Former Vice President Al Gore told guests at a swanky dinner Wednesday night that there needs to be a tax on carbon dioxide emissions and political consequences for those who deny that fossil fuels are causing catastrophic global warming.
The one-time presidential candidate said the world should divest from fossil fuels while he and other global political elites chowed down on a gourmet vegetarian dinner at an event held in his honor by the World Resources Institute. Gore’s global warming musings between bites of double chocolate vegan torte were tweeted out by WRI Europe Director Kitty van der Heijden:
Al Gore “We need a price on carbon in the market & we need a price on denial in politics” @WorldResources boarddinner pic.twitter.com/6YQt8UTWIQ
— Kitty v/d Heijden (@KittyvdHeijden) October 9, 2014
“We’re using earth as an open sewer for carbon. All should divest from carbon assets,” Al Gore. pic.twitter.com/AbtiOUUkKx
— Kitty v/d Heijden (@KittyvdHeijden) October 9, 2014
Gore’s dinner was held at “the glass-walled House of Sweden overlooking the Georgetown waterfront,” according to Politico’s Morning Energy. The event was also attended by a number of politicos including “former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, former Clinton administration Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, outgoing Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke, former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer and U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern.”
It looks like Gore used the event to, once again, pump up his own green energy investments by telling everyone to divest from fossil fuels — which make up more than 80 percent of the world’s energy consumption. Gore has heavily invested in subsidized green energy technology, which struggles when competing with fossil fuels. He’s said that divesting from fossil fuels is necessary for avoiding catastrophic global warming.
Gore’s push for divestment has been coupled with claims that the world has a “carbon bubble” that mirrors the real estate bubble that preceded the Great Recession. Gore and others have warned that the “bubble” will collapse when governments lock up trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels in order to stave off global warming.
“It is still growing because most market participants are mistakenly treating carbon risk as an uncertainty, and are thus failing to incorporate it in investment analyses,” Gore and co-investor David Blood wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year. “By overlooking a known material-risk factor, investors are exposing their portfolios to an externality that should be integrated into the capital allocation process.”
So far, developing countries like China and India have no intention of abandoning fossil fuels because they are necessary to providing their growing economies with cheap, reliable energy.
Attempts by countries to eschew fossil fuels have led to skyrocketing energy prices. Germany, for example, has been rapidly adding wind and solar power to its grid to create a green energy economy. The result has been huge spikes in power prices, which have led the German media to declare electricity a “luxury good.”
“Over the last decade, well-intentioned policymakers in Germany and other European countries have created renewable energy policies that have slowly revealed themselves to be unsustainable, resulting in profound, unintended consequences for all industry stakeholders,” reads a report by the Switzerland-based FAA Financial Advisory AG.
People hurt the most by these policies were middle-class and poor families, as power costs are a larger portion of their budgets compared to rich families. Gore has a net worth of about $200 million.
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