It wasn’t that long ago that environmentalist Bill McKibben was criticizing former Vice President Al Gore for selling Current TV to fossil fuel-backed Al Jazeera. But in an ironic twist of fate, McKibben’s group will be debuting its global warming documentary on the Qatar-funded network.
McKibben and 350.org are premiering their documentary “Do the Math” on Al Jazeera. The documentary will go “after the fossil fuel industry directly, energizing a movement like the ones that overturned the great immoral institutions of the past century, such as Apartheid in South Africa,” according to PF Pictures.
The network is partly financed by the government of Qatar. The OPEC member produces 734,000 barrels of crude oil per day as well as 157 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
The trailer for “Do the Math” opens with McKibben saying, “If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage” — something critics argue he is precisely doing by airing his documentary on a fossil-fuel funded network.
“We did the math a long time ago on Bill McKibben and determined he argues from positions of emotionalism and rationalization. His actions are a prime example of ‘Noble Cause Corruption’ — anything for the cause,” global warming skeptic blogger Anthony Watts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“We already knew that Al Gore is the most lavishly funded fossil fuel player in the global warming debate today,” said Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, a global warming skeptic news site. “Now it turns out that Bill McKibben’s principles are as dodgy as his understanding of climate science. Say it ain’t so Bill.”
McKibben criticized Al Gore when he sold the left-leaning Current TV to Al Jazeera, and still doesn’t like to talk about how Gore sabotaged his own credibility among environmentalists by doing so.
Bloomberg Businessweek reported: “McKibben doesn’t like to talk about Al Gore, but he shakes his head sadly when I bring up the recent sale of Gore’s Current TV to Al Jazeera — a media company funded in part by the emir of Qatar’s fossil-fuel fortune — and how that seems to have diluted Gore’s credibility. McKibben raises his eyebrows, smirks, and says, ‘You think?’ McKibben sees himself as part of a tradition of environmental writer-activists, from John Muir to Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson.”
McKibben wasn’t the only one who criticized Gore for selling his TV network to fossil fuel interests.
“You had an opportunity to make a statement probably about your principles and some people would feel, and for me as well, I thought it was an odd move,” The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart said to Gore in an interview. “Not because of some of the other things, but because it is backed by fossil fuel money.”
PF Pictures adds that in “Do the Math” McKibben is “[p]utting his body on the line to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline and leading universities and institutions to divest in the corporations destroying our livelihoods, 350.org is uniting the growing global majority that view the climate crisis as the most important moral issue of the day.”
“Do the Math” comes out as a new project out of Australia called “50:1” questions the mathematics behind claims made by environmentalists about moving quickly to combat global warming.
According to “50:1,” it will be 50 times more expensive to stop global warming than it would be to simply adapt to rising global temperatures and a changing climate.
“Speaking of ‘doing the math’, the 50:1 project out of Australia offers some sound mathematical insight into how lopsided the climate economic balance sheet is for climate change mitigation,” Watts told TheDCNF. “Unlike Mr. McKibben’s 350.org, you won’t find any emotional rationalizations in it or pleas for money, simply some hard numbers that suggest doing nothing is the most logical option.”
McKibben’s 350.org did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
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