Former Vice President Al Gore attacked President Donald Trump, accusing him of “tearing down America’s standing in the world” by withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.
“The climate crisis is by far the most serious challenge we face,” Gore said Monday morning on NBC’s Today Show.
“We’ve never had a president who’s deliberately made decisions the effect of which is to tear down America’s standing in the world, starting with his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement,” Gore said.
Gore got himself into hot water with black activists last week when he compared the fight against global warming to the emancipation of black slaves.
The fight against global warming is one of humanity’s great moral causes, Gore told participants in the EcoCity World Summit in Melbourne Thursday, alongside “the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage and women’s rights, the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.”
In an online statement, black activists with the Project 21 leadership network blasted Gore for the comparison, saying that he “gives climate change activists unearned moral credibility” by associating these important moral movements of history with a crusade “grounded in questionable data.”
Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper said that Gore’s climate alarmism stands to hurt black Americans most of all.
“Study after study demonstrate that the radical climate policies advocated by Al Gore, Jr. will hurt blacks and the poor most,” Cooper said. “Just as segregation and interracial marriage bans were purported to be for the good of all while clearly done to generate political support, today’s climate alarmism is pushed solely to get the support of a small group of so-called eco-warriors at the expense of blacks.”
Gore’s elevation of global warming to “the most serious challenge we face,” above international terrorism, job security, healthcare reform, immigration or abortion does not ring true to most Americans, according to a recent Bloomberg poll.
Asked “which of the following do you see as the most important issue facing the country right now?” only ten percent of U.S. citizens thought that climate change was the most pressing, while the other 90 percent identified other concerns they felt should be top priorities, such as healthcare, terrorism, immigration, jobs and taxes.
During his meeting with the G7 nations in Taormina, Sicily, last May, President Trump shifted discussions away from climate change to what he declared to be the most critical issue facing the world, namely Islamic terrorism.
Just days before, the President European addressed 55 world leaders from Arab and other Muslim-majority nations in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In that speech, Trump called for unity in pursuing “the one goal that transcends every other consideration. That goal is to meet history’s great test—to conquer extremism and vanquish the forces of terrorism.”
Back in the U.S., President Trump gave a speech in the Rose Garden after deciding to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord. The Climate Accord, Trump stated, “is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.”
The agreement would have left American workers and taxpayers to “absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production,” he said.
“Thus, as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” he said.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.