Congressman Joe Barton Gets Dissed By Al Gore On Global Warming
Vince Leibowitz | Apr 25, 2009 | Comments 6 |
Texas Congressman Joe Barton (R-Ennis) yesterday decided to deliver an encore to his asinine back-and-forth with Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu by taking on former Vice President Al Gore on the issue of global warming.
Needless to say, it was game, set, and match for Gore and Barton was left looking like an idiot.
To start off, Barton quoted to Gore from a magazine, CO2 Science Magazine, which is actually more of an online newsletter than a magazine. He quoted from an article by Dr. Craig Idso. Idso and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change publish the magazine. The Center has actually received funding in the past from corporate pollution giants like Exxon.
In reply, Gore took Barton down a peg and compared some of the corporate polluters perpetrating the global warming fraud to indicted fund manager Bernie Madoff:
GORE: It is important to look at the sources of the science that we rely on. I believe that you have relied on people that you have trusted that have given you bad information. I don’t blame the investors who trusted Bernie Madoff, but he gave them bad information.
BARTON: I never talked to Bernie Madoff.
GORE: I am not saying that you have. But he gave them bad information and committed a massive fraud that ended up hurting, most of all, the people who trusted him. Senator Warner made reference in his opening statement to the story in the front page of the New York Times this morning. The largest corporate carbon polluters in America, 14 years ago, asked their own people to conduct a review of all this science and their own people told them what the international scientific community is saying is correct–there is no legitimate basis for denying it. Then these large polluters committed a massive fraud far larger than Bernie Madoff’s fraud. They are the Bernie Madoff’s of global warming. They ordered the censoring and removal of the scientific review that they themselves conducted and, like Bernie Madoff, they lied to the people who trusted them in order to make money.
Why Barton is doing this is anyone’s guess. One possibility is that he still harbors aspirations of running for the U.S. Senate after his failed bid in the 1990s–most likely when Kay Bailey Hutchison abandons her seat to run for Texas Governor–and is trying to bolster himself among the ultraconservative Republicans in Texas–many of whom seem to have already gravitated to Railroad Commissioner Michael L. Williams.
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Filed Under: Featured • Texas Congressional Delegation
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