Hypocrisy Alert: Oil Rich Al Gore Smears Koch Brothers Over Keystone Pipeline

Katie Pavlich | June 12, 2013 8:03 AM

Self-described global warming expert and creator of the internet Al Gore seems to have forgotten that he just received $100 million in oil money from the Qatari government for selling his Current TV channel to Al Jazeera. During a recent Google hangout about the Keystone Pipeline, the former Vice President slammed the conservative Koch brothers and called them the "purveyors of the dirtiest energy on earth."

They want to put a pipeline right down through very environmentally sensitive parts of our country so they can export it from the Gulf of Mexico to China. Well, the hell with that. It’s the dirtiest form of fuel on the planet, except for its byproduct, petroleum coke, or pet coke, that’s piling up on the Detroit River right now, part of it, thanks to the Koch brothers - the purveyors of the dirtiest energy on earth. This is an atrocity, these tar sands. It really, and so, he ought to veto that, and I hope that he will.

But as Noel Sheppard points out, Gore is, as usual, exaggerating.

Detroit’s a growing mountain of pet coke sitting on the dockside. This appears to be becoming one of the environmental cause celebres, combining as it does the involvement of the Koch brothers, carbon emissions, Canadian tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline.

And for good measure, here is Gore trying to explain why he took $100 million in oil money to become richer than Mitt Romney.

When asked to explain the irony of selling Current to an oil-producer, Gore told an audience at SXSW Interactive, “I knew when I made that decision…my principal obligation was to do business in a way that makes the world a better place.”

“You have heard me be very critical of American television journalism. I think that the addition of a very high-quality, 24-7 honest-to-goodness news channel that covers international news as well as national — that covers climate, that covers poverty, that cover issues that are ignored today — has the potential to be disruptive in a creative and positive way, and raise the game for television journalism here in the United State of America.”