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Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth': While telling the rest of us to cut back, he
uses 20 times more energy to run his house than everyone else
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=nation_world&id=5072659
Heated pools
electronic gates
gas lanterns in yard
and $30,000 a year in
utility bills. How do you spell h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e?
(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.
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