While Al Gore was recently off jetting to Oslo to smarmily lobby on his own behalf for the Nobel Peace Prize – a kind of jury tampering, I might add – I was in Nashville. One afternoon while touring the posh Belle Meade neighborhood, my guide pointed out Tipper and Al’s 10,000 square foot mansion. That’s about the size of a three-story dormitory at one the fancy boarding schools Al attended before Harvard.
I asked my tour guide if he knew how much energy the Gores were using while Al preached conservation to everyone on the planet while consuming tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel on the way to speaking engagements for his hefty fees. Apparently I was not the first to ponder the Gore hypocrisy. According to reports in the Nashville press, the couple shelled out about $30,000 in energy bills last year. That’s about 12 times more than the average home. Or put another way, the Gores use more energy in a single month in that one mansion than most of us use in a year. And we actually live in our houses.
The Gore PR machine spins a dizzying tale about how the mansion is something called “carbon neutral.” I hear the same PR firm sells bridges in Brooklyn and San Francisco. I think that means the Gores pay some illegal aliens – at arm’s length, of course – to plant tree seedlings in a national park. Or maybe tobacco farming qualifies as a carbon-reducing activity. With all Al Gore’s profligate energy consumption, he maintains that he makes a small “carbon footprint” in the tender planet.
In his own mind, and in the minds of Hollywood, Gore is a kind of messiah with a new gospel. In his propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth, he claims that the debate about global warming is over. When did it ever begin? Earnestly and honestly?
During Gore’s speaking engagements at colleges and universities, the ground rules are clear: No one may challenge his premise. He will not take questions from scientists or experts who dare counter his data, methods or conclusions – regardless of credentials. Now the Oscar-winning (gasp) film is shown in schools as fact, as science, as indisputable. What can we expect in a culture that accepts Michael Moore as a historian? The backbone of science is constant scrutiny, constant peer review and criticism, constant evaluation. But Al Gore’s international road show is as controlled and scripted as a Clinton town meeting. And anyone who diverts from the playbook is deemed in the same class as Holocaust deniers.
But I have to thank Al Gore for one thing: If he didn’t invent the internet for us, this Blog could not exist.
Dear Mr. Budris,
Are you saying that the super wealthy and super influential should not try to improve the environment because, by the very the fact of their wealth, they are unfit to preach conservation? I think that although your argument is logical, it is not, in the end, wise. I hope more politicians – super wealthy or otherwise, take up the cause of our environment as a result of Mr. Gore’s work. I would imagine, though I cannot be sure, that you too would like to see steps taken to protect the environment for our children, our grandchildren, and the good of the planet as a whole.
Comment by Jill — April 19, 2007 @ 1:30 pm
Dear Ms. Jill,
I am not saying that the super-wealthy and super-influential should not try to improve the environment. Quite to the contrary. What I am saying, however, is that their rhetoric should to be in line with their lives. The obvious hypocrisy of an abolitionist who owns slaves needs no clarification. A self-ordained high priest of the earth like Al Gore should behave like one. He does not need to fly all over the world to spread his message along with the jet fuel vapors. The most popular talk-radio hosts reach tens of millions of people every day from studios right inside their homes. Al Gore’s own invention (big guffaw) the internet, can reach even more when the airwaves can not. My point is: Al Gore – like so many of his ilk – is one of those do as I say, not as I do characters.
Comment by John Budris — April 19, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
Dear Mr. Budris,
You are a clever writer, but Al Gore on an airplane is not the same as an abolitionist with slaves. Are you suggesting that anyone who fights for environmental responsibility should forgo plane rides? I bet he has a car, too – that hypocrite. Meanwhile, Bill Gates ought to stop trying to end hunger in Africa – after all, his household consumes as much food in one week as the average African family sees in a year. Shame on him for even trying to make the world a better place.
Respectfully yours,
Jill
Comment by Jill — April 19, 2007 @ 6:59 pm
Dear Ms. Jill,
Allow me then to retract and rephrase: Rather than an abolitionist with slaves, Al Gore is like a gun-control advocate with an Uzi in his glove compartment. He represents the most duplicitous kind of self-serving politician. Of course, he had fine mentors in the Clintons. True advocates for the environment (and I posit, who isn’t for the environment?) try their best to conform their behavior consistent with their stated ideology. Gore does not. As to your allusion to Bill Gates and food, though I can not say for sure, I doubt his staff spreads out a banquet table for 12 each night in an empty house and then discards the food. The Gore’s mansion is the epitome of waste. While Al and Tipper globe trot lecturing us about conservation, their energy consumption soars beyond the imagination of us common folk.
Comment by John Budris — April 19, 2007 @ 7:17 pm
This is disgusting…
Comment by Emy — May 18, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
Credits and carbon footprint… What a formula for corruption. Whatever happened to “practice what you preach”
Comment by Brad and Jeannine Crooks — September 8, 2007 @ 9:53 am