Q: When is Destroying the Environment OK?
A: When you are a liberal and making money by doing it — espeically if you are Al Gore.

I found this OpinionJournal article to be quite revealing. It turns out Al Gore has been making money off a family-owned Zinc Mine which has, and I quote, “emitted thousands of pounds of toxic substances and several times, the water discharged from the mines into nearby rivers had levels of toxins above what was legal.” So, if Gore were so worried about his precious earth, you would think that he would deplore the leasing of his own property to huge mining companies to make a few bucks. The only person in this mess that seems to be coming to his defense is a Ms. Kreidler… who said,

“There is a certain zone of privacy once people go into private life,” Ms. Kreidler said. She said critics of the arrangement should realize it should be viewed in a “1973 context, not a 2007 context. . . . There was a different environmental sensibility about all sorts of things.”

So it’s OK if you did horrible things to the environment 30 years ago… and continue to do it in a 2007 context… as long as you are Al-Gore. If you buy carbon-offsets (which do not directly offset pound for pound your carbon footprint) you can life whatever kind of lifestyle you want while making as much money as you want hurting the environment. I swear, the gaul of this man.
Here’s a few more interesting paragraphs for your reading enjoyment.

The offset purchases are actually made for him by Generation Investment Management, a London-based investment firm that Mr. Gore co-founded, and which provides carbon offsets as a fringe benefit to all 23 of its employees, ensuring that they require no real sacrifice on the part of Mr. Gore or his family. Indeed, their impact is also highly limited. The Carbon Neutral Co.–one of the two vendors that sell offsets to Mr. Gore’s company, says that offset purchases “will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions . . . in the short term.”

But what about a 1992 context? That is the year Mr. Gore published “Earth in the Balance,” in which he wrote: “The lakes and rivers sustain us; they flow through the veins of the earth and into our own. But we must take care to let them flow back out as pure as they came, not poison and waste them without thought for the future.” Mr. Gore wrote that at a time when he would be collecting zinc royalties for another 11 years.