A few days ago I wrote a post attempting to defend Al Gore from the acrimony heaped upon him for his ultra-extravagant use of electricity at his home in Nashville. At the time I professed a high level of skepticism, though, at Gore’s own defense that his energy use was “carbon neutral” because he purchased “carbon offsets.”

And I was right. Because as it turns out, Gore is buying the offsets from himself.

The problem is that they were being purchased from Generation Investment Management — chairman, Albert Gore, Jr. In other words, Al was paying Al for the privilege of wasting electricity. It’s as if Gandhi had been photographed inside his ashram wearing spats and a waistcoat and sipping Boodles gin. From now on all the little gestures - riding in the hybrid limo, having the private jet pilot sign the carbon offset certificate, and for all we know, touring the North American continent in a solar-powered blimp - are going to look just the slightest bit hollow.

As Mark Steyn put it,

Al buys his carbon offsets from Generation Investment Management LLP, which is “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 and with offices in London and Washington, D.C.,” that, for a fee, will invest your money in “high-quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns.” Generation is a tax-exempt U.S. 501(c)3. And who’s the chairman and founding partner? Al Gore.

So Al can buy his carbon offsets from himself. Better yet, he can buy them with the money he gets from his long-time relationship with Occidental Petroleum. See how easy it is to be carbon-neutral? All you have do is own a gazillion stocks in Big Oil, start an eco-stockbroking firm to make eco-friendly investments, use a small portion of your oil company’s profits to buy some tax-deductible carbon offsets from your own investment firm, and you too can save the planet while making money and leaving a carbon footprint roughly the size of Godzilla’s at the start of the movie when they’re all standing around in the little toe wondering what the strange depression in the landscape is.

A credibility problem here? I’d certainly say so.

Update: This simply does not pass the smell test. Gore is a founder (2004) of Generation Investment Management, based in London. CNS reports

GIM pays to offset the energy use of its operations and the personal emissions of its 23 employees, including Gore.

So, the firm will cover the cost to offset the energy use at Gore’s home, or his global jet travel, as it would the offset cost of any other employee, [GIM spokesman Richard] Campbell said.

So I stand corrected - Gore isn’t buying offsets to compensate for using energy like a drunken sailor goes through liquor. The company he owns gives the offsets to him. Now that’s brass. Since GIM is an investment firm, that means its depositors actually are subsidizing Al Gore’s profligacy. I wonder whether they know?

Britain’s Channel 4 was the key player in the broadcast there of “The Jesus Family Tomb.” Not content with stirring up trouble for the Christian religion, it’s now turned its guns against the global warming religion (oh, did I say that?) Its new show is called, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

The programme, to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday March 8, will see a series of respected scientists attack the “propaganda” that they claim is killing the world’s poor.

Even the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is shown, claiming African countries should be encouraged to burn more CO2.

Nobody in the documentary defends the greenhouse effect theory, as it claims that climate change is natural, has been occurring for years, and ice falling from glaciers is just the spring break-up and as normal as leaves falling in autumn.

A source at Channel 4 said: “It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for.”

Controversial director Martin Durkin said: “You can see the problems with the science of global warming, but people just don’t believe you – it’s taken ten years to get this commissioned.

“I think it will go down in history as the first chapter in a new era of the relationship between scientists and society. Legitimate scientists – people with qualifications – are the bad guys.

“It is a big story that is going to cause controversy.

“It’s very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bollocks.

“Al Gore might have won an Oscar for ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, but the film is very misleading and he has got the relationship between CO2 and climate change the wrong way round.”

One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but palaeontologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.

He has evidence showing that warmer spells in the Earth’s history actually came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.

Prof Clark believes increased levels of CO2 are because the Earth is heating up and not the cause. He says most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas.

When the temperature increases, more gas is released into the atmosphere and when global temperatures cool, more CO2 is taken in. Because of the immense size of the oceans, he said they take time to catch up with climate trends, and this ‘memory effect’ is responsible for the lag.

Scientists in the programme also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.

It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.

This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.

The programme claims there appears to be a consensus across science that CO2 is responsible for global warming, but Professor Paul Reiter is shown to disagree.

He said the influential United Nations report on Climate change, that claimed humans were responsible, was a sham.

It claimed to be the opinion of 2,500 leading scientists, but Prof Reiter said it included names of scientists who disagreed with the findings and resigned from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and said the report was finalised by government appointees.

Much more at the link, RTWT. Another look at the documentary here.

… when I’d be defending Al Gore. But I ‘ve been having second thoughts about the acrimony heaped upon him because of his apparently profligate energy use in his home in the Belle Meade area of Nashville. It’s been ironclad reported - and actually acknowledged by a Gore company spokesperson - that Gore’s 10,000-square-foot mansion in Nashville’s Belle Meade area consumes more energy in one month than the typical Nashville house does in a year.

Is Gore a moralist preacher, as Glenn Reynolds and Eric Scheie have said? Well, yes. He demands severe cutbacks in first-world lifestyles and business practices in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That means reducing the amount of energy used that is produced by burning fossil fuels. If the standard of living and economic output are to be maintained, it is necessary to replace “old” energy with non-GHG-producing energy a a scale and cost that make replacement both practical and financially attractive.

Well, we ain’t there yet, not by a long shot. Alternative means of producing energy are still neither scalable to offset present demand significantly, nor are they cheap enough to do so. We generally believe (and hope) they will become scalable and cheap in coming years, but we don’t actually know they will.

So Gore has a house (really a mansion by any reasonable definition) that is between 4-5 times bigger than a typical house in Nashville (maybe more than that) but uses roughly 20 times the energy, both electricity and natural gas. Since he is a crusading energy moralist, does that make him a hypocrite?

Needless to say, Gore says no. Through spokesperson Kalee Kreider, the former vice president and recent Oscar winnner has protested that his family,

… tries to offset that carbon footprint by purchasing their power through the local Green Power Switch program — electricity generated through renewable resources such as solar, wind, and methane gas, which create less waste and pollution. “In addition, they are in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power,” Kreider added. “They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero.”

The Nashville Electric Service’s “Green Power Switch” works like this: by paying an extra $4 per month to NES, customers can buy 150-KwH of electricity that is generated by means other than fossil fuel plants, such as wind or solar power or methane burning. I’m not sure how “green” that latter really is, since burning methane exhausts carbon dioxide, but let that pass.

Okay, the carbon offset thing seems a shell-game scam to me, and even the vaunted Economist magazine seems to agree. Gerard Van Der Leun appropriately compared offsetting to the pre-Reformation practice of the Catholic Church of selling indulgences. It worked like this: you, a sinner, could pay money to the Church, which would draw from its (claimed) bank of religious virtue and apply it to you personally. Most often, indulgences were hawked to congregants as a means of buying dear departed Grandma out of purgatory. In fact, the most famous indulgence hawker was one Johann Tetzel, whose jingle went like this: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, another soul from purgatory springs.” Since the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s, though, the granting of indulgences has been specifically forbidden to be attached to any financial matter; they just ain’t for sale no mo’, folks, sorry.

Carbon offsetting is exactly like Tetzel’s salesmanship. It lets you claim righteousness without repentance. And that’s what brought down the blogosphere upon Gore’s head, followed by a brief flare of media attention. (Just try to imagine if the exact same story had broken about the house of any national-level Republican. Really, just pick one. Then consider the media attention given to this Republican’s house. Oh, wait, there’s been practically none.)

But . . .

This morning I read Bruce Thompson’s piece at American Thinker, “Deconstructing Al Gore’s utility bill,” in which Thompson takes Gore to task for getting his power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, routed through the Nashville Electric Service. I emailed Bruce some corrections, which he was kind enough to append to his essay, but here is the gist.

I live in Franklin, Tenn., near Nashville, and my power comes from TVA as Gore’s does, although it is sold to us through two different entities. I don’t draw electricity from NES but from a local co-op. In his column, Bruce wrote,

Note also that all TVA customers are getting a huge bargain on their bills due to the TVA being a mostly nuclear and hydropower source utility, originally funded by the federal government (i.e. all federal taxpayers).

In fact, TVA has been self financed since 1959; neither Al Gore’s nor my electricity is taxpayer subsidized. Also, TVA is neither mostly nuclear nor hydropower. According to http://www.tva.com/power/index.htm: “Fossil-fuel plants produce about 60 percent of TVA’s power, nuclear plants about 30 percent, and hydropower dams about 10 percent.” TVA’s power production is actually mostly coal-fired.

TVA was founded in 1933 not to provide power, but to control Tennessee River Valley flooding and to restore the productivity of farmland. It was not until World War II that TVA became principally focused on power generation and it was to provide wartime energy needs that TVA’s hydropower facilities came to be, although some such capacity was built in before then. http://www.tva.com/abouttva/history.htm:

During World War II, the United States needed aluminum to build bombs and airplanes, and aluminum plants required electricity. To provide power for such critical war industries, TVA engaged in one of the largest hydropower construction programs ever undertaken in the United States.

I never thought I would find myself in a position to defend Al Gore, but facts are facts. I know well the Belle Meade area of Nashville where Gore lives. My grandmother lived out her widowhood in an apartment house there, and I used to bike down Belle Meade Blvd. as a teen

Belle Meade is the “old money” section of Nashville, dating back to at least the 1920s and quite likely to the turn of the 20th century. Gore’s house, at 10K sq. ft., is no tiny thing, but it’s not exceptional in Belle Meade by any means. See the satellite photo of his address. These houses are not energy efficient as first designed and built, though I assume that they have been upgraded since. But geothermal heating and cooling, like President Bush uses in Crawford, is out of the question in Nashville. The whole region sits on limestone that goes down miles. More here.

I’m not sure what Al Gore could do to become greener in his home than he says he is - although it’s fair to ask what’s taking him so long. I’m willing to bet that his electrical usage is not far out of line with his neighbors. It also should be pointed out that Gore runs his business - and it’s a big business, obviously - out of his house (or so his spokeperson claims), and that should be factored in.

So I think we all should take a chill pill here. There’s less than meets the eye about all this. The only item that Gore’s defense offers that bothers me is the carbon offsetting claim, since it forms a crutch to prop up the profligacy of energy the Gore house uses. Even so, another correspondent to Bruce Thompson thinks it is valid, and explains why. Sure, Gore could use a big dollop of humility, but couldn’t we all . . .

Update: On the other hand, the energy bill for Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence at the US Naval Observatory grounds in Washington, DC, comes to whopping $186,000 per year. That’s $15,500 per month, which is what Gore paid for six months of energy in 2006.

On still another hand, Nashvillian Bob Krumm (whom I know personally; he’s a former Army officer as am I), who lives much closer to Al than I do, says that his house is half the size of Gore’s, but uses one-third or so the energy per sq. ft.

… the Krumm household consumed 7.34 KWH per square foot over the last twelve months. During the same period, Mr. and Mrs. Gore used 19.43 KWH per square foot–nearly three times our family’s energy consumption.

Okay, so maybe he has electric heat. We should then compare gas bills to get a complete picture. …

… the Gore household used $6,432 worth of gas in 2006, ranging from a monthly high of $990 to a low of $170. By contrast our gas bill was only $1,137 last year, with a monthly range from $33 to $205.

Again, accounting for size, in 2006 the Krumms spent 24 cents per square foot to heat our home and water, and to cook our meals. The Gores spent nearly triple that amount: 64 cents per square foot.

Again, I don’t think such a direct comparison is entirely valid, since Bob doesn’t run his business from his home (I’m pretty sure) and doesn’t have a Secret Service detachment staying there 24/7. Nor does Bob have a seaprate guest house which in Gore’s case is likely occupied more often than not. But this point of Bob’s does seem relevant:

Still, in spite of the fact that the entire Gore home was under renovation for over a year, they didn’t apparently incorporate significant energy-saving ideas into the design–at least not until now. The result is that they spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars on home improvements but still have a house that will consume a million dollars worth of energy over the length of a thirty year mortgage … .

As I said, what took him so long? And here’s Bob’s kicker:

Four and a half years ago Al Gore bought a large home and made it larger, but did very little to reduce his own energy consumption. Instead, he spent the same time telling you how to reduce yours.

BTW, local channel 2 News (WKRN) posted online Gore’s actual billing record from NES. Whether the former veep realizes it or not, this issue is a big credibility problem for him.

Update: Local resident John Wark emails,

I just finished reading your post defending (choke) Al Gore. Can’t say I totally disagree with you and it pains me as well to say anything in his defense, but here’s a quick correction to your post. I don’t believe that Gore has a Secret Service detail any longer. If I’m not mistaken, former Vice Presidents get Secret Service protection for only six months after leaving office. Only ex-President’s have permanent Secret Service details.

Now, I would not be surprised if Gore has security of some sort. I strongly suspect that his house has a much more high tech and high end security system than your typical suburban ADT set-up. That could cause some amount of the extra energy consumption for his residence, especially if there are a lot of active sensors that are armed 24 x 7. It certainly wouldn’t account for all of the extra consumption – not sure what could use that much power in a 10,000 sq ft house – but it would be one reason why Gore’s per sq. foot consumption is higher than, say, Bob Krumm’s.

Does Gore have an actual Secret Service detail? Anybody know? John’s email makes another thought occur to me: just what is sucking up all the juice in the Gore house? Multiple home movie theaters? Twelve deep freezers? Three heated pools? What?

The LA Times on the environmental unfriendliness of private jets like the Gulfstream IV:

… A round-trip Los Angeles-Washington flight on the Gulfstream burns about 4,500 to 5,000 gallons of fuel at a cost of roughly $20,000, depending on local pump prices, said Jeff Beck, a veteran corporate pilot. And that doesn’t include pilot fees, maintenance and parking bills.

“It’s the least environmental thing that politicians can do,” Beck said. He said Gulfstreams devour so much fossil fuel per passenger that “it’s like they’re throwing dinosaur bones out of the tailpipe.”

Uh, Jeff, oil doesn’t come from dinosaur bones.

I have been perusing the web site of the Nashville Electric Service, impelled by the revelation that Al Gore’s mansion in Nashville’s Belle Meade area consumes more energy in one month as the typical Nashville house does in a year.

Through spokesperson Kalee Kreider, the former vice president and recent Oscar winnner has protested that his family,

… tries to offset that carbon footprint by purchasing their power through the local Green Power Switch program — electricity generated through renewable resources such as solar, wind, and methane gas, which create less waste and pollution. “In addition, they are in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power,” Kreider added. “They also use compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy efficiency measures and then they purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero.”

The Nashville Electric Service offers a program called, “Green Power Switch.” By paying an extra $4 per month to NES, customers can buy 150-KwH of electricity that is generated by means other than fossil fuel plants, such as wind or solar power or methane burning. I’m not sure how “green” that latter really is, since burning methane exhausts carbon dioxide, but let that pass.

NES claims that buying 24 blocks of power ($96) provides a carbon offset equivalent of parking your car for four months. If you drive a pretty typical 15,000 miles per year, that $96 lets you pretend you are driving only 10,000 miles. Or, put another way, pony up a C-note less four bucks and you get to guilt-free drive 20,000 miles per year!

Which leads me to the denouement: I drive about 24,000 miles per year. If you use energy at Gore-like levels, let me sell you an indulgence carbon offset. All you have to do is help me buy a Toyota Camry or Honda Accord hybrid and I will give you an official certificate crediting you, pro-rata, with a carbon offset based on the reduced quantity of fuel those cars use than what I drive now. How can you pass up a deal like that?

In response to my essay, “Mythbusting E85,” a blogger by the nom de blog of Engineer-Poet has called my attention to his Nov. 2006 posting, “Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy - What, me worry?” Unlike me, this fellow really is an engineer and I readily admit deals with the technical matters of energy policy better than I. near the top:

There are many frustrating things about our current energy non-policy. One of the worst is that we’re paying people to do ineffective or even counterproductive things in the name of “sustainability”, “energy independence” and even supporting family farming. For instance, our current production of ethanol depends on natural gas or even coal to distill the product. (”Live green, go yellow”? If something depends on burning coal, how green can it be?)

But what if we fixed that?

It won’t be easy to change. There are huge interest groups which reap benefits from the status quo. This gives the non-policy a great deal of support, whether it is productive or not. The example of corn ethanol illustrates this nicely. A bunch of people are doing well by it, including:

* Corn-belt farmers, who have a market too big to saturate.
*Agribusinesses like ADM, which reap billions in taxpayer subsidies in the name of (illusory) energy independence.
* Manufacturers and sellers of seed, fertilizer and pesticides.
* The politicians whose taxpayer-financed largesse created this bonanza, and who are in turn supported by its beneficiaries (the benefits aren’t for the taxpayer).

Contrary to mouthpieces of those interests, corn ethanol doesn’t do well at anything else; it takes nearly a gallon-equivalent of various fuels (including natural gas and diesel) to make a gallon of ethanol. By the USDA’s over-optimistic accounting, the increase is roughly 1.27:1, which is not nearly enough to make a sustainable system. …

The displaced gasoline comes mostly from some other fossil fuel, the greenhouse benefit is minuscule, and the public pays more overall for the ethanol than they would for imported oil to fill their tanks. In the long run, this is bound to collapse. But in the short run, the program thrives and grows because of the interlocking political support.

It’s a long piece, illustrated with graphs and tables. Something to think about.

Using ethanol won’t free us from imported oil. Here’s why.

Note: I invite reader comment for this post and welcome fact and arithmetic checking. Please study my comments policy before weighing in!

E85 is a motor-vehicle fuel consisting of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline by volume. Pure ethanol’s ambient-temperature properties require it to be combined with gasoline to useful as a consumer fuel. Fifteen percent gasoline is the most common mixture.

There are two major drawbacks to using E85. George Will explains one:

Ethanol produces just slightly more energy than it takes to manufacture it. But now that the government is rigging energy markets with mandates, tariffs and subsidies, ethanol production might consume half of next year’s corn crop. The price of corn already has doubled in a year. Hence the tortilla turbulence south of the border. Forests will be felled (will fewer trees mean more global warming?) to clear land for growing corn, which requires fertilizer, the manufacture of which requires energy. Oh, my.

In fact, I read not long ago (sorry, no link) in another article that it takes about one gallon of diesel fuel to produce one gallon of ethanol. Diesel is used in ethanol production to clear fields, produce and apply fertilizer, harvest the crop and transport and store it. Because processing the corn into ethanol requires electricity, diesel or some form of fuel oil is likely used to produce the electricity, too, since hydropower is the corn states is pretty rare. Further, E85 can’t be piped except for short distances, certainly not state to state.

[A]n ethanol-gasoline mixture can’t be piped, because the two ingredients separate, which could cause the fuel to damage a car’s engine. Ethanol has to be transported on the road, a much more costly endeavor than sending it through a pipe. …

“‘Corn is in the center of the country and gasoline consumers are on the coasts,’ he [Dr. Darren Hudson, a professor of agricultural economics at Mississippi State University] said. ‘So transportation costs can be quite high — roughly double the cost of shipping gasoline’ or about $1.20 per gallon of ethanol.”

Transporting E85 will require diesel fuel and lots of it. That aside, a gallon of E85 - 109 ounces of ethanol and 19 ounces of gasoline - has less usable energy than 128 ounces of of plain gasoline.

(more…)

… means greater inequality of the classes.