TMQ versus Al Gore

Gregg Easterbrook, the Brookings Scholar and ESPN football writer, is a passionate environmentalist. Unlike many environmentalists, however, he is adamantly against the dishonesty, self-promotion, and hypocrisy with which many environmentalists treat their work. In today's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, he takes serious aim at Al Gore. It's well down the page if you want to read more. I'd strongly suggest doing so. His column is a great piece of writing and always worth a look.

Those Hollywood Searchlights Around Gore's Home Sure Eat Power
Tuesday Morning Quarterback for ESPN

Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost - indeed, could be used for self-promotion - suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led to any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.

An annoying complication of Gore's Nobel is that few realize the award was given jointly to him and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization well worthy of distinction. The IPCC is a group of scientists who have spent two decades studying climate change n obscurity, and in many cases without pay. The IPCC's efforts have been selfless, motivated only by concern for society. Had the Nobel Peace Prize gone solely to the IPCC, it would have been a great day.

An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. (A Hummer Year, TMQ's metric of environmental hypocrisy, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year of driving a Hummer). When his utility bill made the news - though apparently not in Oslo - Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would not by carbon offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!

After news of Gore's personal energy consumption broke, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider told The Associated Press the utility bill was justified because "Al and Tipper both work out of their home." This raises the question - what kind of work are they doing? Perhaps reanimating Frankenstein; in Frankenstein movies, there is always a lot of electricity crackling wastefully about. Here are other possible reasons the Gores' home requires so much energy:

• Gore is building a time machine to return to Palm Beach, Fla., in October 2000.
• The former vice president is doing everything he personally can to cause global warming, so he can claim his predictions came true.
• Gore is growing marijuana in his basement. (Note from the corporate legal department: This is strictly a joke, ESPN is not accusing Al Gore of growing marijuana. We stand by our allegation that he is a sinister kingpin of international rare-bird smuggling.)
• Members of Gore's species require high power levels to maintain human form.
• Al and Tipper don't just leave the lights on when they make out, they leave the lights on all over the house.
  

Can we stop talking about Al Gore for President already?

I'm really getting sick of people and their whole "Al Gore for President" garbage. This is a many whose primary successes have come from his "environmental" stances and "successes". Of course, running on that would be suicide for him due to the ridiculous amount of hypocrisy. What do I mean?

• He's admitted to exaggeration in his "documentary," An Inconvenient Truth.
• He flies around the world in private jets to discuss global warming.
• He gets a paycheck from a company which he formed that claims to provide carbon credits but in reality doesn't do much for the environment.
• He lives in a 20,000 square foot house and has four-digit monthly utility bills.
• He drives an SUV in An Inconvenient Truth.
• Most notably, however, is that he never submitted the Kyoto accords to the Senate despite his position as President of the Senate.

How someone who lives such an extravagant, wasteful lifestyle and was against the Kyoto accords when he had an opportunity to do something about them could ever run on an environmental platform is completely and utterly beyond me.

Al Gore's (still more) hypocricy

They sold 700 seats costing between $1,000 and $25,000 a piece? Reasonably, it cost a total of $1 million for the entire event. Just to put that into perspective, that's about 1/9 of the money needed to build a 2.5MW wind turbine and all the applicable infrastructure. Alternately, that could have been used to give approximately 100 poor families solar energy. Also, the amount of CO2 which Al Gore's private jet had to spew to get him from Washington to Australia would combine to a ridiculous amount of extravagant ecological excess to get together to spew forth hot air about how people aren't doing enough to combat global warming.

Here's an idea - instead of giving obscene amounts of money to ridiculously wealthy jetsetter, why not just donate the money to a charity that builds wind and solar power generators? Nah, it's so much better to be flying around the would on private jets and begrudging the contractor an F-350 pickup so he can haul his three coworkers and about 500 pounds of equipment to the job site.

Paying dearly to hear Gore's climate story
The Age (Australia)

AL GORE has a story he wants to tell the world. But it will cost you a thousand dollars to hear it.

In a passionate attack on the climate policies of Prime Minister John Howard and US President George Bush, the former US vice-president, addressing a very expensive lunch in Sydney yesterday, called Australia and the US "the Bonnie and Clyde" outlaws of the global environment for their failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Mr. Gore called on Australia to change course on Kyoto and its climate policies, saying if it did "it would be impossible for the United States to withstand the pressure" to join the rest of the world in ratifying Kyoto.

Labor under Kevin Rudd has promised to ratify the protocol while Mr. Howard is adamantly opposed to it and is backing Mr. Bush's efforts to find a "post-Kyoto accord."

Mr. Gore made his comments after reporters were asked to leave the lunch venue. Despite the cost, lunch in the 700-seat room at the Sydney Convention Centre was a sell-out, as is tomorrow's event in Melbourne. VIP packages, which included a spot close to Mr. Gore and a meet-and-greet with him, cost $25,000.

Dear God, I'm sick of talking about him...but Al Gore again

Taranto addresses Al Gore's "over-representation of factual presentations".

Now, I TOTALLY agree that this is EXACTLY what President Bush is accused of doing - trumping up the case of a threat he fully believes in order to bring about results which critics view critically. However, Taranto's light-hearted treatment of the costs is way off base. Currently, the U.S. auto industry and the economics of the various rust-belt states, our own in particular, are being devastated. Who's the biggest target of "global warming"? The auto industry. Not because they're the biggest emitters of CO2 (that's mother nature) or even the biggest product of human CO2 emissions (that's power production). No - it's because they represent the spread of capitalism and, with it, individual freedom.

So, what do you think the target will be of the "global warming" crusade? The auto industry. Why bother with building nuclear plants to replace heavily polluting coal and oil power plants when you can just ratchet up the CAFE standards (which, incidentally, have resulted in a substantial increase in fuel use)? Al Gore's exaggerations about global warming are helping to kill U.S. jobs and, in particular, Michigan jobs.

And, I've noticed that John Dingell isn't doing anything about it.

More Al Gore...

Al Gore in his testimony:

The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, "well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem." If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.

I'll just also say this: if you have an issue which has the potential to either (1) cripple the economy while diverting funds from humanitarian threats such as African disease, poverty, and famine or environmental threats such as smog, acid rain, and heavy metal emissions; or, on the other extreme (2) destroy the world in a never-in-the-history-of-the-Earth-before-seen ball of fire then you don't say, "well, I saw a movie that tells me it's a problem" particularly when it's by a guy who admits he exaggerates the threat, uses pictures of expansion of the southern ice cap to demonstrate recession of the northern ice cap, and has absolutely no academic credentials whatsoever.

This was really bugging me last night and, frankly, made it difficult to sleep. If there is such an overwhelming consensus among the "scientific community" (which, ironically, apparently includes economists and social scientists who just happen to agree with the idea and excludes geologists and meteorologists who happen to disagree with it) then why not have someone with actual scientific and academic credentials come in? I don't see why a guy with 30 year old degrees in journalism and law is any more reputable than the medical doctor he slams in the above quote. Was it really that difficult to find the phone number to the Union of Concerned Scientists? These are actual academics with actual credentials who actually study the issue who are purportedly on Gore's side. The difference, of course, is that even the extremists in the UCS aren't nearly as far flung as Al Gore.