There’s nothing more saddening intellectually than seeing smart people being misled by the clever manipulation of factual information. This article shows facts completely out of context and then smart people fall for it prey of their own deductive power.
Here’s the way the thinking process goes:
Al Gore spends a lot of money on energy – fact. (This is the scope of the article).
Energy creation has an inherent side-effect that’s bad for the environment through CO2 pollution and its effects on increasing global warming – fact. (Ironically, this is exactly what Al Gore predicates)
Logically then, it follows that Al Gore is indirectly doing things that are bad for the environment, and hence he is a phoney (this is the goal of the article). The conclusion is straightforward, but it’s also wrong because the premise is being framed incorrectly!
Let’s add some more context…
Al Gore has never claimed that he uses energy at the level of the average person.
What Al Gore has claimed time and again is that he is carbon neutral. This means that whichever harm his lifestyle habits cause to the environment in form of CO2 pollution, he offsets by funding initiatives that reverse the damage, such as reforesting.
The idea is quite simple really. There are organizations that measure the carbon offsetting activities and how much they cost. Next, they sell certificates to any prospective buyer, such as Al Gore, for $5 to $30 per tonne of CO2 removed. The money is used to continue the reforestation efforts. Interestingly enough, this approach is more efficient and easier to implement than a straigthforward reduction in fossil fuels consumption.
So, now that we have a different frame for understanding the article, let’s see if Gore’s claims of being carbon neutral are realistic.
The average CO2 footprint for a resident of a developed nation is between 6 and 23 tonnes of CO2 per year. Taking the article at face value, Al Gore consumes in a month the same amount of energy that the average person consumes in a whole year. That would put Gore at 12 times the average CO2 footprint. Taking the upper limit of 23 tonnes, that yields 276 tonnes of CO2 per year. Let’s say that Gore likes to pay top-dollar for his certificates, and buys them at the $30 rate. He must then shell out $8,280 per year to be carbon neutral. Somehow I have the hunch that he can afford an extra $8K per year. In fact I bet he puts in a bit more than that since 100% of all proceeds from the Inconvenient Truth are used to fund a bipartisan educational campaign. If only 13 people out of all his listeners became carbon neutral then Al Gore could afford not to offset an atom of his CO2 footprint and the world would still be better off.
Sure, there are still controversies around carbon offsetting and there’s no set standard on how to measure these activities and perhaps Gore has many other things that people could pin on him but I bet he is smart enough to have covered his butt on this one – come on people, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that his opponents would try to attack his credibility the minute he opened his mouth.
