10 Mar 2008 Project 21 Helps Expose Hypocrisy of Environmental Elite in the Third World

From David Almasi:

You may remember Al Gore being unmasked last year by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, which discovered that Gore’s Nashville mansion was using 20 times the amount of energy as an average American home. Additionally, Gore and his celebrity friends are holding nearly annual rock concerts to celebrate their environmental alarmism. And let’s not forget all those special flights they take to and from their international conferences, where they moan about the evils of excessive air travel, among other things.

On Tuesday, March 11, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will begin running a commercial on cable television exposing the hypocrisy of Gore and the environmentalist elite.

CEI’s commercial shows that many in the Third World – particularly those in Africa – are literally dying due to a lack of adequate power, and the catastrophe that could result from imposing anti-global warming emissions regulations on power generation in these areas. Forcing these people to go without would be especially galling considering Gore and his ilk are living opulent lifestyles.

To help CEI and show just how much the anti-energy environmentalist elites are out of step with the rest of the world, Project 21 – the National Center’s black leadership network – has gathered statements for the press conference from native Africans and black Americans who have seen first-hand how Western elites try to impose their will on others.

Here are some samples of their statements:

Thompson Ayodele, director of the Initiative for Public Policy Analysis in Lagos, Nigeria: “The Nobel Peace Prize, Oscar and an Emmy Mr. Gore has been awarded for his environmental activism will only aid the people of Africa is he melts them down and donates the gold to a relief organization. For him and his colleagues to try to restrict people of the world from obtaining the energy they need in the means that are cost-effective and readily available for them to get it is not humanitarian in any sense of the word.”

Project 21’s Bishop Council Nedd II: “If it weren’t so unsettling it would be funny that it is people such as Al Gore who are behind policies and pressure to restrict the development of pretty much every sort of successful method of energy production. This is inconvenient and costly to us here in the United States, but it can be a matter of life-and-death in a developing country.”

Alice Wanja Hinga, RN, a native Kenyan: The people of Africa cannot afford to worry about their carbon footprint when they are focused on making sure they have enough to eat and can remain healthy. If people from outside Africa want to intervene, it should be to make access to things easier, not more difficult. My people ask for assistance, but the strings attached to certain aid are sometimes worse than not accepting anything in the first place.”

The CEI press conference will be held in the Murrow Room of the National Press Club (529 14th Street NW, 13th floor) at 10:00 am on Tuesday, March 11. A PDF of the statements can be found here (pdf).