Transcription
All right, welcome back to Rising Aaron. What is on your mind today?
>> Yes, let's get into it. 20 years ago, former Vice President Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth. 20 years ago, it was 2006. I was 17 years old, getting ready to graduate from the Aquinus Institute of Rochester, blasting Fallout Boy in my pickup truck.
A lot can change in 20 years. The film won an Oscar. It helped earn Gore a Nobel Peace Prize or peace prize prize. Yep. Schools showed it to children. News organizations treated it as required viewing. And this week, 20 years later, Al Gore declared victory.
>> When you see the film, do you feel like it still holds up?
>> Unfortunately, yes. And the scientists were dead right.
>> Right. Those are his words. But before we hand out another trophy, let's remember what actually made this movie famous. Because Al Gore didn't become a global celebrity for observing that temperatures might gradually raise over time. He became famous for the warnings, the predictions, the timeline, the visuals of a very possible reality. Those weren't side notes. Those were the headlines. Those were the claims that transformed An Inconvenient Truth from a documentary into a movement.
History remembers Gore standing on that stage declaring that within a decade there would be no more snow on Mount Kilimanjaro. Two decades later, there's still snow on Kilamanjaro. In fact, there is now double the ice coverage. Gore famously declared Glacier National Park would become, quote, "the park formerly known as Glacier." Federal agencies put up signs warning visitors the glaciers would be gone by 2020. You know what happened in 2020? They took the signs down because the glaciers were still there. An Inconvenient Truth predicted an ice-free Arctic within years. At Copenhagen in 2009, Gore cited a 75% chance of an ice-free Arctic within 5 to 7 years. The Arctic still has summer ice. And the researcher Gore cited said afterward he didn't even know where the 75% figure came from. The record remembers dramatic graphics of a 20 foot sea level rising, flooding Manhattan, Miami, San Francisco, not in centuries, in the near future. Those cities are still standing. Gore described in an inconvenient truth how much cities, including New York City and the grounds of the World Trade Centers, would be underwater. He talked about how scientists could map the water overtaking cities and coastlines with certainty, even saying, quote, "A lot of people live there," to add fear to the visuals of these areas overrun with water.
And that's what bothers me about this anniversary celebration. You don't grade predictions based on intentions. You grade them based on outcomes. You compare what was said to what actually happened. When you do that, the claim that Gore was dead right on all important elements becomes very difficult to defend because the important elements weren't buried in an appendix. They were the claims that made the movie famous.
In fact, even a British high court reviewing the film just one year after its release, not 20 years later, one year, concluded that schools needed to provide students with additional guidance of nine distinct scientific inaccuracies and what the co court called partisan political views. A court didn't say the film couldn't be show. A court didn't say climate change wasn't real. It said students needed more information because of the partisan framing by Gore. Yet somehow that never became the story because the goal wasn't skepticism. The goal was persuasion. And that's the same unagnowledged story 20 years later.
The left never seems to be held to the standards of accountability for reality because in modern politics there appears to be no penalty for being wrong in your prediction if your prediction was scary enough. For 20 years, the left, the media, Hollywood, academia, and the environmental movement told Americans to trust them because they followed the science, because they dealt in facts. Now, 20 years later, one of the biggest icons of the movement is still insisting that movie got it right. Not mostly right, not directionally right, dead right. And maybe that's the most inconvenient truth of all.
The remarkable part isn't that he got some things wrong. Everybody gets things wrong. The remarkable part is that after 20 years of mist timelines, exaggerated certainty, and moving goalpost, we're still expected to pretend he was dead, right? The snow's still on Kilimanjaro. The glaciers are still in Glacier National Park. New York City still stands. There's a parade going on there today. The only thing that disappeared was the reckoning.
The big point here, I think, is that I know ABC, they're saying, "Oh, most of this was right." The that's not what made the movie famous was that Al Gore was tepid and saying, "Oh, it's gradual." It was these images of Kilimanjaro with no snow, Glacier Park empty, all these big the New York City and Ground Zero being flooded, and that didn't come to fruition. But now, 20 years later, we're supposed to celebrate and pretend, "Wow, what a monumental movie of greatness and the environment!" And it was a huge part of the environmental movement and the work we saw by the left and Democrats in this country for ever since the last 20 years. I just find that to be the hardest part of an inconvenient truth.
I'm for protecting the environment, even if it's overexaggerated so that we can make sure that our kids kids kids have a good life here. And so if we overexaggerated to protect them even more and we went too far, let's bring it back in. But I certainly don't want to do what the opposite, what this administration is doing, is paying wind farms that are being built offshore to be removed and actually paying the companies to take them down and not protect the country from fossil fuel usage at an overt amount. And so this is like what's happening right now with the president. He's getting rid of wind farms.
>> Wind farms are are are proven to show that they do not make a mass.
>> So then we're going to rely on fossil fuels, which then deteriorates. And so, but the point is, the president is not proposing ideas to protect the environment, and the administration is not proposing ideas to protect the environment. If they are, I'd surely like to hear them.
But I don't mind that he got most things right. Like you said, I don't care that he said, "I got all right." Okay. He can believe what he wants to believe. But the earth is actually getting hotter. No, but you named one. You named Mount W. Let me finish this. May I finish?
>> He said dead right. That's the problem, though. You got to admit that dead right is dead wrong.
>> May he could say whatever he wants. But the fact that change came after his documentary is the point that I care about most. And so the earth did get warmer. CO2 gases did get trapped in the environment. We did talk about melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, and how that's still happening, even though you have one example description of Greenland at the time. If he went too far. My point is that we the things that he named are happening, just not at the rapid pace that that he suggested. And so no, it means that we still need to protect the environment. So if we instituted an overall correction, we can reel it in, but we don't have to then go back to what we used to rely on to speed up the process of deteriorating our environment.
>> Everybody's arguing that we need to go back. But also, this overcorrection we took didn't hold those who are the most nefarious actors about greenhouse gas emissions through the left ever. We're not going. The left did not go after India and hold them to account for greenhouse gas emissions that did not go after China, the two largest nations that pursue and have greenhouse gas emissions. No, we demanded it here. And it cost jobs. And the president. There's no reason we can't protect the environment and have natural gas and do fracking and believe in energy independence and dominance. You can do both at the same time. It's 2026 in the United States. We've got the technology to send people to the dark side of the moon. I feel we can do both at the same time. But Al Gore continues to be lauded and that movie for how correct it was. And we all need to acknowledge dead right was dead wrong. Him saying, "Well, you're saying, 'Okay, well, maybe he overexaggerated.'"
>> He's getting some stuff right on our test. You got a zero. Why do you want him to say he's dead wrong? Because if he got, let's say he got 80% on a test, did he not still do well to push the conversation forward?
>> Because that's not what he did, though. He gave the definitive. He said dead right. He gave the definitive. That is why that's a zero. Dead right is dead wrong. He said the definitive. And that's the issue. And people continue to say that. That was the headline of that ABC piece. That was the sign.
>> And Al Gore said about his own documentary that he got it dead right.
>> Yes. And you know what? That's what they continue to put out there. That the inconvenient truth movie was dead right. That's the problem. We continue to pursue in these headlines and clicks an opportunity to try and push push the cultural environmental lobby of the left for the sake of their own, not for the betterment of man. And so right now, what they are doing is pursuing an ideology and not pursuing the facts because putting that headline out is dead wrong. Even if it's a clip and a portion of what he said.
>> That's what he said.
>> But, but to put that out. Now, what he said, though, to to not provide the context on it in the headline, you need to provide both sides. This was a celebration of a movie where it was talking about New York City flooding. We've been watching beautiful shots of the Knicks parade. And I have not seen a person in a rain boot or a canoe on the streets of New York City and Manhattan, the way he talked about it. Greenland, if you go back and watch it, he showed that country dramatically decreasing in size by now. That didn't happen. And if you're trying to argue that the overcorrections might have prevented this, it didn't because India and China still remained the largest and most nefarious people when it came to climate change in this country, in this world, globally. It was not Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth that somehow stopped all of this. The nefarious actors were still acting nefariously. And so you continue to say and allow him to say that this movie got it right isn't a fact. And we need to call that out because the more we perpetrate the inconvenient truth that Al Gore got it wrong and that he used hyperbole to try and scare people instead of doing what he should have done, which, hey, you want to talk about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. You need to talk about it globally, and you need to talk about going after the other countries, which Democrats didn't want to do. So I just, you got to call it out for what it is, and that's what I'm saying here.
Maybe I'm disconnected from the attachment to Al Gore here or his movie, The Inconvenient Truth. And I'm more connected to the idea that we did something about trying to protect the country, the environment, and climate change. And I'm more inclined to say that when we put Lee Zelden in position and he's slowly deteriorating some protections that we had for our environment, then that's problematic. And that not might not be the response. We have to be able to strike a balance between
>> overcorrecting and not doing anything, right?
And so if if Al Gore wants to keep saying he's right for egotistical reasons, I don't really care. I care about the actions being taken place. He's not even a leader in the party. He didn't win an election. He didn't, uh, he's not in Congress. He's not making any laws. So if he wants to go on as an individual in this country and say my documentary that won all these awards is still great, he can do that. But if we are striking a balance trying to figure out, "Yeah." I care about the climate change portion, the actual story. And that's what this is about, though.
And while you're talking about, you're talking about overcorrection and that we might have overcorrected, have you ever thought that what Lee Zelden might be rolling back are the overcorrections that went too far, are the ones, you know, the Waters of the United States rule that exists? It tries to regulate things the size of puddles on farmers property by the federal government. That is ridiculous oversight in an attempt to push forward this climate change narrative when puddles and small ponds on farmers property are now being overrun by the federal government. That is where climate change became overreach, and you continue to see it in the United States, and it's detrimental to the people in this country. That there's no reason the federal government should be watching puddles and small ponds on farmers property. So, you should also consider that if Lee Zelden's rolling things back, it might be because it was too far reached in the first place. And for the media to continue to give even Al Gore the oxygen to make such a false statement about what that movie was, that's a problem as well.
Also, real quick aside, my favorite Al Gore fact, all of the vice presidents of the United States are the president of the Senate. They all get a bust in the capital. Al Gore doesn't have his yet. You want to know why?
>> Why?
Because of this movie. No, obviously because he put on too much weight after the vice presidency and wanted to lose it before he got his little bus made, allegedly. One of my favorite facts.
>> Okay. Well,
>> So, I mean, but you want to talk about ego seems to be the man of Al Gore.
>> And I said he's an individual. He can go on ABC. No, I'm saying right now he lives as an individual among us. Yes, he's former vice president. But my point is that he can go on TV and say he's not in office right now,
>> but the media shouldn't continue to give him oxygen to continue to espouse that his movie was dead right when New York City is not a canoe land today. It is still full of streets and not flooded, and they didn't hold the people to account who are actually the most nefarious actors when it comes to climate damage and change.
>> So even if you have people like Bill Gates who recently said, "You know, I went a little bit too far." People condemned him like, "No, you shouldn't even saying that years ago." What can people do who went too GOING TOO FAR TRYING TO PROTECT THE No, but Bill Gates said, "You know what? I'm scaling back some of my predictions from." He said that in the last few months, and I, Robbie, and I sat here and argued about he should have never, Bill Gates should have never been involved in this conversation. It's like, what can people do? They said they went too far. They said they got it dead right. Nobody's happy. That's why I'm saying let's talk about the environment.
But also, this led to, if you want to talk about the environment, this led to an environmental movement and cause in the United States that was based on a hyperbolic movie that ended up being inaccurate. And so there were several things in the movie that were true that I named. So if twice a day,
>> if action came from that, then what's the problem? Because the overregulation and the continued pursuit of fidelity to climate change and that if you do not believe in what that movie specifically espoused, then you are the problem and that you do not believe in science. Well, those are all the arguments I've heard from the left. But right now, science says Glacier National Park still exists. Science says Greenland still exists. Science says California still exists, and it's not underwater. That's the inconvenient truth of this movie. That's the incontinent truth of the whole climate change lobby. This whole environmental movement. I am for protecting the environment of the United States. I love this country. We are a beautiful, diverse environmental nation. We are also rich in environmental resources. We can be good stewards of both. But we can't do it at the behest and continuing to push false narratives and false facts because he was the former vice president. You can challenge it, too. And that's what this was about. All right. All right. Senator Bernie Sanders is introducing legislation to give the American public ownership in AI companies. We'll be right back.