Former Vice President Al Gore's new global warming movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," warns in emphatic terms that the world is facing a "planetary emergency" unless America curbs its penchant for fossil fuel pollution.Despite widespread coverage of Gore's cinematic debut, however, the press has declined to mention a few inconvenient truths about the ex-veep's own environmental record.
One of the most glaring tidbits, for instance, is the pollution Gore and his family caused by maintaining their own toxic waste dump on their farm in Carthage, Tennessee. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Nashville's CBS network affiliate WTVF broadcast video of the Gore dump after the then-vice presidential candidate denied the story was true. The film featured aerial shots of the debris, and included close-ups of dripping oil filters, toxic aerosol spray cans, unrecycled aluminum pesticide containers, used tires and all manner of environmentally unfriendly refuse.
"It wasn't a pristine environmental haven, it was an ugly, dangerous dump -- and it could have leached into the [nearby] Caney Fork River," one Gore critic complained at the time.
During Gore's 2000 presidential bid, the Fox News Channel unearthed and re-aired the dump clip, but the mainstream press otherwise ignored the startling news that the nation's leading environmentalist was himself a Class A polluter. According to EPA regulations cited by the Washington Times, the pesticide dumping alone could have netted Gore over $25,000 in fines. Despite the smoking gun video of Gore's environmental violations, there's no record he was ever penalized for his pollution.