An energy insider believes former Vice President turned hardcore environmentalist Al Gore is making public comments against ExxonMobil because he senses the upcoming presidential election may wipe out gains made by green groups over the past eight years.
“Al Gore has come out of hiding now that he may be sensing political victory on climate and energy policy based on the next presidential election,” Marc Morano, the founder of ClimateDepot.org, told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday.
Gore joined a cavalcade of attorneys general on March 29 press conference to excoriate ExxonMobil for allegedly committing fraud by refusing to act on internal research that seemed to show sea levels were rising.
“If these companies did violate the law in committing fraud,” Gore said at the presser, which was spearheaded by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, “then they should be held to account.”
He went on to say that the best way to solve the Exxon problem is if the Congress allows the Obama administration to do its work on punishing fossil fuel companies who, he said, break the law.
“The lawbreakers can be dealt with at the federal level,” Gore said.
Gore realizes that the best way to solidify many of the gains environmentalists have made over the past eight years, Morano continued, is to make sure that there is a president in the White House who is sympathetic to environmentalist issues.
“If the next President is Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, that means Obama’s EPA climate regulations get essentially set in stone and it means the UN Paris agreement becomes entrenched in U.S. policy,” he said.
Gore also recently reiterated his public support for fossil fuel divestment campaigns on college campuses .
During a talk titled “Confronting The Climate Crisis: Critical Roles for the US and China” at Harvard University on April 7, Gore told a slew of students that one of the best ways to slay global warming is to push major institutions like Harvard to fully divest their fossil fuels.
“We need to speed up the shift away from dirty, carbon-rich fuels toward a true renewable economy. And I would dearly love, for economic reasons alone, to see Harvard leading the way,” Gore told the crowd, echoing calls other environmentalists have made concerning fossil fuel divestment.
The former vice president made similar suggestions in 2013, when he spoke, again, at Harvard, his alma mater, telling students that if he were a student again he would be out in the streets campaigning for divestment.
Kansas Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt seemed to echo Morano’s sentiments on April 3, writing in a letter to the Kansas Corporation Commission that Gore’s presser on Exxon was nothing more than a “publicity stunt.
“I want to assure you that the State of Kansas is not participating in the Gore group’s initiative, which one reporter at the New York news conference likened to a ‘publicity stunt,’” Schmidt wrote in a letter to the Kansas Corporation Commission.
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