “very slim possibility indeed,” Gore observed. It was a somewhat ironic choice of words since Gore has been telling us for years that the “debate” was over.
Melodramatically, Gore said that “the government was not working as our founders intended it to.” He laid blame at the feet of “fossil-fuel interests” who allegedly conducted a “cynical coordinated campaign” with “unprecedented funding” and “who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars just on lobbying.” He criticized “polluters” for “dumping global-warming pollution into the atmosphere like it was an open sewer.”
Gore blamed the skeptics for “attacking science and scientists.” “They [the skeptics] did damage and cast doubt,” Gore said.
Asked why the alarmists were ineffective in addressing Climategate, Gore bitterly blamed a “biased right-wing media … bolstered by professional deniers.” Gore claimed the Wall Street Journal published 30 editorial and news articles about Climategate and “not a single one presented [his] side of the science.”
Speaking about the post-2010 prospects for a climate bill, Gore tried to boost morale by stating that “the battle is not over” and that “we [alarmists] have no choice but to win the battle.” Gore said that “reality is [the alarmists] ally” and then, among other things, blamed recent flooding in Nashville and the Russian heat wave and forest fires on global warming.
He concluded by observing that “it is darkest before dawn” and “we have not yet begun to fight.”
In a warm-up discussion before Gore addressed the call, National Wildlife Federation chief Larry Schweiger referred to the skeptics as “enemies” and that he hoped the alarmists would “outlive the bastards.”
So what does all this really mean?
While the call was no doubt a schadenfreude moment for the skeptics who have been savagely attacked by Gore over the years, cap-and-traders (greens and rent-seeking businesses) have not quit the fight for cap-and-trade and are regrouping for fall and lame duck congressional efforts.
Opponents of cap-and-trade will need to gird themselves for a final brutal finish to a highly contentious fight that will not end until the 111th Congress is finally relegated to the ash heap of history.
