This story has been around for a few days, but I just think it bears repeating–especially after the Al Gore-lovefest, I mean the Grammys, the other night.
While Gore relaxes in his posh pool house and heated pool, you should be taking shorter and colder showers, and hanging your laundry outside to dry. As Gore jets around the world in first-class comfort to hob-nob with society’s elites about his self-declared “moral imperative”, you should travel less and bike to work. You should use less electricity while Al and his wife, Tipper, use 20 times the national average. Now that’s a real carbon offset.
“Are you ready to change the way you live?” Gore literally meant you – and only you.
Do you realize that it costs Al Gore more money to heat his pool than it costs me to heat my house? Drafty windows and all? Gore makes a big deal about his carbon offsets, which is a stupid idea in the first place, and yet he doesn’t even pay for his offsets.
First, Al Gore doesn’t purchase carbon offsets out of his own pocket and the actual economic cost, if any, to him is unknown.
The actual offset purchaser is a London-based investment firm, Generation Investment Management (GIM), that Al Gore co-founded with former Goldman Sachs executive David Blood and others in 2004.
GIM supposedly purchases carbon offsets for all 23 of its employees to cover their personal energy use, according to a March 7 CNSNews.com report. These offsets, then, would be provided to Gore more as an employee benefit, thus requiring very little sacrifice on his or his family’s part. …
But it’s the carbon offset purchases through which Gore really validates application of the $300-man epithet to him. His company buys the offsets for their employees. There’s no cost to him. He benefits politically – and perhaps financially, as well – from them. He then advocates that the rest of us who cannot so easily offset are carbon production suffer myriad personal sacrifices.
Of course he’s laughing on the Grammys. (And, btw, did you really think that Melissa Etheridge song was the best? How can Dreamgirls have three nominated songs and not win?) He’s laughing because he owns more houses right now than most people have in their lifetime. That’s the joke.
Balaam's Ass 