GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

GLENN: One of the things that we have been talking about this week is Al Gore. It seems like only a week ago that he won a Nobel Prize. One of the men who knows exactly why he's so deserving of a Nobel Prize would be Marlo Lewis. Marlo, welcome to the program. You're a guy who actually took his film almost frame by frame and pointed out all of the inaccuracies, right?

LEWIS: I do go over it with a fine tooth comb, Glenn, yes.

GLENN: How deserving of a Nobel Prize is he?

Marlo Lewis, Jr. is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he writes on global warming, energy policy, and other public policy issues. More...

LEWIS: Well, Glenn, I think what we're talking about here is the Nobel Peace Prize and I would assume that the person who receives the Nobel Peace Prize should have done something to advance the prospect of peace in the world.

GLENN: Well, he -- but he did.

LEWIS: Al Gore's policies I think undermine peace in the world. They're a recipe for increasing global instability and strife because what those policies are is a program of energy rationing. It's all designed to restrict the amount of energy that people consume, people other than Al Gore, and without energy you can't make economies run. So if you make energy scarcer and you restrict economic growth, you reduce the chances for peace in the world.

GLENN: Okay, hang on just a second. Marlo, let's -- I mean, you can go on with that mumbo-jumbo all you like but have you ever been in a really hot room? You get cranky, don't you? See what I'm saying? You want peace; you need air conditioning or some sort of a cap on global warming. It makes just that much sense.

LEWIS: Right, right. Well, what we really need for peace is for poor countries to develop, so they all have a stake in a peaceful, prosperous world. And you can't do that if you are going to ban coal plants around the globe.

GLENN: It is really amazing to me that the same people who are on this global warming kick are the same people that are always lecturing us about Africa and these third world countries. How can you possibly get them out of poverty if you are not letting them build power plants?

LEWIS: There's no way. I mean, Al Gore says we shouldn't have a new coal plant unless it's equipped with carbon capture and storage. There is not a single coal plant with carbon capture and storage in commercial operation anywhere in the world because it's too expensive. We can't afford to do that here yet and yet Al Gore says no new coal plants in Africa or Asia until they're equipped with carbon capture and storage.

GLENN: Crazy.

LEWIS: You know, I mean, it's the "let them eat cake" mentality.

GLENN: The courts over in the U.K. just last week, the same week that he gets a Nobel Prize, the courts in the U.K. come out and say, you can't show this film without significant disclaimers to schoolchildren because it's inaccurate. Can you point out some of the inaccuracies here that they were talking about?

LEWIS: Yes. For example, Al Gore rather heavy-handedly implied that the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina was brought due to global warming even though Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 storm and there have been plenty of Category 4 and 5 storms before the age of global warming. He said that we should be -- or he rather heavy-handedly implied that we should fear 20 feet of sea level rise in our life times or the life times of our children and that's really a scientific impossibility. It would take at least a millennium under, you know, a very scary set of assumptions to produce that much ice melt from Greenland, for example. So those are two of the big ones. Another one he said that global warming, because of ice melt in Greenland could shut down the gulfstream and plunge Europe into an ice age.

GLENN: Wouldn't that be great?

LEWIS: And there's no scientific possibility of that happening.

GLENN: But that would be good for global warming, wouldn't it?

LEWIS: Well, that's -- you see, they're conflicted about it. Then they have to say, well, it's climate change that we're talking about, any change for the worse by definition.

GLENN: Isn't it true that the southern hemisphere of the planet got cooler in the last few years or ten years or 100 years or something like that?

LEWIS: Well, not exactly. The southern hemisphere is warming. It's not warming as fast as the northern but there are areas of Antarctica that have been cooling. That may be what you're referring to. Which is hard to understand in terms of the greenhouse theory. Also sea ice is growing in Antarctica although it's contracting in the Arctic, the Arctic circle. You read a lot about that. You don't read very much about sea ice growing in Antarctica.

GLENN: Do you believe that right before the last ice age that the dinosaurs had giant SUVs that we just haven't found yet?

LEWIS: Well, I think you're referring to another one of Gore's inaccuracies which is he presented a graph in an Inconvenient Truth of carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures going back 650,000 years and people who have seen the film will remember this part of the movie. It's actually when Gore gets up on a forklift in order to illustrate how high carbon dioxide levels are going to get and allegedly how high temperatures are going to get following carbon dioxide levels. Anyway, he made it look like carbon dioxide was the big driver of climate change throughout the millennia whereas, in fact, all kinds of paleological evidence shows that the carbon dioxide changes followed the changes in global temperature by hundreds to thousands of years for a very simple reason. When the oceans warm up, a lot of carbon dioxide fizzes out of the ocean just as it does in your carbonated beverage when it gets warm.

GLENN: So maybe -- hmmm. Maybe we should, I mean, ban soda. And another unrelated topic here. Next week, I don't know if you've seen this, but CNN is running Planet in Peril.

LEWIS: Yes.

GLENN: How do you -- I mean, because they spent, I don't know, I think a lot of money on sending people all over the globe and they said -- I mean, I've talked to people in the hall ways: Glenn, what's happening? We documented it with our own cameras; it's changing; it's hotter; it's penguins with swimming trunks on; it's craziness.

How do you address people who say, you know, global warming is absolutely happening and man is responsible?

LEWIS: Well, I think that global warming is happening and I do believe that man is responsible for much of the warming of the past 30 years. I mean, I can't prove that to you and -- but I think that most scientists believe that. So I'm prepared to defer to these experts.

GLENN: But wait a minute. If you say the last 30 years it has been largely caused by man or significantly caused by man, why wouldn't you be for doing something about that?

LEWIS: Well, it's all a question of costs and benefits. We could spend -- the United States could spend, for example, $100 billion to $400 billion a year complying with the Kyoto protocol which even if perfectly implemented by all the industrial nations of the world would only avert a theoretical 7/100ths of a degree of global warming by 2050. So that's trillions of dollars spent for no measurable results.

GLENN: So what would you do? I mean, you talk about the economy. If you believe that man is largely responsible for this, then you've got to do something because you have no economy if you have no planet.

LEWIS: That's what they say, right? But the world warmed a full degree Fahrenheit-plus during the 20th century and yet global GDP increased by 18-fold. So the thesis that warmer equals doom really needs to be rechecked. I mean, it all depends on how much it warms and how fast. So far global warming and global economic growth, prosperity, you know, the doubling of the average human lifespan, the near quadrupling of the human population, those all seem to have gone together quite well and, you know, marched down the road narrowly holding hands. So you see, I think what Al Gore tries to do is equate global warming with catastrophe and so if you agree with him that the world is warming and mankind is contributing to it, then you agree that we're doomed unless we let people like Al Gore turn the global economy upside down. And that's simply a logical fallacy. It's, you know, select political rhetoric and it seems to bamboozle a lot of people. But B does not really follow from A.

GLENN: How much money do you get from global oil corporations?

LEWIS: How much money do we get? You know, we used to get -- we used to get a lot more than we get now because as you probably have read, ExxonMobil is no longer a supporter of ours, has not been for two years, stopped supporting us before I began my detailed analysis of Gore's book. You know, but look. I would say this, Glenn. That there are actually a lot of honest people in this debate, but there are very few honest brokers. And by an honest broker, I mean someone who by virtue of his professional position, is above even the suspicion of a conflict of interest. And that goes not just for me because I'm an -- I've worked for an advocacy organization. But it also goes for Al Gore. It goes for, you know, natural resources defense council, it goes for a whole lot of scientists, all of whose bread and butter depend on keeping the public in a state of fear about global warming. You know, there's billions of dollars in research money, grants that the federal government hands out for climate scientists a year. That money would dry up in a heartbeat if the consensus of scientists all of a sudden said, well, there's really not all that much to worry about.

GLENN: Well, how do you say that there's, you know, there's no honest brokers when you have Al Gore coming back -- by the way, do we know -- he flew on private jet back home from the Nobel Prize, did he not, Stu? He did, right?

LEWIS: Yes, he did.

GLENN: Do you know what size jet that was? Was that a G5?

LEWIS: I don't know. I saw a picture of it on the Internet. I'm not sure what it is, but it is quite clear that flying in private jets is the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation and so I remember that one of your colleagues, Sean Hannity said Gore doesn't have a carbon footprint. He leaves a carbon crater. That's really true. You know, a lot of people have faulted Al Gore for his hypocrisy because just one of his four residences consumes more energy in a year -- or excuse me, in a month than the average American home does in a year. But what I would say to that is that this is deeply significant because even Al Gore, who is one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth cannot live beyond petroleum, cannot be carbon-free, not even for one day, then how the heck does he expect the rest of us little guys to do it? You see, the thing is Al Gore wants to regulate the planet as if it were possible to live beyond petroleum, but his own life, his own lifestyle shows that it's impossible. The only way he could become anywhere remotely beyond petroleum is if he gave up the Leer jet, you know, the Gulfstreams, he gave up the limousines and actually my colleague Myra Ebell put it really well. If you really want to be beyond petroleum, you've got to live like Osama Bin Laden, you know. You've got to give up cars, you've got to give up air travel. You basically have to go back to the caves.

GLENN: We're trying to find Al Gore's carbon footprint. Do you have any idea on any of that? How would you figure that out on somebody else's?

LEWIS: Okay. Well, here's what you have to do. There are actually quite a few carbon footprint calculators available on the Internet and they all show that what you have to do is lift how many people there are in your household, how much electricity you consume per month if you're able to break it down by --

GLENN: But is there any way to do that --

LEWIS: Whether you use home heating oil, how much natural gas you consume, how much you drive, do you carpool, what kind of car do you drive, do you fly. You know, how do you fly? Commercial? You know. So basically you have to itemize the man's comings and goings and domiciles and --

GLENN: But is there any way to do that for a third party that you don't -- I mean, because I don't have his airline tickets. I don't know -- I mean, I can tell you that I looked at the, you know, the party he threw for winning the Nobel Prize and, you know, you want to think locally and -- or think globally and act locally. He had tuna from the Pacific, he had Alaskan crab from Alaska, he had lobster from the Atlantic. I mean, this guy, the carbon footprint of his meal for those 95 people alone was outrageous. How can you do it --

LEWIS: I mean, that was -- an investigative journalist, which I'm not, but maybe you know someone, Glenn, could actually --

GLENN: CNN would be willing to take that on.

LEWIS: I think it would be very difficult for Mr. Gore or his organization to withhold such information from an investigative journalist and then you could perform the calculation. I just want to make one point, which we talked about earlier, but I think this is really so critical, which is again global warming does not equal disaster. That's a rhetorical trick of Al Gore. And I just want to illustrate that with an Inconvenient Truth. If you watch the movie, you see scene after scene of devastation. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts. And it gives you the impression that the world is actually becoming a more dangerous place because of global warming. Well, I have a friend who works for the Department of Interior. His name is Indur Goklany and he actually reference climate change for the Department of Interior. He's just written a new book called The Improving State of the World. And what he shows is that mortality, overall deaths and mortality rates; in other words, how many people per million die related to extreme weather has declined dramatically since 1920, all right? As the world has warmed, overall deaths due to, related to extreme weather like hurricanes and so on have dropped about 95%, as well as mortality rates. Now, this is astonishing when you think about it because there are almost four times as many people in the world today and yet the number of people who actually die because of extreme weather events is much, much lower than it was back in 1920, and it's been falling ever since the 1920s. That shows the world is becoming safer with respect to extreme weather, not more dangerous.

GLENN: Marlo, thank you very much, sir. We'll talk again.

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