It's Mine, All Mine!

The environmental conscience of our nation or hypocritical robber baron? The media is torn on which face of Algore it wants to portray. Lately, it seems, the curtain has been torn away from this wizard who once was a heartbeat (or at least one more blue dress) away from the presidency.

This week, his hometown newspaper (the Tennessean, not the Washington Post) publishes an article loaded with class warfare buzzwords, in a piece subtlely titled: "Tenn. mine enriched Gore, scarred land." Enriched ... scarred ... wow, it sounds a lot like a Gore speech aimed at greedy Corporate America.

Al Gore has profited from zinc mining that has released millions of pounds of potentially toxic substances near his farmstead, but there is no evidence the mine has caused serious damage to the environment in the area or threatened the health of his neighbors.

Two massive white mountains of leftover rock waste are evidence of three decades of mining that earned Gore more than $500,000 in royalty payments for the mineral rights to his property.

New owners plan to start mining again later this year, after nearly four years of inactivity. In addition to bringing 250 much-needed jobs to rural Middle Tennessee, mine owners will resume paying royalties to some residents who, like Gore, own land adjacent to the mine and lease access to the zinc under their property. ...

Previous mine owners released toxic substances into waterways above the allowable levels several times in the eight years before the mine closed.

But state regulators consider those permit violations minor, and monitoring reports provide a clean bill of health for the surface water in the area. Community leaders and health officials recall no health problems ever associated with the mining.

But now that the mine is reopening and Gore's status as an environmentalist has grown, some of Gore's neighbors see a conflict between the mining and his moral call for environmental activism.

"Mining is not exactly synonymous with being green, is it?" said John Mullins, who lives in nearby Cookeville. A conservative, Mullins welcomes the resumption of mining for the benefits it will bring the community. But he says Gore's view that global warming is a certainty is arrogant and that by being connected to mining, Gore is not "walking the walk."

Yes, yes, we know Al Gore is a hypocrite. Nothing new here. Get to the real story. Oh, wait, there it is ... all the way down in paragraph 16.

Al Gore Jr.'s involvement in mining can be traced to Sept. 22, 1973.

Former U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Sr. bought about 88 acres along the Caney Fork River from Occidental Minerals, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, for $160,000. Included in the deal was the subsurface area. The rights to the minerals below ground were then leased back to Occidental.

On the same day, Gore Sr. sold the land and subsurface area to his 25-year-old son and daughter-in-law for $140,000. The mineral lease to Occidental was put in their names.

Ding, ding, ding. There it is. The good ol' Gore-Occidental connection again.

Forget that in 1973, Gore Jr. was a reporter for the very newspaper now writing about him -- and on his salary alone, he could hardly afford to purchase the land himself. (Adjusted for inflation, that's $650,000 in today's terms.) He surely had a trust fund at this point, since his old man had been "The U.S. Senator from Occidental" long before he actually went to work for the company.

What smells here? It's not Gore's hypocrisy on the environment. By all accounts, zinc mining does damage surrounding land. But, as the National Association of Manufacturers, points out, what economic activity doesn't have some environmental impact? In fact, NAM actually defends Gore -- and these two wouldn't normally agree that the sky is up.

No, the Gore hypocrisy on display here is his natural inclination to blame greedy corporate overlords for the world's ills, while he himself collects money from Big Tobacco, Big Oil and now Big Zinc. And all the while, he got in bed with the zinc mine in a midnight transfer of leases between his daddy and his daddy's longtime corporate benefactor.

Have you ever tasted zinc? Well, it tastes like this whole thing smells ... like sh*t.

--

John Fund of the The Wall Street Journal editorial page points out more media recognition of Gore's nuttiness.

The New York Times last week interviewed many scientists who say they are alarmed "at what they call [Mr. Gore's] alarmism on global warming." In a front-page piece in its science section, the Times headline read "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype."

The Times quoted Don Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, as telling hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America that "I don't want to pick on Al Gore. But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data." ...

Even James Hansen, a scientist who began issuing warning cries about global warming in the 1980s and is a top adviser to Mr. Gore, concedes that his work may hold "imperfections" and "technical flaws."

It goes on and on.

---

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit sums it up best -- and much more briefly than we've done here.

That said, it's not clear that Gore himself has done anything wrong, though he's clearly made money from a project that's pretty environmentally unfriendly. But this will add to the perception that Gore's green talk is hypocritical, I suspect. As I've noted below, if you adopt a quasi-messianic posture, people will judge your actions very differently than if you do not.

And Hollywood really wants Gore to run for president? Imbeciles.