Author Topic: The Goracle  (Read 4254 times)

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sirs

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The Goracle
« on: February 27, 2007, 11:56:03 AM »
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

sirs

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #1 on: February 27, 2007, 10:19:29 PM »
Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'? -- $30,000 utility bill

(2/27/07 - NASHVILLE, TN) - Back home in Tennessee, safely ensconced in his suburban Nashville home, Vice President Al Gore is no doubt basking in the Oscar awarded to "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary he inspired and in which he starred. But a local free-market think tank is trying to make that very home emblematic of what it deems Gore's environmental hypocrisy.

Armed with Gore's utility bills for the last two years, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research charged Monday that the gas and electric bills for the former vice president's 20-room home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours.

"If this were any other person with $30,000-a-year in utility bills, I wouldn't care," says the Center's 27-year-old president, Drew Johnson. "But he tells other people how to live and he's not following his own rules."

Scoffed a former Gore adviser in response: "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent."

Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for the Gores, did not dispute the Center's figures, taken as they were from public records. But she pointed out that both Al and Tipper Gore work out of their home and she argued that "the bottom line is that every family has a different carbon footprint. And what Vice President Gore has asked is for families to calculate that footprint and take steps to reduce and offset it."

A carbon footprint is a calculation of the CO2 fossil fuel emissions each person is responsible for, either directly because of his or her transportation and energy consumption or indirectly because of the manufacture and eventual breakdown of products he or she uses. (You can calculate your own carbon footprint on the website http://www.carbonfootprint.com/)

The vice president has done that, Kreider argues, and the family tries to offset that carbon footprint by purchasing their power through the local Green Power Switch program — electricity generated through renewable resources such as solar, wind, and methane gas, which create less waste and pollution. "In addition, they are in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power," Kreider added. "They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero."

These efforts did little to impress Johnson. "I appreciate the solar panels," he said, "but he also has natural gas lanterns in his yard, a heated pool, and an electric gate. While I appreciate that he's switching out some light bulbs, he is not living the lifestyle that he advocates."

The Center claims that Nashville Electric Services records show the Gores in 2006 averaged a monthly electricity bill of $1,359 for using 18,414 kilowatt-hours, and $1,461 per month for using 16,200 kilowatt-hours in 2005. During that time, Nashville Gas Company billed the family an average of $536 a month for the main house and $544 for the pool house in 2006, and $640 for the main house and $525 for the pool house in 2005. That averages out to be $29,268 in gas and electric bills for the Gores in 2006, $31,512 in 2005.

The press release from Johnson's group, an obscure conservative think tank founded by Johnson in 2004 when he was 24, was given splashy attention on the highly-trafficked Drudge Report Monday evening, and former Gore aides saw it as part of a piece, along with an Fox News Channel investigation from earlier this month of Gore's use of private planes in 2000. Last year, a seemingly amateurish Youtube video mocking the "An Inconvenient Truth" turned out to have been produced by slick Republican public relations firm called DCI, which just happens to have oil giant Exxon as a client.

"Considering that he spends an overwhelming majority of his time advocating on behalf of and trying to affect change on this issue, it's not surprising that people who have a vested interest in protecting the status quo would go after him," said the former Gore aide.

Kreider says she's confident that the Gores' utility bills will decrease. "They bought an older home and they're in the process of upgrading the home," she said. "Unfortunately that means an increase in energy use in order to have an overall decrease in energy use down the road."

Gore is not the only environmentalist associated with "An Inconvenient Truth" who has come under fire for personal habits -- and not all the criticism has come from the Right.

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 2004, liberal writer Eric Alterman criticized producer Laurie David for her use of private Gulfstream jets. David, he wrote "reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable." New Republic writer Gregg Easterbrook followed up, computing that "one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year."

In an interview in 2006, David told ABC News that she was limiting her use of private planes and was flying commercial far more frequently.


An inconvenient fact


"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

Lanya

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #2 on: February 27, 2007, 11:44:13 PM »
Responding to Drudge’s attack, Vice President Gore’s office told ThinkProgress:

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 footprint and try to reduce it as much as possible. Once they have done so, he then advocates that they purchase offsets, as the Gore’s do, to bring their footprint down to zero.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/26/gore-responds-to-drudge/
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sirs

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #3 on: February 28, 2007, 12:06:04 AM »
"Drudge's attack"??    ROFL     
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

Plane

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #4 on: February 28, 2007, 12:56:58 AM »
I want a heated pool.


What did the Gore Carbon footprint look like before he bought the used mansion?

Amianthus

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #5 on: February 28, 2007, 07:39:12 AM »
2) Gore has had a consistent position of purchasing carbon offsets to offset the family’s carbon footprint

I followed your link, and many of the links embedded within that page, and found no list, or even any examples, of the carbon offsets that the Gore family purchases.
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. (Benjamin Franklin)

Brassmask

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #6 on: February 28, 2007, 05:15:53 PM »
The sad truth is that Gore's energy use is ALL green.  He actually pays FOUR TIMES AS MUCH as the regular price in order to get green energy.

Once again, the truth and facts jump up and bite the conservatives in the ass.

Amianthus

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #7 on: February 28, 2007, 05:20:28 PM »
The sad truth is that Gore's energy use is ALL green.  He actually pays FOUR TIMES AS MUCH as the regular price in order to get green energy.

Once again, the truth and facts jump up and bite the conservatives in the ass.

Source?

(Green Power Switch is a program to buy power generated by consumers, not a source for "green power".)
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. (Benjamin Franklin)

sirs

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #8 on: February 28, 2007, 08:40:34 PM »
The sad truth is that Gore's energy use is ALL green.  He actually pays FOUR TIMES AS MUCH as the regular price in order to get green energy.

Once again, the truth and facts jump up and bite the conservatives in the ass.

Source?

(Green Power Switch is a program to buy power generated by consumers, not a source for "green power".)


Precisely.  The electricity flowing into Gore's home can be coming from any source, including...*gasp*...coal burning.  There is no Gore Power plant that only pipes "green power" into Gore's home, nor are there any Gore wind mill acres pumping power directly into his home, be it on his property or specifically beloning to Gore elsewhere, while the neighbors get the darker stuff.  Electricity is electricity is electricity.  Gore might have every energy saving appliance known to man IN his mansion, but the FACT still remains he's using 20x the national average
Once again, facts to libs are like kryptonite to Superman     
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

hnumpah

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #9 on: February 28, 2007, 10:10:58 PM »
"I love WikiLeaks." - Donald Trump, October 2016

hnumpah

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #10 on: February 28, 2007, 10:13:05 PM »
"I love WikiLeaks." - Donald Trump, October 2016

Amianthus

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #11 on: March 16, 2007, 11:38:31 AM »
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.

I asked about the "carbon offsets" several times, and got no response from the people who posted the original claims (Lanya and Brass).

Turns out Gore setup a company to buy his "carbon offsets" for himself, from himself.

Quote
First, Al Gore doesn't purchase carbon offsets out of his own pocket and the actual economic cost, if any, to him is unknown.

The actual offset purchaser is a London-based investment firm, Generation Investment Management (GIM), that Al Gore co-founded with former Goldman Sachs executive David Blood and others in 2004.

GIM supposedly purchases carbon offsets for all 23 of its employees to cover their personal energy use, according to a March 7 CNSNews.com report. These offsets, then, would be provided to Gore more as an employee benefit, thus requiring very little sacrifice on his or his family's part.
Al Gore's Inconvenient Electric Bill

"Carbon offsets" are apparently this century's version of the medieval practice of purchasing "indulgences" - where a person pays the church to absolve themselves of sins - many times before sin is even committed.

In addition, there is very little evidence that "carbon offsets" do anything to help the environment.

Quote
The other form of carbon trading is to get Third World companies to cut their emissions to offset Western pollution. The reason this doesn't work--and why the carbon racket is a farce--is that you need a cap for cap-and-trade to work. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the U.S. were capped, and the trading system succeeded in reducing acid rain by half. But even the Kyoto treaty doesn't put any cap on greenhouse gases in China and India, where billions of these carbon credits are traded. Sure, you can pretend you're offsetting Western greenhouse pollution by supposedly cleaning up a dirty coal plant in China. But China is adding a new coal plant every week. You could build a particularly dirty "uncapped" power plant, then sell hundreds of millions in carbon credits to reduce it to a normal rate of pollution. The result? The polluter gets very rich. The planet continues to cook. And the Gores of the world can feel virtuous as they burn up the local power grid.

If Gore really wants to save the planet, he can try this: Turn off the lights. Ditch the heated pool. Ride the subway. And spare us the carbon-trading piety.
Limousine Liberal Hypocrisy.
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. (Benjamin Franklin)

sirs

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #12 on: March 16, 2007, 11:50:45 AM »
D'OH

Perhaps I should take this moment to declare my wife & I are now paying for our own carbon offsets now.  In the front of our house is a city planted tree.  Every week, we pay $1, by planting it in the ground at the base of this tree.  I figure we can now run our washing machine & dishwasher anytime of the day we want, and never have to carpool any longer, since of course the tree is soaking up in any extra energy we might be using, and we're paying for it to soak up that energy specifically for us.       8)
« Last Edit: March 16, 2007, 04:42:19 PM by sirs »
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #13 on: March 16, 2007, 03:53:27 PM »
Sirs demonstrates that he does not understand the concept of energy offsets.
------------------------------------------------------


My electric bill runs less than $90 per month, even with the increased rates and fuel supplemental charges FPL is hitting me with. So I pay maybe $750 per year on my small 2 bedroom house in Miami.

I have only one AC, a window unit in the smallest bedroom that I run maybe 45 days a year. I use heat about 20 days per year. The heat usually is from one of those oil radiator electric things, and occassionally an electric space heater with a blower of 1500 watts. The rest of the time I get by on ceiling fans and portable fans. I have no gas bill or fuel oil bill.

Both my cars are Diesels and get 25-40 mpg depending on where I drive them.

Al lives farther north, and I suppose that he has central air (which is always sold as "saving energy" even though this is true if you cmpare it to running all your window units all the time.

Cheney's electric bill is far more humongeous than Al Gore's.

My bill is a lot more important to me. And it's too high. It used to be under $40 per month.


Most of my bulbs are phosphorescent, and I am pretty frugal with light.

Perhaps it would be best to buy a superefficient fridge.
« Last Edit: March 16, 2007, 03:57:14 PM by Xavier_Onassis »
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Plane

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Re: The Goracle
« Reply #14 on: March 17, 2007, 05:03:55 PM »
"Cheney's electric bill is far more humongeous than Al Gore's. "


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That is an interesting comparison  , can we really look at both thse bills?