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Canadians Think "Windbag" Al Gore Should Butt OUT!
Foreign windbag Gore should keep his nose out of our business
The Vancouver Province
May 01, 2007 | Alan Ferguson
Haven't we heard enough from Al Gore, the U.S. windbag turned Hollywood celebrity who presumes to lecture Canadians on their environmental responsibilities?
The failed U.S. presidential candidate spends a lot of time in Canada, perhaps because he finds it fertile ground for self-enrichment.
The multi-millionaire with a carbon footprint the size of a Sasquatch was in Toronto at the weekend, preening himself among adoring fans.
He was introducing a showing of his Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, that apocalyptic vision of a world in meltdown that has earned him the soubriquet of "the world's most famous environmentalist."
Gore, whose political experience should have taught him to keep his nose out of other nations' business, had the gall to dismiss PM Stephen Harper's new climate policy as "a complete and total fraud." Much like his own claim to have invented the Internet, I suppose.
If any other American busybody dared to meddle in Canadian affairs, he'd be dismissed as an interfering, imperialist bully. But since Gore claimed to have discovered the secrets of a doomed universe, he's become the darling of hand-wringers everywhere.
This is the same guy, remember, who under Bill Clinton conspired to keep the U.S. out of the Kyoto accord. The pact he helped kill in his own country is the one he now claims is all that stands between the planet and oblivion. No wonder few Americans take him any more seriously today than they did then.
So enamoured is Gore of his new-found fame, however, that he feels impelled to inflict his dodgy opinions on anyone else who'll listen.
Many do. The movie is doing well (it's earning him millions), and most who see it take it as gospel, disregarding those scientists who find much of it hogwash.
Gore himself backtracks shamelessly when challenged on his cataclysmic scenario of rising seas inundating towns and cities. He told George Stephanopoulos on ABC that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" in such a scenario.
They "don't know," he said, "they just don't know." And this is the movie being hawked around Canadian high schools!
John Baird, our environment minister, suspects Gore never read Canada's new policy. And, given the time he devotes to his fawning fans, it wouldn't surprise me.
Among Gore's adulators, of course, is Liberal leader Stephane Dion, the former environment minister who presided over unprecedented increases in greenhouse- gas emissions and seems determined to contribute even more hot air in opposition. But at least Dion is playing on home ground and the rhetoric, however overblown, is part of a legitimate process.
Gore, on the other hand, seems to detect no hypocrisy in his intrusive efforts to foist on other countries climate-change policies he himself failed to endorse in his own.
Now that's a really inconvenient truth.
Submitted by Jason H.
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