By Vijay Jayaraj
As an Indian, I don’t know whether to be more annoyed by Al Gore’s condescension or his hypocrisy when he describes my country as “the world’s third-highest emitter” of carbon dioxide in a tweet congratulating it for pausing investments in coal-fired power plants for five years.
As the world’s most populous nation, India’s CO2 emissions are frequently cited by climate zealots in their demonization of the life-sustaining gas. However, such descriptions of “carbon pollution” lack as much in context as they do in scientific validity.
Comparison of Per Capita Emissions and National Average
The per capita CO2 emissions for the United States is 14.24 tons per year (2021). As we shall discuss, the number would be higher for Al Gore, who owns expensive properties and travels in carbon-intensive modes to international events.
In comparison, India’s per capita emissions for 2021 were just 1.9 tons. In other words, an Indian emits about 13 percent of the CO2 that an American does over the course of a year! Yet, people like Al Gore use the smear of “polluter” to browbeat some of the planet’s poorest people into submitting to the climate cult.
Even if one ignores per capita emissions, the United States as a whole releases nearly twice as much CO2 (4,752 tons) as India (2,648 tons), a country where 1.4 billion people live. In plainer terms, despite having only 25 percent of India’s population, the United States generates almost double the CO2 of India.
A comparison of Al Gore’s lavish CO2 footprint with many millions of India’s poor would be even more absurd. Just consider how he compares the typical U.S. citizen. In 2017, the National Center for Public Policy Research listed some of the climate-unfriendly impacts of the former vice president’s hypocritical lifestyle.
The Gore home used 19,241 kilowatt-hours of electricity (kWh) on average per month in 2016, which is far more than the typical American household’s consumption of 901 kWh. So, Al Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.
Gore ate up 66,159 kWh of electricity merely to heat his pool between August 2016–August 2017, during which time he paid $22,000 in electric bills. That much energy would be a year’s supply for six typical American households.
Finally, Gore paid an estimated $60,000 to install solar panels, whose output amounted to less than six percent of his energy consumption. It is safe to assume that much of the remaining 94 percent was supplied by fossil fuels.
Why are so many in the media okay with a man of Al Gore’s means berating some of the most impoverished people?
Perhaps a more pertinent question is: Why do people like Al Gore find it acceptable to use fossil fuels to sustain their own extravagance but want to deny less fortunate fellow humans access to the same energy sources to develop economies that have already suffered under centuries of colonialism?
Abject Living Conditions
Millions of Indians are still in a state commonly referred to as “third world living conditions” whose hallmark is insufficient access to energy. Around 41 percent of India’s households still cook with unclean fuels like wood, dung, charcoal and other solid fuels that expose them to lifelong disease and early death. Just in 2022, many regions of the country faced the worst power blackouts in six years.
Just 7.5 percent of households in India own a car and only 18 percent own a washing machine. Despite much of the subcontinent having a tropical climate with summer temperatures regularly exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit, only 24 percent of households own an air conditioner.
India’s focus on economic growth and poverty reduction will result in an inevitable increase in energy use during the next few decades. Energy-intensive industries and infrastructure projects are required as the country works to raise living standards.
There will be a rise in demand for fossil fuels that provide reliable, affordable and abundant energy at a large scale. The coal-fired power plants that have been put on hold are actually needed to boost millions out of poverty. The so-called green technologies of wind and solar simply cannot do that now – or quite possibly ever.
We do not begrudge Mr. Gore his wealth, but we do reject his vision of a “decarbonized” energy system that would doom countries like mine to continued deprivation.
This commentary was first published at The Daily Caller, June 21, 2023, and can be accessed here.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
Why do people like Al Gore find it acceptable to use fossil fuels to sustain their own extravagance but want to deny less fortunate fellow humans access to the same energy sources to develop economies that have already suffered under centuries of colonialism?
Answer: To promote solar, wind, EV, CO2 “storage,” cladding, and other “renewable”/”green” tech
because
those scams
make them
MONEY.
It’s too bad he’s not into deep sea exploration.
Or into historical reenactment, e.g., the CSS Hunley’s attack on the USS Housatonic.
Once again, that is in bad taste, unnecessary.and decending to Gore’s level.
Dark humour. At least he didn’t suggest, in all seriousness, that if the rich are paying for dangerous excursions that they aren’t being taxed enough – contemptible Ash Sarkar’s reaction to the Titan tragedy.
Bad taste, yes. But necessary. If we go on letting it appear as though the greens have the moral high ground, we are doomed.
Very unworthy especially as the detail of this tragedy indicates it would not have happened if warnings were heeded.
The thing that really struck me was that they’d already done 3 trips in that thing in previous years – an accident waiting to happen.
And how many people have gone public saying they refused to take a trip – James Cameron for one. Sadly the Lawyers will relish the impending lawsuits?
Al Gore does not really understand the science. He showed a graph in his first movie that clearly showed that CO2 has had no effect on our global climate. To get an up to date understanding, Al needs to read “The Rational Climate e-Book” by Patrice Poyet. The download is free. He will discover that there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate and the the AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science.
Greens are misanthropes and elitists. Keeping peons in mud huts is their goal, barring eliminating them entirely.
Not just the peons, but all of us
YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND BE HAPPY, WHILE THE ELITES AND GOVERNMENTS OWN EVERYTHING AND WILL DEFINE FOR YOU WHAT IS HAPPINESS
Typo paragraph 4
Million tons not tons
I do begrudge Al’s ill begotten wealth….but he could redeem himself by investing in Thorium Power……for the masses….for the world…..tonnes of Thorium Power.
Yes, it is commendable for Vijay to say
as a general principle, but considering the sources of that wealth, I do not concur.
His wealth may not have come quite as corruptly as that of The Big Guy ™ but it is largely predicated on being a celebrity who spouts contemptible lies.
Errr… Antigriff, you do seem keen on this thorium technology. A pity it’s still 30 years away even after all these years of development.
You must be thinking about fusion – not thorium.
My thought on TP and similar projects is a “10,100, 1,000” rule™.
Get 10 operating and connected to the grid.
Have 100 under construction with full financing in the bank.
Have 1,000 permitted by location with financing committed.
Why does everyone one on the left find it acceptable to support a blatantly corrupt administration ( in US but I think it is everywhere now) and MSM? Criminality combined with psycho social illness on mass scale.
You mean the UN/WEF financial sector kleptocracy that appears to have most Western politicians firmly by the cojones?
Now tell Indians how large Gore’s homes are and what amount of power they consume and how many AC units he has.
And petrol cars, private jets, helicopters, fine meaty foods
You don’t have to be Indian to be annoyed by Al Gore’s hypocrisy and condescension.
That’s what happens to many who go to Hah-vid.
“We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential…the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising…Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself.”
Al Gore’s Nobel Lecture in Oslo, Norway, http://www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 2007.
Lol.
And NO ONE who knows about data-driven science takes him seriously.
(below, South Park got the phony part right, but, they were mistaken about Gore’s sincerity (he’s a complete fake) and about his real motivation: money)
“Nobody takes me cereal!!” “Manbearpig is REEEEAAAAL! waaaaa!”
Of.course Al Gore is not himself a scientist but rather a politician, a salesman who has been taken n by the propaganda of AGW. A graph from Al Gore’s first movie, it you look at the data in a higher temporal resolution, shows that more CO2 has been has been a cause of global warming. There is no evidence that it is a cause He included today’s level of CO2 on his chart. If CO2 were really the temperature thermostat that he claimed it is, it should be a heck of a lot warmer today than it actually is. Als graph shows that CO2 is not a cause of global warming and hence the AGW hypothesis must be false. If anything Al Gore’s Nobel Prize should be for salesmanship for his scam… .
Wow, those statistics for Gore’s energy use are mind blowing.
“We do not begrudge Mr. Gore his wealth…”
I do- I believe his family wealth come from growing tobacco which has killed millions of people including many people I know. Sure, nobody forced them to smoke- but they got the habit decades ago when it was a national pastime- as shown so well in the TV series “Mad Men”. I suspect far more people have died from tobacco than climate causes (meaning weather of course).
His family wealth did but don’t begrudge him the millions he’s made by flying round the world exploiting the gullible and stupid for hefty fees!
“family wealth come from growing tobacco“
That would have been a small part. His father, Al Senior was a man of connections. Money was from law, politics, and Occidental Petroleum — made the family rich. Al jr. is not a worker or entrepreneur.
I’ve likely picked more tobacco, 3 leaves, than Big Al.
Al Gore: “If I didn’t have hypocrisy, I wouldn’t have no -crisy, at all!”
Between his house in Nashville, and his new $8.9 million mansion in swanky Montecito, Ca., poor old Al only uses ~20X more electricity than the average American household! I don’t know how he survives such impoverishment! I’d like to start a petition for helping him rid himself of the nuclear and fossil-fueled power he so despises! Let’s remove his grid connection now, before he has to suffer through another year of wallowing in all the money he’s scammed from an entirely too credulous public!
For those unsure of the point I’m trying to make, please view the N.Y.C. swimming pool scene from the movie The Magic Christian
This scene?
“FREE MONEY — HERE”
Well I don’t envy him the Montecito pad, I hear the neighbours are pretty appalling.
Tipper is the owner of the Montecito place. Purchased as they split in 2010. Al is based in Carthage, Tenn.
Tipper also owns a farm in Virginia.
Here’s a crazy calculation for y’all.
It involves Australia but anyone could repeat if for India.maybe.
The world famous well renowned CO₂ curve is ramping up, at about 2ppm per year.
Embedded in that is a saw-tooth pattern where CO₂ falls, at a rate of 5ppm per month for the 3 months of May, June and July
Basically = The growing season of the Northern Hemisphere
Hence ‘ Australia’ – where’s any contribution from Down Under
Simple enough, Australia is a cinderised burnt out wasteland desert
Hence ‘crazy’: What if it wasn’t?
What if Australia was turned (back) into a verdant garden of loveliness?
As in fact NASA seem to think it is. sigh
OK. 10% of Earth’s total area can support plant-life so, during May June & July that means that each 2% of Earth area is removing 1ppm of CO₂ from the atmosphere.
As best I can find out, Australia accounts for 1.5% of Earth’s total area.
Thus if it behaved as the northern hemisphere did/does, that would remove 0.75 ppm per month
Most of Australia is below 35° of latitude so if any greenery did show its face, it would grow for 12 months of the year.
Meaning: Australia would remove 9ppm of atmospheric CO₂ every 12 months
Is it not worth at least thinking about and would be soooo easy to do, most of Western Australia is one humongous slab of basalt.
And we know there is/was some good fertility elsewhere – that’s why it has a Great Barrier Reef – that thing is not supported by fresh-air, junk science and virtue all on their own.
We all do know The Problem of course = how to monetise such a venture
Go look at the work Russ George did with iron fertilization of open ocean
Mappings based on data from the OCO-2 CO2 measuring satellite show an increased level of CO2 where global vegetation is most dense. This is an indication that vegetation is a net producer of CO2 and may be the chief source of atmospheric CO2 and not a CO2 sink.
Australia, according to some, is a carbon (dioxide) sink already but there is no money in already meeting fantasy reduction targets.
https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/21/17453/2021/#section5
We performed a four-dimensional variational data assimilation inversion to estimate Australian CO2 fluxes for 2015. The inversion was based around the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) transport–dispersion model and satellite data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) (land nadir and glint data, version 9). Our regional inversion suggests that Australia was a carbon sink of −0.41 ± 0.03 PgC yr−1 compared to the prior estimate of 0.09 ± 0.20 PgC yr−1.
“We do not begrudge Mr. Gore his wealth”
I do. Well – he begrudges mine such as it is.
Vijay, as always, a solid, informative takedown of hypocrisy and misinformation from the climatocrasy. One small point,though. Yes, it’s not hard to find ample examples of suffering and even horror in the era of European colonialism. In fairness, though, the taking over of vulnerable countries by the stronger defines much of human history.
The Persian Prince Babur and descendants invaded and subdued two-thirds (?) India starting in the early 16th century and lasting til after the mid 19th century. Moghul ruler Nadir Shah put down a rebellion in Delhi in the early 17th century and, to your point Viijay,
ordered the slaughter of 25,000 people as a deterent to further unrest! BTW Babur was descended from his mother’s side from the second son of Genghis Khan who conquered from Mongolia through what is today Ukraine.
While Europeans were living in hovels in the forest, the Roman’s rolled over them. They at least brought roads, baths, laws, organization, architecture, mathematics aqueducts ….Greeks and Persians brought all these wonders to the Romans! etc.etc. and recipients improved on them.
This, unfortunately along with the suffering, is how a modern, productive, healthy, wealthy, comfortable world was set on its path. Beware of néoclonialism, though. Its masters want to take all this down, lock us up, and get rid of 7 billion of us.
Stone roads – there was already an extensive network of roads across Europe and UK made from logs where it was boggy (corduroy) and stamped earth where it wasn’t. The inhabitants of Europe already had an extensive system of laws, organisation, mathematics and a flourishing economy without the Romans – in fact Rome stopped producing coins for decades because they, and many other places, were using coins minted in Europe. Europe had a flourishing trade with the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians (who loved irish/british bronze) even with the silk road and the amber road. It’s a complete fallacy that the Romans gave us everything – one that still persists despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Al Gore, like John Kerry and the other shills, are making a good living from peddling deceit whilst brazenly private jetting the globe telling people to do as they say, not do, enjoying beach front properties whilst preaching sea level rises from anthropogenic CO2 driven climate change and all the glorious benefits of fossil fuel derived products, rich foods, gas guzzling luxury cars etc etc
It would be funny, if it were not so perversely agenda driven portrayed
At a current level of only 4/100ths of one percent of the atmosphere it is unrealistic to think that atmospheric CO2 is causing any noticeable change in the Earth’s temperature or climate. This is especially true considering that the temperature curve and atmospheric CO2 curve do not correlate.
4/1000ths ??
4.5/10,000th’s ??
Nearly half the world relies on fertilizers made from fossil fuels.
The other half is dependent on increasing CO2 and reductions may cause serious problems. When it does, will we recognize what is happening or blame climate change?
https://twitter.com/aaronshem/status/1668981529907720195
Aww, don ‘t be so hard on Igore..er, Algore. After all, he invented the Internet, and what a shining example of truthfulness and virtue THAT turned out to be! He needs his planes, and suburb sized residences to house his greatness and intelligence that will save us from ourselves so that we can erect (using zero carbon, of course), the shining statues to his forward-thinking greatness!
Gore, used to laud, his beloved Prof Revelle, who taught him about the climate. But when Revelle retired he expressed that he may have been wrong (probably because his pension was secure, and no longer depended on research funding).
When questioned about it, Gore referred to him as an old fool.
Interesting misinformation, I’ve read in the past that Gore’s electricity usage was six times the typical American household. They never mentioned it was just for his swimming pool.
I wonder what Sunak’s bill will be like?
Affordable I reckon….at least to him, and does he care anyway?
“India’s focus on economic growth and poverty reduction will result in an inevitable increase in energy use during the next few decades. Energy-intensive industries and infrastructure projects are required as the country works to raise living standards.”
I understand the very meritworthy thrust of Mr Jayaraj’ s article; however he does lay himself wide open to spluttering reactions from those who might mention the cost of India’s Space programme and why as a wealthy country it still is happy to receive “foreign”aid from the UK, upwards of £2bn perhaps between 2016/21.
“Fix the roof” first?
Thank you, Vijay. Your post turned out to be one hell of an object lesson for me. I learned far more from that than I could have ever hoped. Well done!!!! And thanks, again.
Per capita numbers applied to countries such as India and its neighbors ignore the elephant in the room: the fact that the people of India and other poor countries breed without even considering whether they can support or even feed their kids, thus ensuring that their countries will always be poor and starving.
Now, if they kept this problem to themselves by building walls on their borders then it would be none of our business. But the rich countries, where social pressure is enough to prevent most of us from outbreeding our means, are being overrun by migrants from poor countries, thus threatening our human right to remain as wealthy as we have been. And we have a right to prevent that from happening.
Send them home.
I have a similar reaction to Americans for much the same reason and I simply can’t understand why people call me bigoted. sarc