Al Gore, Zinc Miner And Hypocrite

Here is an excerpt from this article on opinionjournal.com. It shows that on top of his over the top energy consumption( which he pays carbon credits to himself to justify), he is also a zinc miner whose company polluted rivers. So it seems that Al Gore is being outed for the environmentally unfreindly hypocrite that he is.

Here is the excerpt:

Then there is the Gore zinc mine. Mr. Gore has personally earned $570,000 in zinc royalties from a mine his father bought in 1973 from Armand Hammer, the business executive famous for his close friendship with the Soviet Union and for pleading guilty to making illegal campaign contributions during Watergate. On the same day Al Gore Sr. bought the 88-acre parcel from Hammer for $160,000, he sold the land and subsurface mining rights to his then 25-year-old son for $140,000. The mineral rights were then leased back to Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum and the royalty payments put in the names of Al Gore Jr. and his wife, Tipper. Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider claims the terms of the 30-year Occidental lease agreement gave the Gores “no legal recourse” to get out of it. She said the Gores never thought about selling the land and would not comment on whether they ever tried to void the lease. “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.”

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.

The mines had a generally good environmental record, but they wouldn’t pass muster either with the standard Mr. Gore set in “Earth in the Balance” or with most of his environmentalist friends. In May 2000 the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation issued a “Notice of Violation” notifying the Pasminco mine its zinc levels in a nearby river exceeded standards established by the state and the federal Environmental Protection Agency. In 1996 the mine twice failed biomonitoring tests designed to protect water quality in the river for fish and wildlife. “The discharge of industrial wastewater from Outfall #001 [the Caney Fork effluent] contains toxic metals (copper and zinc),” the analysis stated. “The combined effect of these pollutants may be detrimental to fish and aquatic life.”

The Gore mines were no small operations. In 2002, the year before they shut down, they ranked 22nd among all metal-mining operations in the U.S., with total toxic releases of 4.1 million pounds. A new mine operator, Strategic Resource Acquisition, is planning to reopen the mines later this year. The Tennessean reports that just last week, Mr. Gore wrote SRA asking it to work with a national environmental group as it makes its plans. He noted that under the previous operator, the mines had, according to the environmental website Scorecard, “pollution releases from the mine in 2002 [that] placed it among the ‘dirtiest/worst facilities’ in the U.S.” Mr. Gore requested that SRA “engage with us in a process to ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices.” The Tennessean dryly notes that Mr. Gore wrote the letter the week after the paper posed a series of questions to him about his involvement with the zinc mines.