The Gore/Hollywood Hypocrisy

And we should listen to Al Gore, why, exactly?

[Al] 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.
(via Drudge)

And it’s not just electricity. Gore has been blowing through natural gas to the tune of over a grand a month. And his power usage at home has increased since his movie came out.

Let’s put this into other numbers. Each kilowatt-hour of electricity used by the average household equals about 2.3 pounds of CO2 emitted. Gore’s house alone accounts for 508,300 pounds or 230.56 metric tonnes of CO2 every year. I can’t do the same calculations for his natural gas usage, since I don’t have quite enough information, but we can all imagine that burning over a thousand dollars of natural gas every month is not very environmentally-friendly.

Al Gore isn’t the answer to the problem. He’s an impediment toward solving it. While he has no problem jetting around the globe “raising awareness” or leading a “cause”, he’s polluting far more than the average person he’s been hectoring for the past couple of years.

It’s not like Gore would have to go far to put his money where his mouth is. All he has to do is to live an upper middle class lifestyle instead of the upper upper class lifestyle he so publicly reviles. I’m certain he could build a house – even a really big house – that was pretty darned close to carbon-neutral (something the Brits look to force their people to do by 2016). It doesn’t look to be prohibitively expensive – perhaps $275,000 for what this article describes as a “simple zero-carbon home”. That’s well within Gore’s means.

Really, the question we ought to be asking is if Al Gore is that heart-wrenchingly concerned about Mother Earth, why does he continue to hurt her so badly?

And what are we to make of the celebrities so sanctimonious in their pronunciations that last night’s awards ceremony had “gone green”. What does that mean? As it happens, not as much as you might think:

More stars arrived than ever before in environmentally friendly limousines, like plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars, hoping to educate Americans on alternatives to fossil fuels blamed for producing heat-trapping gases.

Earlier in the show, Gore and the hybrid-driving actor Leonardo DiCaprio took the stage to announce the Academy Awards had “gone green” with environmentally sensitive methods incorporated into every aspect of putting on the show.

The greening of the Oscars included using recycled paper, doing an energy audit for the Kodak Theatre and serving organic food at the Governors Ball, said the Natural Resources Defense Council, the advocacy group that worked with organizers.

That’s worth applauding? Did anyone in that hall even stop for a moment to consider just how much carbon they were pumping into the atmosphere during their four-hour glitzy back-patting. I wonder how many of them considered that they could have probably fed a starving village full of people for the cost of one ball gown or tuxedo. Did any of them pause in their attempts to “educate” us rubes to consider the damage they were doing?

No, of course not. They would rather fall over dead than to step onto the red carpet from a Prius, wearing a used tux they picked up at a local thrift store. I don’t imagine that any of them recommended that maybe they could have simple finger sandwiches and chips and dip instead of their organically-grown gourmet vittles (which don’t seem to be any better for the environment than the “normal” high-class eats). It’s striking to me that Gore, especially, could have saved an enormous amount of carbon by simply not going to the ceremony at all. He could certainly have taken advantage of the Internet he invented and appeared by web cam to accept the award. Perhaps he might have given a little thrill of shame to the assembled throng for reveling in their excesses in the middle of what he called a “climate crisis” at the same time. Don’t you think that would have been a good message to send.

But no. Instead we have Al Gore and his Celebrity Planet Rangers seeking to “educate Americans” about their profligate lifestyle while doing more damage to the environment than any of us could. I have no regard for Gore or the rest of them. Some might see their message as important and praise them for their sanctimony. I see them as rank hypocrites who would rather the whole world suffer then for any of them to know a single privation.

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Category: Oh the Climate, It is A-Changin'