More for Gore

With the presidential race revving up for primetime, I wanted to give a shoutout to NFL/Political Columnist Extraordinaire Gregg Easterbrook on his op-ed piece published in the NYT. The story broke in February, but since I've been surrounded by hardcore environmentalists and left-leaning academians the past month, it's no surprise that it was never brought to my attention.

Apparently, sources revealed that beloved erstwhile candidate Al Gore uses TWENTY times more electricity and natural gas at his Tennessee home than the national average. Easterbrook ran Gore's power bills and ZIP code through an emissions calculator and discovered that the former VP causes 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases each year. This usage, as Easterbrook points out, is the equivalent of driving 20 Hummers. Put differently, you'd have to plant roughly 40,000 trees just to neutralize the carbon footprint.

(Here's a good question: what the hell is Al doing in there? Building the world's first "green" nuclear weapon? Purposely raising emissions to support his cause? If he were smart, he'd be building a time machine to return him to Florida, circa October 2000.)

A Gore spokeswoman defended the bills by making sure everyone knew Gore bought offsets for the usage. Hold on a moment. Wasn't the entire premise of "An Inconvenient Truth" that we have to REDUCE emissions substantially in order to reverse global warming? Apparently, Gore doesn't understand that the offsets, by definition, only nullify his current use and don't actually decrease present emissions levels. And they gave this man a Nobel Peace Prize! Must have been a slow year in peace - which I guess it was.

If you're keeping track, here's what Gore did for the environment:

* Produced and promoted "An Inconvenient Truth," a popular film documentary on global warming

Now, here are some other things he did at his political apex (1992-2000):

* Failed to promote or even propose carbon trading
* Declined to raise fuel economy standards for automobiles
* Refused to submit the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for consideration (or even push to ratify it)
* Said little to nothing about climate change
* Took no meaningful action against greenhouse gases

Perhaps he didn't understand the extent of the problem at the time. That's fine; very few of us did anyway. But it's not exactly an impressive record for someone collecting Oscars and Nobels promoting environmentalism, is it?

Gore is a politican after all, so we should've seen this coming. In retrospect, the 2000 election was best summed up by the Rage Against the Machine song "Guerilla Radio":

More for Gore
Or the son of a drug lord?
None of the above,
Fuck it, cut the cord.