As Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, premiers at the Cannes film festival, the Exxon-funded climate sceptics are crawling out to attack him. One of those is Myron Ebell, the arch-fossil fuel advocate from the Exxon-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organisation that recently launched the most bizarre adverts promoting the benefits of CO2.
“Mr. Gore has always promoted causes that would require taking decisions away from the people and putting them in the hands of an expert elite,” argues Ebell. “Mr. Gore’s ideal would be to give each person a book of energy rationing coupons and every year put fewer coupons in the book. It is a program of mandatory energy starvation.”
Others are weighing in too: Steven Hayward of the also Exxon-funded American Enterprise Institute calls the movie part of a “multi-million dollar PR campaign” to scare people over climate change. “Green warriors,” like Gore “advocate putting the U.S. and the world on an energy starvation diet, to the exclusion of a wider and more moderate range of precautions that might be taken against global warming,” says Hayward.
Energy starvation diet? Hmmm tell that to the 200 million odd African who are predicted to die because of climate change by the end of the Century.