People who buy products from their own company are assholes? Wouldn’t he be a bigger assholeif he didn’t buy products that he sold?
:::sigh:::
I give–just why does that make him an asshole?
To add to what **Simplicio **and **samclem **said, it is sad but Penn & Teller did fell for… well, bullshit.
Seriously? Because, by buying those, he gets to pollute more that the rest of us, while telling us we need to pollute less. And because its his own company, he can negotiate whatever price he wants.
I would think that that is a point coming mostly from Fox news.
I don’t think he’s been around for awhile – has he?
Gores Tenn. House has solar panels, rainwater collection system, geothermic heating and uses compact light emitting diode light bulbs.
AFAIR he crashed and burned by telling us all that there was no such thing as water vapor feedback with CO2, when I posted the evidence showing how ignorant that position was, he played the “ignore card”.
He never showed again for climate change threads but I think I noticed him in Cafe Society (I helped him once to ID a movie that he was looking for and he never gave thanks)
So…
Al Gore, who is a very wealthy man, has bought a very expensive house. And this somehow makes him a scam artist. Got it.
I’ve made this argument before, probably the last time this came up.
It’s true that compact fluorescent bulbs and recycling aren’t going to save the planet. Al Gore knows that. He knows that the only things that will help to counteract global warming are big, top-down solutions–government regulations, international treaties, investment of public money (in conjunction with private investment), and the like.
Changes like that happen from the top down, but the political will to make them comes from the bottom up. People need to be willing to elect politicians who will make climate change a priority, to commit tax dollars to solving the problem, and to accept changes that come along with the solutions. The best way to guarantee that is to make environmental stewardship a part of people’s everyday lives, and a part of being a good citizen.
The best way to do that is to encourage people to 1.) educate themselves, and 2.) make better choices within their own lives, like choosing more efficient light bulbs or cars. People aren’t going to pay attention if you tell them they need to start acting like Ed Begley, Jr., but if you get them in the habit of doing the small everyday things then you can start to create the political will to make the real changes happen.
That’s why someone like Al Gore is a better spokesman for the movement than someone like Ed Begley, Jr. Gore has not completely restructured his life around reducing his environmental impact the way Begley has; instead he lives the life that he wants to live and takes steps to reduce the impact of that life on the climate, even if he doesn’t take every step that he could. That’s all he asks of anyone else.
Meanwhile, he’s educating and focusing people to help create a political environment in which the big changes can happen.
So even though people who are predisposed to dislike Al Gore may call his unwillingness to live off the grid in a log cabin and travel solely by horseback “hypocrisy”, it would not make his advocacy more effective if he went overboard with his own conservation. Gore is playing the long game.
I should have elaborated why I think he’s an asshole. It’s more the fact that he sells carbon offsets, and makes a shit ton of money doing so. He presents himself as this great moral crusader, but his actions more closely resemble those of a profiteer. He doesn’t donate all the money he earns from from global warming to environmental causes, he spends it on multiple mansions that consume tons of energy to be built, heated, and air conditioned. Now I wouldn’t find this so particularly galling if he didn’t chastise Americans for causing more pollution than Indians via our higher rate of consumption. Or if carbon offsets actually stopped or reversed global warming, but best case scenario they mildly retard its increase. Basically, Gore’s message is “do as I say, not as I do,” which pretty much makes him an asshole.
Buying carbon offsets does not mean he gets to polute more than the rest of us.
Again, I ask for evidence that the technologies paid for when you purchase carbon offsets do not work. I do not know what they are, personally. It very well could be that they do not work.
But Gore is not hypocritical if his technology really does offset as much carbon as claimed, and he invests enough to offset his footprint. Even if he claimed that if everyone did as he did with regards to carbon offsets, then fears of global warming would be solved, he would just be mistaken, rather than hypocritical.
And even if there is a too-low maximum on these schemes, if they actually work, then Gore is not a net polluter. Most people do not invest in carbon offsets, so he is paying for people to perform environmental mitigation which would not happen without the money.
Except he does pollute more than the rest of us. While telling us we should pollute less. I don’t think he’s lying about the existence of global warming, I just think he’s an asshole.
The OP does not even try to show that Al Gore is a scam artist.
Maybe because Al Gore isn’t a scam artist. If he buys a huge, wasteful property, does that make him a scam artist? No.
End of story.
Has the OP been in a coma since 2006? Because this debate raged on back then, and it got nowhere, because the people who hated Gore said “HYPOCRITE!!!” and used it as an excuse not to do anything about global warming, and meanwhile those who didn’t hate Gore said “WHO CARES” and … well, probably didn’t do much of anything about global warming either. And that’s pretty much the end of the debate as far as it went. Why on earth bring this up four years later as if you’ve only just read it on Drudge?
Oh wait. I think I just figured it out. A thread rehashing old material? Maybe it’s actually just a winking nod to Gore’s exhortation to save the environment by recycling. Well played, OP!
Do you not understand the definition of the word “offset”?
Cite?
That’s what I was thinking, too - when the rubber hits the road, that kind of is what it means. It’s like trying to lose weight by paying someone to go to the gym and work out for you.
At least it’s not another thread about Sarah Palin. I mean, it is the same thread, just with the name changed from Sarah Palin to Al Gore, but at least the name is different and I get to read different people cry, “Hypocrite!!”.