Monday, February 26, 2007

The Oscar for best politics goes to

Al Gore for his global warming agitprop. While global warming advocates want major reductions in consumer energy use, Al Gore is showing no leadership in this area. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research looked into Al Gore's energy usage:
Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”

Gore’s home uses more than 20 times the national average

Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk to walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

The problems with Gore's version of science are addressed more substantively by Dr. Patrick J. Michaels who, for instance, addresses the sea rise issue:
The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Dr. Michaels has a Ph.D. in Ecological Climatology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1979) and is Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Virgina. He was a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He was an author of the 2003 climate science "Paper of the Year" awarded by the Association of American Geographers. This makes is hard for his detractors to call him out of the mainstream but they do anyway.

UPDATE: Gore responds to the house electricity issue here, claiming that he tries to consume "green" energy and, among other things, he uses "solar panels and uses compact fluorescent bulbs." It would seem that solar panels and fluorescents must not be very effective if, despite their use, his electric bills are so high.

RELATED: Michelle Malkin has a post on strikingly similar story of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do in animal rights: PETA activist Pamela Anderson says she had no idea that the sheepskin boots that she made famous were actually made of sheep's skin.

UPDATE: From James Taranto:

Of course we don't begrudge Gore his life of luxury--only his sanctimonious insistence that the rest of us sacrifice our comforts to the dubious god of global warming.
It is interesting to contrast Al Gore's energy consumption with Pres. Bush's relatively eco-friendly Crawford ranch.

UPDATE: For hypocrisy similar to Sen. Gore's, see this report:With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming.

No comments:

Clicky Web Analytics