If You Got the Cash You too Can Be Green

There's just far too many articles and Op-Eds on this one to pick from. Someone on the right calls Algore a hypocrite, justifiably, and the loony left breaks into a sweat. It goes on Fox and they start screaming and throwing feces. Funny how they screech when their hero is shown to be less than wonderful, but they haven't any restraint when they go after those evil conservatives.

I guess Algore has a really nice life style. I can't imagine how he uses 20 times the electricity than the average American, but he's got the money to by carbon offsets, so it's cool. From Townhall.com:

Silly us to get down on Gore for using more than 20 times the average American's consumption of energy while lecturing the rest of us about our own wastefulness. The deal is, we just can't comprehend how he's avoiding damaging the environment with his magical, lefty ways.

From Gore, via Think Progress:

1) Gore’s family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology.

2) Gore has had a consistent position of purchasing carbon offsets to offset the family’s carbon footprint — a concept the right-wing fails to understand. Gore’s office explains:

What Mr. Gore has asked is that every family calculate their carbon footprintand try to reduce it as much as possible. Once they have done so, hethen advocates that they purchase offsets, as the Gore’s do, to bringtheir footprint down to zero.

It’s the latest in a series of desperate attacks by Drudge to paint Gore as a hypocrite...

These are the lengths that climate skeptics must go to suppress actionon global warming. There is no meaningful debate within the scientificcommunity, so the right-wing busies itself with talk about how muchelectricity Al Gore’s house uses — and even then they distort the truth.

The lengths weren't really all that great. The story pretty much writes itself when the self-proclaimed guru of global warming uses 20 times as much power as the rest of us. I mean, two times as much? I could see that. I'd probably still point out the hypocrisy, but 20 times? I'm no enviro-freak, but I turn out the lights when I leave a room and shut off the water while I brush my teeth, and it keeps my bills quite a bit more modest than Gore's $30K a year. We right-wingers can't help it if the plain facts of Gore's lifestyle make every normal person in America go, "Wait, he's lecturing me? What a jerk!"

I wonder how many "carbon offsets"-- trees I buy that other people promise to plant for me to soak up all the emissions my lifestyle creates-- I'd have to buy to take care of my $27-a-month power bill, huh? I'd hate not to be carbon-neutral, like Gore is.

Go and read the comments at the Thing Progress site. It's quite entertaining.

Personally I don't mind Algore's lecturing. He has a point about wastefulness that many could learn from. It would be nice if he actually tried the part about minimizing his usage. That part is probably more important than his having fluorescent lights in his house.

I also keep hearing about these Carbor Offsets that Algore uses to buy his way into heaven. It's an interesting concept. Here's a Treehugger article on various services you can buy.

As more and more people, small businesses and large companies become hip to carbon emission offsets and the carbon-neutral lifestyle, Ecobusinesslinks.com has done some homework for us and completed a comprehensive comparison of the nonprofit and for profit organizations providing carbon offsets. The survey found that most companies provide nearly identical service (offsetting carbon emissions) using a couple different means (tree-planting or investment in renewable energy, or both) but varying wildly in price. Carbonfund.org checked in with the lowest price, at $5.50 US per metric ton of carbon dioxide, while other companies like TerraPass (about $10/ton) and NativeEnergy (about $13/ton) charge more for their offsets that can be calculated for more specific activities, like traveling by car or airplane. The growing number of companies that offer such service seems to indicate a growing market for carbon credits, which, no matter how much you pay, is a good thing.

Lots of the offsets appear to be planting trees and investing in "green" energy sources. The key to most, if not all of these is that you pay them to offset your CO2 emissions. Kind of like paying for penance rather than just being a good person.

Not really surprising that this has turned pretty hot. It's also a telling indicator along with the whole global warming scenario. It's become a religious movement for the far left, and if you criticize any of the arguments or any of the players, you're either an idiot or working for the oil companies.