Al Gore, Junior. Pauline Gore has one heir to which she will leave the oil stock when she dies. So Gore had substantial interest in the oil industry long before this year's price explosion. Occidental stock jumped 10 percent. But the Occidental windfall didn't stop there.
Occidental now pumps and sells oil from that oil field.
The oil gets refined into gasoline, which is sold at higher and higher prices. For Al Gore, the gift keeps on giving. Incidentally, the Elk Hills purchase was the largest privatization of federal land in American history. How ironic that it was engineered by a man who frowns on private land ownership by people other than himself. Gore made his first splash in national politics with the publishing of his 1992 environmental fantasy Earth In The Balance, a Chicken Little-type tome warning of every faddish environmental disaster awaiting mankind.