By PHELIM McALEER
Investor’s Business Daily Editorials
October 14, 2009
Last week at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Wisconsin, former Vice President Al Gore took questions from journalists about global warming for the first time in years. I attended to ask him about factual errors in his movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
You wouldn’t know it from the sparse media coverage, but the British High Court found so many errors in Gore’s movie in 2007 that British schools no longer can show the film without the equivalent of a health warning.
I asked Gore if he intends to correct the record. He dodged the question, and the so-called reporters defended his right to be evasive by shutting off my mic.
The encounter was disappointing but not surprising. I served years of hard time as a liberal journalist in Europe and learned that covering the environmental beat meant toeing the line of extremism — no inconvenient questions allowed.
But it is now time for journalists, and the consumers and businesses that will pay the ultimate price, to start questioning the conventional wisdom about global warming and exposing its true cost. If alarmists like Al Gore get their way, millions of American families will watch as their dreams of a prosperous and pleasant future disappear.
The evidence of environmentalism run amok abounds in Europe. Spain believed the spin that environmental regulation can create “green jobs” and boost the economy. Now the country has 18% unemployment. Britain could suffer blackouts because of policies that require the country to replace coal with fuels like solar and wind power that aren’t readily available or reliable.
Continues at IBD Editorials. McAleer co-produced “Not Evil Just Wrong,” a documentary film that premieres Sunday.
