Betrayed

Great civilizations rot from the top. Here is an enlightening piece about Al Gore from the National Review:

So there is no doubt that Al Gore Sr. deserved his payoff from Armand Hammer. But what has Al Gore Jr. ever done for Qatar? Isn’t he, after all, the foremost champion of the worldwide environmentalist movement, which is bitterly opposed to oil production, the very lifeblood of the Qatari regime? Yes, he is, but there is a little catch, because while opposed in principle to oil production everywhere, the environmentalist movement has been effective in reality only in impeding it in the United States.

Some measure of the effect of the environmental movement may be obtained by [comparing] U.S. oil production, OPEC oil production, and non-U.S./non-OPEC oil production from 1960 to the present. ... U.S. oil production grew at an average rate of 3.2 percent per year during the 1960s, peaking at 9.6 million barrels per day in 1970. In that year, however, the environmental movement was empowered by the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and the accompanying creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and U.S. production has been in decline ever since. ... [T]he growth of OPEC production, which had been extremely rapid during the 1960s, came to a screeching halt in 1973, when the OPEC powers replaced the previously dominant Seven Sisters’ policy of expanding production to grow the world economy with an alternative policy of constricting production to loot the world economy.
As a result, OPEC production has not increased at all since 1973. Thus the entirety of the increase of world oil production over the past four decades — during which time the world economy has doubled in size — has come from non-OPEC, non-U.S. sources. ... [T]his has increased at a rate of 3.4 percent per year since 1970, essentially the same as the 3.2 percent average U.S. growth rate from 1960 to 1970. [If not for this], instead of producing 5.7 million barrels per day today, we would now be producing 35. Together with other non-OPEC production, this would have totally marginalized OPEC and constrained oil prices below $30 a barrel, with associated gasoline prices driven to the range of $1 to $1.50 per gallon. Just as they did in the 1950s and 1960s, such low oil prices would have fueled dramatic U.S. and global economic growth.

At present, Qatar exports around 400 million barrels of oil per year, while the U.S. imports about 4 billion barrels per year. So the fact that oil prices today are $90 per barrel, instead of the $30 per barrel that they would be if not for the environmentalist hamstringing of American oil production, is costing the United States at least $240 billion per year (based on the price difference alone — much more if we take into account the potential replacement of our oil imports with exports), while benefiting Qatar by $24 billion per year, and OPEC as a whole by at least $600 billion per year.

So, Al Gore has certainly earned the gratitude of the rulers of Qatar, and indeed, all of OPEC.