Just Who Are You Calling A Hypocrite?

Former U.S. Vice-President and presidential-hopeful Al Gore, better known now as a very vocal instructor on green living and the dismal future of atmospheric collapse that awaits us Earthlings should we fail to heed his warnings, has amassed quite a fortune for himself. He is estimated to have a net worth of $200-million, perhaps more. Fortune aside, he has shared a Nobel Prize, and his books continue to earn him capital.

He was not exactly penurious as a senator, then a Democratic presidential candidate after his stint as vice-president -- worth just under $2-million. But then he sold his little-known Current TV network to Al Jazeera, and his share options with Apple and earned himself $100-million. As spokesman for the health of the environment we all share and pollute, he has world-wide recognition and respect.

No doubt as far as he went at Harvard in journalism and Vanderbilt University in law school without graduation, he parlayed what he learned in academia into a future for himself, even while running for public office. Mr. Gore's speaking engagements earn him $175,000 for each of his earnest and well-rehearsed public appearances.

In a well-considered bit of public relations, profits from his climate books go directly to his non-profit organization, the Climate Reality Project. His literary environmental work funding his environmental charity.  It's just fine that he sold his cable TV network to Qatari interests because Al Jazeera, so he claims, has high quality, extensive climate coverage, best in the world.

So the fact that oil money has profited him is merely incidental to the larger picture of environmental degradation and citizen responsibility. That would be everyone else's responsibility; he goes out of his way to spell out the damage done and what should be done to ameliorate it, but living in a 20-room, 20,000-square foot mansion in Nashville, an energy-burning behemoth can be overlooked; a fellow has to live somewhere.

He has another 'somewhere'; an ocean-front six-bedroom, $8.9-million villa in Montecito, California. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research claims the Nashville house used almost 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006, which works out to some twenty times the national average household consumption. But then life is full of inconvenient truths.

But there's lots of those inconvenient truths. Consider: while Al Gore laments the unfortunate Alberta-based oilsands, he must certainly be aware, as an energy and pollution expert, that the greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired electricity stations in his country pollute 40 times greater than do the oilsands. The U.S., in fact, accounts for 22% of global GHG emissions; Canada for 2%.

Working that out in relative terms, with a population nine times greater than Canada, the American greenhouse gas emissions are eleven times higher than Canada's. That would be Canada, to the north of the 49th parallel a geography well known to be much colder than that of the greater United States, with commensurately higher home-heating needs.