The Branch Algorians

Al Gore is like Jim Jones, and we're drinking his Kool-Aid
By PHIL VALENTINE

Professor Roger Gottlieb, a leading proponent of religious environmentalism, spoke at Vanderbilt University this past week. Gottlieb, the author of A Greener Faith, maintains that we are to be caretakers of our planet. I certainly agree.

I'm a big fan of clean air and clean water. But this postmodernist environmental movement Gottlieb finds himself in the middle of bears little resemblance to its forerunner, the ecology movement of the 1960s. Back then, Captain Kangaroo simply told us to never throw trash out the window. Soot-belching factories and straight-pipe waste into rivers were put under the microscope. The government ultimately responded with the EPA, formed in 1970 and tasked with cleaning up the land, air and water that had been abused for so long.

Now, schoolchildren scold their parents because they haven't traded in their incandescent lightbulbs for the depressing yellow light of compact fluorescent bulbs. Environmentalism, which used to simply include anyone concerned about pollution, somehow morphed into radical environmentalism. Gottlieb and others have taken up the banner of global warming under the guise of religious responsibility. Radical environmentalism has become a religion in and of itself. Its heaven is a utopia in which we all give up our modern conveniences and technological advancement for some austere, Amish-type lifestyle.

Al Gore, the Jim Jones of this new religious cult, preaches doom and gloom from his pettifogger pulpit, all the while living the lifestyle of an energy hog. He actually uses twice the amount of electricity in one month at his Nashville home than the average household uses in an entire year. He has two homes in Tennessee, one in Virginia, at least. He flies all over the world on his Magical Hysteria Tour, sucking down resources and belching out tons of carbon, all to tell us we need to conserve. We're trying to make ends meet just to afford gas in our cars while Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. And no one seems to care.

The Branch Algorians read from the Gospel of Al and never question a word. The movement's devil is carbon dioxide, an essential component of photosynthesis and the substance we all exhale with every breath. Understand this: CO2 is not a pollutant. However, Gore and the radical environmentalists have been quite successful in convincing people that smog and CO2 are the same. They are not. CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with the smog or haze we see over our cities. There is absolutely no evidence that CO2 has anything to do with any kind of warming.

The Gore Kool-Aid drinkers will point to "all these scientists" but can't give you one link between CO2 and any kind of climate change. As the founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, recently put it, global warming is the greatest scam in history.

When Professor Gottlieb is not writing a guilt-trip treatise on the environment, he's writing about Marxism and how the Soviets just didn't quite get it right.

You see, global warming is the perfect template for Marxism because it's the great equalizer. The wealthier a nation, the more CO2 it produces. To atone for its sins, it must pay carbon offsets. In other words, the producing nations pay the non-producing or under-producing nations in cash for the sin of emitting a harmless gas. It's beautiful.

The global warming movement is a way to not just confiscate money and wealth from the producers, but because of their guilt, they gladly hand it over. If Karl Marx were still alive, he'd be beaming with pride.