Al Gore gets handed a right hiding by my favourite Australian journalist, Andrew Bolt:
Billing records of the Nashville Electric Service revealed that the local Gore mansion—a 20-room, eight-bathroom behemoth with a well-lit heated pool—used more electricity each month than the average American household used in an entire year. Use Less Gore had so many lights burning, heaters running, computers humming and gadgets whirring that he burned up 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, or more than 20 times the national household average.
Worse, he was using more electricity now than he did before he made An Inconvenient Truth to hector us into making do with less.
And this isn’t even counting all the power he uses for his other two homes, and his endless flights around the world, in private jets and civil, to flog his film. Ouch, Bolt goes on:
Let’s work through those three common excuses.
So Gore has low-energy light bulbs.
And he still uses all this power? My god.
So Gore uses the local green power program.
But isn’t that green power just an add-on to the Nashville Energy Service’s main source of base-load power—gassy coal-fired power plants?
And doesn’t the NES’s green methane-burning plant still need to burn some dirty coal to work properly? Don’t its emissions still contribute to global warming?
And so we get to Gore’s final excuse—the get-out-of-jail card of so many of our warming prophets of doom, from Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery to that Jeremiah of the airport lounge, David Suzuki: Gore buys carbon offsets.
That actually means he pays other folk to use less dirty power themselves, or take out the carbon dioxide he pumps out. It’s a bit like paying someone to starve so you can gorge.
But there are at least four problems with such offsets, the first of which is very particular to Gore. And that is Gore buys his offsets through Generation Investment Management, whose chairman is . . . Al Gore.
What’s more, GIM’s business is not to itself remove carbon from the air, but, it says, to “buy high quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns”. Looks bad for Al, what's the third excuse?
green groups now doubt many carbon offsets actually work.
For instance, the most common offset scheme—especially here—is to simply plant trees, often in places where people would probably plant them anyway.
But trees die and rot, and when they do they release much of the carbon they’ve trapped back into the air.
As Prof. Oliver Rackham, the Cambridge botanist and author, says: “Telling people to plant trees is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.” What goes in will come out. But surely Gore's minions are making up for his sins, right? Well, no:
Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al.
Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: “Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year.”
But—and here’s where she shows she’s nobler than you—“I feel horribly guilty about it.”
See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus. Oh dear. Is
anyone actually serious enough about Global Warming to do anything about it? Or maybe the question should be: is anyone serious enough to do anything to stop earning money from it? Al Gore certainly isn't.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_its_a_joke_right/
