Als Resolution as it should read

If you read this You may want to check the version I prefer. You will never know how close I came to offering this as an amendment.


A RESOLUTION to honor Al Gore as a Tennessee’s “Hypocrite of the Year” for 2007.

WHEREAS, Tennessean and former Vice President Al Gore has, through scare tactics and misleading and exaggerated scientific evidence, become a leader for the environmental and global warming movement; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth, the propaganda film based on Mr. Gore’s book of the same title, was recently awarded on Oscar based on the faulty notion that it was a documentary

WHEREAS, Marlo Lewis, PhD, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute finds that nearly every significant statement Mr. Gore makes in An Inconvenient Truth regarding climate science and climate policy is either one sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or wrong; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth never acknowledges the indispensable role of fossil fuels in alleviating hunger and poverty, extending human life spans, and democratizing consumer goods, literacy, leisure, and personal mobility; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth never acknowledges the environmental, health, and economic benefits of climatic warmth and the ongoing rise in the air's CO 2 content; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth neglects to mention that aggregate mortality and mortality rates due to extreme weather events declined dramatically during the 20th century; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth neglects to mention the circumstances that make it reasonable rather than blameworthy for America to be the biggest CO 2 emitter: the world's largest economy, abundant fossil energy resources, markets integrated across continental distances, the world's most mobile population; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth impugns the motives of so-called global warming skeptics but never acknowledges the special-interest motivations of those whose research grants, direct mail income, industrial policy privileges, regulatory power, prosecutorial plunder, or political careers depend on keeping the public in a state of fear about global warming; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth never addresses the obvious criticism that the Kyoto Protocol is all economic pain for no environmental gain and that regulations stringent enough to measurably cool the planet would be a “cure” worse than the alleged disease; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth implies that, throughout the past 650,000 years, changes in CO 2 levels preceded and largely caused changes in global temperature, whereas the causality mostly runs the other way: CO 2 changes followed global temperature changes by hundreds to thousands of years; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth ignores the societal factors that typically overwhelm climatic factors in determining people's risk of damage or death from hurricanes, floods, drought, tornadoes, wildfires, and disease; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth implies that a study, which found that none of 928 science articles (actually abstracts) denied a CO 2 -global warming link, shows that Mr. Gore's apocalyptic view of global warming is the “consensus” view among scientists; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth reports that 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists accused Bush of distorting science, without mentioning that the scientists acted as members of a 527 political group set up to promote the Kerry for President Campaign; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth hypes the importance and exaggerates the certainty of the alleged link between global warming and the frequency and severity of tropical storms; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth claims polar bears “have been drowning in significant numbers,” based on a report that found four drowned polar bears in one month of one year, following an abrupt storm; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth portrays the collapse in 2002 of the Larson-B ice shelf—a formation the “size of Rhode Island”—as harbinger of doom. For perspective, the Larson-B was 1/246th the size of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth presents a graph suggesting that China's new fuel economy standards are almost 30% more stringent than the current U.S. standards. In fact, the Chinese standards are only about 5% more stringent; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth blames global warming for the record-breaking 37-inch downpour in Mumbai, India, in July 2005, even there has been no trend in Mumbai rainfall for the month of July in 45 years; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth blames global warming for recent floods in China's Sichuan and Shandong provinces, even though more damaging floods struck those areas in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth blames global warming for the disappearance of Lake Chad, a disaster more likely stemming from a combination of regional climate variability and societal factors such as population increase and overgrazing; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth warns that a doubling of pre-industrial CO 2 levels to 560 parts per million (ppm) will so acidify seawater that all optimal areas for coral reef construction will disappear by 2050. This is implausible because coral calcification rates have increased as ocean temperatures and CO 2 levels have risen, and today's main reef builders evolved and thrived during the Mesozoic Period, when atmospheric CO 2 levels hovered above 1,000 ppm for 150 million years and exceeded 2,000 ppm for several million years; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth warns of “significant and alarming structural changes” in the submarine base of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but does not tell us what those changes are or why they are “significant and alarming.” The West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been retreating since the early Holocene. At the rate of retreat observed in the 1990s, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet should disappear in about 7,000 years; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth warns that half the Greenland Ice Sheet could “slide” into the sea, even though the ice sheet sits in a bowl-like depression surrounded by mountains that restrict glacial outflow to the sea; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth claims glaciologist Lonnie Thompson's reconstruction of climate history proves the Medieval Warm Period was “tiny” compared to the warming observed in recent decades. It doesn't. Four of Thompson's six ice cores indicate the Medieval Warm Period was as warm as or warmer than any recent decade; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth claims the rate of global warming is accelerating, when it has been remarkably constant for the past 30 years—roughly 0.17°C/decade; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth attributes Europe's killer heat wave of 2003 to global warming; it was actually due to an atmospheric circulation anomaly; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth claims that 2004 set an all-time record for the number of tornadoes in the United States. Tornado frequency has not increased; rather, the detection of smaller tornadoes has increased. If we consider the tornadoes that have been detectable for many decades (F-3 or greater), there is actually a downward trend since 1950; and

WHEREAS, An Inconvenient Truth blames global warming for a “mass extinction crisis” that is not, in fact, occurring; and

WHEREAS, despite calling the campaign to combat global warming a "moral imperative," Mr. Gore hypocritically consumes outrageous amounts of electricity and natural gas, frequently flies in private planes, and owns a zinc mine notorious for polluting the air, ground and water near his Carthage home.

WHEREAS, according to the Nashville Electric Service, Mr. Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh in 2006—more than 20 times the national average—in his Belle Meade home; and

WHEREAS, last August alone, Mr. Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year; and

WHEREAS, Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Mr. Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore’s heated pool house ran up more than $500 in natural-gas bills every month; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore claims to purchase carbon offset to reduce his “carbon footprint,” but a CNSNews.com reports that Mr. Gore doesn't purchase carbon offsets with his own resources, and that they are meaningless in terms of global warming; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore’s offset purchases are actually made for him by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that Mr. Gore co-founded, and which provides carbon offsets as a fringe benefit to all 23 of its employees, ensuring that they require no real sacrifice on the part of Mr. Gore or his family; and

WHEREAS, the impact of these offsets is also highly limited. The Carbon Neutral Co.--one of the two vendors that sell offsets to Mr. Gore's company, says that offset purchases "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions . . . in the short term"; and
WHEREAS, Mr. Gore’s indifference to his personal energy hypocrisy was highlighted on Wednesday, March 21, 2007, when he refused to sign a pledge to consume no more energy than the average American household; and
WHEREAS, Former U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr. bought about 88 acres along the Caney Fork River from Occidental Minerals, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, for $160,000. Included in the deal was the subsurface area. The rights to the minerals below ground were then leased back to Occidental; and

WHEREAS, on the same day, Mr. Gore Sr. sold the land and subsurface area to his 25-year-old son, Al, and daughter-in-law, Tipper, for $140,000. The mineral lease to Occidental was put in their names; and

WHEREAS, Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp., was a controversial influence peddler who trafficked in politicians of all stripes and parties, Mr. Hammer pleaded guilty in 1975 to providing hush money in the Watergate scandal; and
WHEREAS, Mr. Hammer cut a wide swath across Washington from the 1930s until his death in 1990. His controversial career was marked by decades of profitable business dealings with the Soviet Union, which were closely watched by the FBI; and
WHEREAS, Mr. Hammer leapt into the big time by acquiring Libyan oil rights for Occidental Petroleum through what biographer Edward Jay Epstein has characterized as a combination of shrewd business dealings and bribery; and
WHEREAS, Hammer cultivated close relationships with many politicians, but, according to the Wall Street Journal, he was closest to Albert Gore, Sr., a U.S. senator from 1953 until 1971; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore received $20,000 a year for 27 years and $10,000 a year for three years, making a total of $570,000 in lease payments; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore’s mine is a complex of several interconnected sites known as the Gordonsville Mine and Mill, the Cumberland Mine and the Elmwood Mine; and

WHEREAS, in 1996, Mr. Gore’s mine twice failed biomonitoring tests designed to protect water quality in the Caney Fork for fish and wildlife; and

WHEREAS, a 1998 study by the Environmental Working Group criticized the zinc-mining operation for purchasing a toxic waste that included sulfuric acid and reselling it as fertilizer; and

WHEREAS, the Environmental Protection Agency began reporting toxic releases from Mr. Gore’s metal mining operations for the first time in 1998.

WHEREAS, in the five-year period from 1998 to 2003, before the mines were shuttered, 16.6 million pounds of toxic substances were released into the air, water and land at the Gordonsville site, according to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory data, and 2.6 million pounds were released at the Cumberland site; and

WHEREAS, in its last year of full operation in 2002, the Gordonsville-Cumberland mines ranked 22nd among all metal mining operations in the U.S., with about 4.1 million pounds of toxic releases; and

WHEREAS, in recent years, releases of toxic substances from Mr. Gore’s zinc mine into waterways were often above the allowable levels set under the federal Clean Water Act.; and

WHEREAS, Sampling at one site where Mr. Gore’s mine discharges into a tributary of the Caney Fork River found 23 violations of the limit on zinc levels out of 30 samples taken between October 1995 and August 2000; and

WHEREAS, Mr. Gore admitted that “pollution releases from the mine in 2002 placed it among the ‘dirtiest/worst facilities’ in the U.S”; and

WHEREAS, given the facts concerning Mr. Gore’s failure to lead the environmental movement with integrity and live his own life in a manner reflective of his own recommendations; now, therefore

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE ONE HUNDRED FIFTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF TENNESSEE, that we hereby honor and congratulate native son Al Gore as a Tennessee’s “Hypocrite of the Year” for 2007.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that an appropriate copy of this resolution be prepared for presentation with this final clause omitted from such copy.