GORE COMPARES LARGE CO2 EMITTERS TO SUBPRIME MORTGAGE LENDERS

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/25/13

Former Vice President and prominent environmentalist Al Gore compared the fossil fuel industry to the lenders whose bad investments sparked the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent economic downturn during a speech this week in Washington. During a Center for American Progress event Oct. 24, Gore said the world’s fossil fuel emitters have $7 trillion worth of “sub-prime carbon assets” whose valuation is based on “an assumption that is even more ridiculous than the absurd assumption that these people who couldn’t make a down payment were a good [bet] for home mortgages.” “The assumption is that those $7 trillion [in assets] can be sold and burned. They cannot be sold and burned. We are putting 90 million tonnes of global warming pollution into the thin-shelled atmosphere of our earth every 24 hours as if it is an open sewer. It’s not an open sewer,” Gore said.

Gore, who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, said that emitters should no longer be able to get away with pricing fossil fuel resources without accounting for the negative externalities associated with burning hydrocarbons. “I get the fact that their business model is based on extending this artificial valuation of their sub-prime carbon assets for as long as they possibly can,” he said. “But our job as American citizens is to work through the formation of public policy based on reality, based on logic, based on reason, in support of the public interest, not private-sector interests.” Gore has spent the last week busily promoting his efforts to force the issue of climate change on policymakers’ agenda. He recently hosted the “24 Hours of Reality,” a live-streamed webcast with his Climate Reality Project aiming to gauge how carbon pollution is impacting the world, and also appeared on late-night talk shows and the website Reddit to answer questions about his climate advocacy work.