Thus a looming environmental crisis facing all of humanity is reduced to celebrity gossip.
Well done. Keep fighting the good fight!
Sage Rat I don’t know any of the facts except what I read here on the straightdope. I think based on the area that he is in, that a large percentage of his energy was derived from burning fossil feuls. That is not clean energy. I could be wrong.
It sounds like President Bush has installed some very eco-freindly energy management systems in his Crawford house (How many other houses does he have?) Bush is not my cup-of-tea but I will not detract from him when he apparently has done a decent thing. (Even though its for a cause he actively fights politically.)
NES and TVA have been offering “clean energy” alternative power for a couple of years now. You wind up paying extra on your bill, but the power that’s going to your home isn’t from one of TVA’s coal plants. From what I understand Al’s shelled out the extra bucks for this.
I love this sentance:
“Only,” huh?
Gore’s house is “only” 10,000.
Oh, God, don’t let me get sucked back into this debate. Must resist…
Great, he is lighting his cigars with green $100 dollar bills. :rolleyes:
But what about his gas usage?
Twenty times the national average? What is Al doing? Running gas fireplaces in every room, and then turning on the A/C cause it’s too warm?
Actually, depending upon when the house was built, it may not be very well insulated. As late as the 1980s, builders here didn’t seem to grasp the concept that it does get cold here in the winter and they didn’t bother to really insulate houses or equip them with proper furnaces. I’ve lived in places that had freakin’ space heaters for heat, and come the winter you had two choices: Freeze your nuts off, but keep the heat turned down so you don’t have an insanely high electric bill or turn the heat up so that you have an insanely high electric bill and still freeze your nuts off.
What Gore’s specific situation in regards to that is, I don’t know. Maybe it’s got a crappy furnace, maybe his mansion’s not properly insulated, or maybe with a house full of women, Al’s got to keep the heat at 89 degrees or he has to spend the entire winter listening to them bitch about being cold. 
IAC, natural gas is a fairly clean burning fuel, unlike say, coal or oil.
The part I like best is that the company he gets his “carbon offsets” from is a company that he is on the board of. Cite
The article makes the point that he’s not profiting from the offsets, but he doesn’t have to pay for them as an employee of the company.
I leave it up to you whether a perk is “not profiting”. As I see it, a car that costs $500 a month that the company pays for is $500 in your pocket that you wouldn’t ordinarily have, i.e. a profit, but again, that’s your call.
While Gore is undoubtedly well-intentioned, he seems to be having trouble living up to the standards he is espousing for the rest of us. These things happen from time to time, I suppose.
I have an idea. Why doesn’t the former Vice President – a gentleman that I have voted for many times – move into a smaller, more efficient house? He could make his house a “green” showplace. I’m surprised that he hasn’t.
Well, I stand corrected. I guess the president has more say than a typical historic house resident gets. I won’t begrudge Reagan tearing off Carter’s solar panels. It’s only been in the last few years that solar panels have become efficient enough to be worth bothering with. Carter-era solar panels would have done little except make the White House uglier. I live in an apartment, so I really can’t begrudge Bush for not wanting to spend a lot of time and money fixing up someone else’s property.
As to this whole “carbon credits” business, let’s call them what they are: a guilt offering, the environmental equivalent of giving money to charity to atone for your sins. As with traditional guilt offerings, it’s fair to ask, “why don’t you change your behavior and be done with it?”
As Tuckerfan says, Gore pays extra to use clean energy. But regardless, the point remains that the man isn’t out there trying to convince people to use less energy. He’s trying to convince people that we need to spend the extra money to switch over to clean energy. If clean energy wasn’t available in his area and he was still using the same amount of energy as he is now, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Mankind uses as much power as it needs to use and that’s only going to increase. No one’s trying to say “Use less!” so it doesn’t matter how much you use, whether it’s half of what the ordinary person uses, or eighty times.
I’m really glad that Bush has an environmentally friendly home. Really. But an efficient heating system in Crawford, Texas isn’t really saving a lot of energy. And the collection of rainwater has a lot more to do with it being located in the dry part of the country. Still, great for Bush, hip hip hooray. But I’d rather have a leader wasting energy like a madman personally and who is taking the country in the right direction on environmental issues than have a leader who is very energy efficient at home but whose policies are bad for the environment.