Al Gore, raising the heat on Obama, calls Keystone an “atrocity”

From one Nobel Peace Prize winner to another, this whole Keystone XL thing is an “atrocity.”

Al Gore has been calling on Barack Obama to step up the fight against climate change and Keystone, most recently during an interview with The Guardian:

The former vice-president said in an interview on Friday that he hoped Obama would follow the example of British Columbia, which last week rejected a similar pipeline project, and shut down the Keystone XL.

“I certainly hope that he will veto that now that the Canadians have publicly concluded that it is not safe to take a pipeline across British Columbia to ports on the Pacific,” he told the Guardian. “I really can’t imagine that our country would say: ‘Oh well. Take it right over parts of the Ogallala aquifer’, our largest and most important source of ground water in the US. It’s really a losing proposition.” …

“This whole project [Keystone XL] is an atrocity but it is even more important for him to regulate carbon dioxide emissions,” Gore said. He urged Obama to use his powers as president to cut carbon dioxide emissions from new and existing power plants — the biggest [single] source of global warming pollution.

“He doesn’t need Congress to do anything,” Gore said. “If it hurts the feelings of people in the carbon polluting industries that’s too bad.”

A few days previous, the former veep made another call for Obama to take action. “I hope that he’ll get moving on to follow up on the wonderful pledges he made in his inaugural speech earlier this year and then soon after in his State of the Union,” Gore said during a Google+ video chat last week, Politico reported. “Great words. We need great actions now.”

Gore joins a growing number of Democrats and activists who have been voicing their frustrations with Obama over the president’s failure to match his strong climate rhetoric with strong climate action. Last week, a group of Democratic senators sent the president a letter urging him to get going. From The Hill:

This is not the only source of this info, but the first one that I clicked on excerpt:

For example, in the Democratic Party, Vice President Al Gore has a long-time relationship with Occidental Petroleum that has been enormously beneficial to the company. Occidental's late chairman, the controversial Armand Hammer, liked to say that he had Gore's father, Senator Albert Gore, Senior, quote, "in my back pocket", unquote.

When the elder Gore left the Senate in 1970, Hammer hired him for $500,000 a year. Personally and professionally the vice president has profited from Occidental largess. To this day he still draws $20,000 a year from a land deal in Tennessee brokered between his father and Hammer. The total amount is more than $300,000. The personal relationship between young Gore and Hammer was very close throughout the 1980's, including trips on Hammer's private jet and constant campaign contributions.

For most of the 20th century, oil companies have tried unsuccessfully to obtain control of two oil fields owned and operated by the federal government: the Teapot Dome field in Casper, Wyoming, and the Elk Hills field in Bakersfield, California. Despite his public reputation as a staunch environmentalist, Gore recommended that the president approve giving oil companies access to this publicly owned land. It is land that the U.S. Navy has held as emergency reserves since 1912. In October, 1997, the Energy Department announced that the government would sell 47,000 acres of the Elk Hills reserve to Occidental.

It was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history, one that tripled Occidental's U.S. oil reserves overnight. Although the Energy Department was required to assess the likely environmental consequences of the proposed sale, it didn't. Instead it hired a private company, ICF Kaiser International, Incorporated, to complete the assessment. The general chairman of Gore's presidential campaign, Tony Coelho, sat on the board of directors.

The very same day the Elk Hills sale was announced, Gore delivered a speech to the White House Conference on Climate Change on the "terrifying prospect" of global warming, a problem he blamed on the unchecked use of fossil fuels such as oil. He said, quoting, "If we ignore the scientific warnings and continue stubbornly on our current course, we better begin to prepare what we would like to . . . http://www.ratical.org/ratville/Columbia/Gore+Oxy.html

http://www.publicintegrity.org/reports/bop2000/pctranscript.html

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