Former Vice President Al Gore’s suggestion that the climate change movement is akin to the campaign against slavery is “truly rich” considering his family history with segregation, a black activist group said Friday.
Horace Cooper, a former assistant law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, criticized Gore for appropriating the moral fight to end slavery to lend credibility to the push against global warming.
“When Al Gore, Jr. associates these moral movements of history with one grounded in questionable data, he gives climate change activists unearned moral credibility they haven’t earned and don’t deserve,” Cooper wrote in a press statement Friday.
He was referring to comments Gore made Thursday comparing the environmental movement to the civil rights push in the 1960s. Cooper is the co-chairman of Project 21, an initiative within the Conservative Black Leadership.
Reducing the Earth’s temperature and beating back the fossil fuel industry is on par with other “great moral causes” that have improved humanity, Gore told an audience at the EcoCity World Summit in Australia. Gore used slavery and South African apartheid to illustrate his point.
He is in Australia promoting “An Inconvenient Sequel,” the follow up to Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth.” The event was closed to the press, according to Mac Morano, a climate change skeptic and frequent critic of Gore’s climate crusade who attended the speech. Morano said he recorded Gore’s remarks.
Cooper also suggested that Gore’s father’s general support for segregation makes the former vice president’s comments inappropriate. Al Gore Sr. voted against several important civil rights initiatives during the 1960s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He did support the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however.
Gore’s global warming investment group, Generation Investment Management, has not responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comments about the speech or his comparison.
Gore has made similar comments in the past. Gore told reporters in 2013 that so-called climate change “deniers” are like alcoholic fathers who act belligerently when someone mentions the issue.
“It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace,” he said at the time.
Other activists within Cooper’s group weighed in on Gore’s remarks as well. Project 21 Co-Chairman Stacy Washington, for instance, suggested Friday that Gore’s comments were baffling.
“Fighting people being owned as property and debased in an entrenched system enshrined in law is akin to worshiping the idea that humans can materially impact the climate?” Washington said in Project 21’s response to the Gore’s speech. “He cannot be serious!”
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