Al Gore says his high-carbon life-style of private jets, limousines, and four residences–including a mansion that consumers more energy in a month than the average household does in year–does not make him a hypocrite, because he purchases “carbon offsets.”
Amazing what some guys can say with a straight face. Let’s leave aside the question of whether Gore actually pays for those offsets, and whether paying someone else to plant trees that won’t mature for decades actually offsets any emissions you produce today.
Instead, let’s look at the morality of offsetting. If a glutton pays someone else to go on a diet, is he any less a glutton? Can an adulterer offset his sins by paying other people not to cheat on their wives?
Someone who looks strictly at energy balances might question the appropriateness of these jibes, but Al Gore says global warming is a “moral” and “spiritual” issue. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore admonishes readers to “reduce the number of miles you drive by biking, walking, carpooling, or taking mass transit wherever possible,” and to “reduce air travel.” Does he practice what he preaches? Nope.
But does this make Al Gore a bad person? By his own lights, yes. But in reality, no. Gore’s high-carbon life-style reveals that he is a preacher of sham virtue. An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar, the Nobel Peace Prize, and Live Earth, to say nothing of all the campaigning and networking and media outreach Gore did over the years would not have been possible without lots of affordable energy produced from fossil fuels.
Not even Al Gore, one of the world’s richest and most powerful men, can afford to live “beyond petroleum” for a single minute! Isn’t it a little crazy then to demand that government put ordinary folks on an energy diet?
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I could say a lot of things in response to this post, but I’ll just say this: the environment doesn’t care whether you’re moral, whether you’re a hypocrite, or what your motivations are for offsetting your carbon. The environment only cares that there is less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And one more thing: you’re definitely right about trees planted today not absorbing carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere today. What actually happens, is trees planted today absorb carbon dioxide that was released into the atmosphere at some point in the past. That’s a good thing.
Keep up the digging!
- Russell
from Carbonfund.org
It is rather creepy that a champion of carbon reduction should have to cause so much to be emitted. David Suzuki has moaned about this for years, as he traveled the world on essentially the same mission as Gore.
But at least he’s trying. Just because he hasn’t got it right, I wouldn’t want other people to think they can get away with doing nothing at all. But can we so easily discount the positive outcomes of Gore’s relentless campaigning? If he encourages thousands (maybe more) people to take global warming seriously and improve their own lifestyles, not to mention demand serious action from political and business leaders, might this not be a meaningful “offset”of his massive carbon consumption? He’s not off the hook, but he’s not on a holiday.
The environmental activists call for everyone else to reduce their “carbon footprint.” But are they interested in reducing theirs? Only when hell freezes over. This “global warming” crusade is absurd. They want everyone else to change their ways of living, but have no interest in changing theirs. If the Greens were given control of the world, I’ll bet they would ultimately change the world back to the way it was before the Industrial Revolution. To do that would be insane. Global Warming or not, there’s no turning back to that point in time. We can only go forward in technological innovation.
Algore and his kind are the greatest perpetrators of the worlds greatest scam, global warming. Mankind has NOT caused one bit of this worlds climate to change. global warming is just a way for people like algore to get rich and to bring successful societies (like the USA) down to a 3rd world situation. I plan on spewing more CO2 into the environment and in fact I am spewing an aerosal can into the air right now….just to upset the silly liberals that are stupid enough to be believe in global warming. Here’s a challenge to all the idiots out there…show me one shred of evidence that global warming (as prescribed by morons like algore) is real. In fact, if you can prove it there is a prize (offered by others) in the amount of 125K…..idiots