A leading scholar of Jerusalem University has ruled out decisively that one of the ossuaries found in the so-called Jesus family tomb could be that of Mary Magdalene.

Update: Jodi Magness is the Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She offers a highly readable and pretty devastating rebuttal of the “Jesus family tomb” hypothesis on the website of the Society of Biblical Literature, the primary professional association of biblical scholars.

Update: Now even the scholars who appeared in the show itself are running away from its basic premise, including,

… Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together. …

… DNA scientist Dr. Carney Matheson, who supervised DNA testing carried out for the film from the supposed Jesus and Mary Magdalene ossuaries, and who said in the documentary that “these two individuals, if they were unrelated, would most likely be husband and wife,” later said that “the only conclusions we made were that these two sets were not maternally related. To me, it sounds like absolutely nothing.”

Indeed, nothing is exactly what it is.

It could happen, though a lot of research has yet to be done. According to the Wake Forest University Medical Center,

An approved drug for fighting obesity is helping scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine uncover clues about how to stop the growth of cancerous tumors. …

In the current issue of Cancer Research, [Steven J. ] Kridel [Ph.D] and colleagues are the first to report that a tubular network within cells, known as the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), is regulated by an enzyme that is tightly linked to tumor growth and development.

“When the ER cannot do its job properly, there’s a series of events that gets turned on that can lead to cell suicide or death,” said Kridel.

The research showed that an enzyme known as fatty acid synthase is vital for the ER to do its job. Blocking this enzyme, which makes fat in cells, has been shown to prevent tumor cell growth and to promote cell death.

“No one had made connection before between fatty acid synthase and the function of the ER in tumor cells,” said Kridel. “This is the first to show that fatty acid synthesis is important in maintaining ER function and keeping tumor cells alive.”

So, apparently, the same enzyme system that can (hopefully) be manipulated into killing fat cells can be manipulated into killing cancer cells. Serendipity knows no bounds.

To combat female jihadists. Reports Crossroads Arabia,

They are playing a part in the overall efforts of the Saudi government to discourage youths from adopting extremist ideologies, nipping the problem in the bud rather than having to fight them in the streets. The article points to the way Al-Qaeda has paid attention to women in its own outreach programs and how female extremists are more difficult to pull away from their ideologies.

See what you think.

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has been making noises about “Greater Venezuela,” meaning taking control of the south Caribbean islands of Dutch West Indies, lying near Venezuela’s coast.

What if the nutcase running Venezuela actually made a grab for the islands? Is it farfetched to anticipate? Venezuela’s economy is in the pits, wrecked by Chavez-flavored socialism. Hearken back to 1982, when Argentina was headed by a military junta, controlled by General Leopoldo Galtieri. Faced with economic crisis and growing opposition to the regime, Galtieri launched an invasion of the British territory of the Falkland Islands, about 400 km east of the country. Argentines have long considered the Falklands actually to be Argentine territory, las islas Malvinas, and Galtieri played on this sentiment in invading.

Could something like that be running through Chavez’s head? Like Britain of today, but unlike Britain of 1982, Holland has practically no power-projection capability. There is a modest Dutch military force stationed in the Dutch West Indies, but it would quickly be outmatched by Venezuela’s military.

In 1982, Britain sent a naval task force of two aircraft carriers, submarines and surface combatants to retake the Falklands. Other vessels brought Royal Marines and British Army troops. It was a bitter, hard-fought struggle and the British suffered significant losses, especially from Argie air power. However, the conscripts of the Argentine army in the Falklands were no match in the end for the Brits and the islands were returned to British control.

So what if Chavez moves against the DWI? Strategy Page analyzes the situation.

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?

Mudville Gazette quotes Michael Yon, a former Army Special Forces NCO and now almost certainly the most experienced and perceptive war correspondent working. Writing of troop morale, Michael observes: “If their morale could be bottled, it would probably sell like crack, then be outlawed.”

Yesterday I showed why the entire thesis of the Talpiot tomb containing the ossuaries of Jesus, his claimed wife Mary Magdalene and their claimed son, Judah, is at bottom a conspiracy theory: It completely depends on Jesus having been an anti-Roman agitator or wannabe revolutionary leader. But there is no historical evidence of that. In my own seminary studies I read or scanned through a large number of books that serious scholars had written, claiming that Jesus was a wisdom teacher, a sage, an apocalyptic prophet; a Jewish reformist, and so on. But I don’t remember even one claim that he was attempting to agitate against Rome.

No matter what the DNA tests show, no matter what the names on the ossuaries, if the claim that Jesus was an anti-Roman agitator cannot be sustained - and it most certainly cannot - then the entire edifice of the “family tomb” proposal falls into ruins, for that is the only reason the show presents for their claim of a secret marriage of Jesus and Mary Mag. and the secrecy of them giving birth to a son, Judah. As far as I know, I am the only person who has identified this flaw in the family tomb proposal.

I urge you to read pieces by two others. One is noted New Testament scholar, Professor Ben Witherington, at his blog. Start here, but there is a lot more on his site. Especially do read the comments.

The other is by RealClearPolitics contributor Jay Cost, “Examining the ‘Jesus Tomb’ Evidence.”

Here is a grab from last night’s “Jesus Family Tomb” show on the Discovery Channel, that i sort of live blogged.

Here is the context of the show in which this scene appeared. Film maker Simcha Jacobovici claims to have located the concrete sealed-over Talpiot tomb, discovered in 1980, investigated and evacuated then, and shortly afterward built over by apartment complexes. This occurs in the last half hour of the show and is, dramatically, a really big thing. The Talpiot tomb had been covered with a concrete slab by the government even though all the human remains and the ossuaries had been removed. So Simcha and crew removed the slab to get inside:

Once inside, Simcha, a crew member and the cameraman discovered, as expected, that the bone boxes were gone. But there were old copies of the Jewish Scriptures interred there. These were put there after the tomb’s discovery; the narrator explains that Orthodox belief requres that worn-out Scriptures be buried or interred. (So does Islam, btw, for worn Qurani.)

Simcha discovers that one of the texts is open to the book of Jonah. The narrator says that Jesus told his disciples that “Jonah is the key” to his ministry: “If you want to know what I am up to,” Simcha quotes Jesus, “read the book of Jonah. That’s the code.” The narrator then kicks in: “The Gospels record that Jesus constantly spoke in parables and codes, not surprising for the leader of what today would be an anti-government movement.”

There are three problems with this claim.

One: Jesus never said that Jonah was “the” key. He did mention Jonah when some people asked him for a sign of his authenticity. Jesus responded, “… no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! ”

It is an illuminating comparison, indeed, but Simcha overstates it by saying it is “the key” to understanding Jesus’ ministry. And, worse for Simcha, even if it was the key, it cannot jibe with the third problem, below.

The second, and much more serious problem for the show’s thesis is that the Gospels do not claim that Jesus spoke in codes. In my New Testament studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I learned that what Jesus taught and preached was mostly quite transparent to his hearers. It’s true that a couple of Jesus’ parables were so opaque to the Twelve that they asked him outright what the meaning was, but in each case Jesus’s explanation was religious, not political. Example: the parable of the sower who went out to sow.

The third, and most severe problem is this: Nowhere in the NT is Jesus presented as a political pretender to the ancient throne of David. There is no basis in the NT that the Twelve or the several women who arranged for Jesus’ daily support - and must be included as part of Jesus’ inner circle - had any idea that Jesus wanted them to oppose the government. In fact, when challenged on this point by Pilate, asking him whether he was king of the Jews, Jesus bluntly answered in Luke’s telling, That’s your rumor (”You say so”). In the Gospel of John, it flows thus:

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate then dismisses the conversation with the word, “What is truth?”

The idea that Jesus was a political threat to Rome was a claim made about him, not by him in either word or deed, intended to lead Pilate to order Jesus executed. Pilate is well known to modern historians has an inept governor of Judea (one of an unfortunate series) and one who was especially willing to execute Jews on the flimsiest of evidence, or none at all. This was well known 2,000 years ago, obviously, and Jesus even used Pilate’s liberal use of the sword as a religious teaching point - but not as a political point.

Where does Jonah strike against this claim? Simcha cannot have it both ways. He can’t claim that Jesus was a political agitator, a claimant to a political throne, and then turn around and say that the key to Jesus ministry is Jesus’ claim, via Jonah’s text, that he will be resurrected from the dead after three days. You can have one, you can have the other. You can’t have both.

This is crucial because the entire edifice of the Jesus family tomb show hangs on the claim that Jesus was an anti-government agitator and not a religious reformer or something else. Why? Because that is the only reason Simcha gives for the secrecy of Jesus’ marriage and son. If Jesus was executed by Rome, Simcha says, then how much greater would be the danger that Jesus’ son, Judah, would be hunted by the authorities? So there is a presumed, vast conspiracy of silence among —

— all Jesus’ disciples, including the several women,

— the straphangers who moved in and out of his travels, the Jesus groupies, as it were,

— his hometown synagogue where he presumably would have been married and which the Gospels record was inimical to him personally; Luke even records his own congregants tried to kill him one day,

— the Jewish hierarchy itself, all the way up to the Sanhedrin, whose members would have at least been interested in the question of Jesus’ marital status if for no other reason to compile a dossier - and this interest would have been felt by friendly Sanhedrin members such as Nicodemus, not merely those opposed to Jesus.

In short, the conspiracy to keep Jesus’ presumed marriage secret would have had to encompass keeping it secret not merely from the Romans, but from Jesus’ own countrymen. It would have amounted literally to a nationwide conspiracy.

Simcha’s entire hypothesis stands on this conspiracy because his whole explanation of the tomb depends on his unproven and unprovable claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were secretly married and finally, secretly entombed in the same place along with their secret son.

Can anyone say, “conspiracy theory?” Yep.

Now, back to that skull. One of the reasons that NT scholar Jonathan Reed called the show “archeo-porn” in the following “Critical Look” segment was for scenes such as that one. It is simply sensationalistic, dramatized hype. It is deceptive. The scene does not take place in the Talpiot tomb, but there is nothing in the show telling you that. You see Simcha entering the Talpiot tomb, examining the book of Jonah, then some other sequences are shown, and then we’re back in the tomb - apparently, as far as we know, because there is Simcha rustling on the tomb’s floor in faded light and he picks up this skull and shakes the dirt out of it. Then he puts it back down. There is not a syllable of narration nor a crawl on the screen to indicate that this is anything other than the Talpiot tomb. Then Simcha exits the tomb with this shot.

But this is a shot of the entrance to the Talpiot tomb, not the skull tomb, looking from the inside out. It is a near-exact match of an earlier shot of Simcha entering the tomb. It immediately follows the skull-handling sequence. What are viewers supposed to believe about what they have just seen? At worst, that there are still human remains in the presumed Jesus tomb, at best that Simcha goes tomb hopping and casually handles human remains. And neither give confidence that he plays straight with his audience. He simply does not tell the whole truth.

Update: More on Jesus’ presumed political pretensions. It’s worth noting that John 19:19-30 relates:

19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” 20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. 21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, “The King of the Jews,’ but, “This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ ” 22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”

Here Pilate specifically rejects the idea that Jesus himself claimed the throne of David.

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.

The “Jesus’ Nephew Family Tomb”?

“The Jesus Tomb” is 30 minutes on, and so far we have had explained ossuaries with these names:

1. Jesus son of Joseph

2. Maria

3. Yose

4. Matia

There are other ossuaries, but at this point these are the only four ossuaries that have been presented. At this point the show has moved on to another angle.

As the show pointed out, the Gospels says that Jesus of Nazareth had a brother named Joseph, whose name is actually recorded in English Bibles as a nickname for Joseph, Jose or Joses. According to Prof. James Tabor, on camera on the show, this particular nickname for Joseph is very rare and matches the spelling of the name on the ossuary found in the Talpiot tomb. But his “given” name was Joseph, as traditionally spelled. Okay, fine.

Let’s do a little stipulation here. Let’s stipulate, just for argument’s sake, that for some reason (just make up one if you wish) the family of Jesus, beginning with his generation, decided not to open a family tomb in Galilee, where Jesus grew up and where the rest of his family would have stayed. Let’s suppose that with the dawn of the Christ-following movement (the term “Christian” came much, much later) that the locus of Jesus’ family activities was in Jerusalem, since it was there that the Christian movement first came into nascense. Jesus’ brother, James, for example, became the main leader of Christ followers in Jerusalem before he was martyred by being hurled off the Temple Mount, then stoned to death.

So that eliminates the “problem” of the Jesus’ family tomb being in Jerusalem. But why c0nclude that the ossuary of “Jesus, son of Joseph” is the ossuary of Jesus, called the Christ?

Why not conclude it was the ossuary of the son of Jesus’ brother, Joseph? That is, Jesus Christ’s ‘ nephew, named Jesus by the brother Joseph?

What buttresses this hypothesis? Well, the fact that Jesus the Christ was never called, “Jesus, son of Joseph.” In fact, one day Jesus went to his hometown synagogue and began to teach there, where, “many who heard him were astounded. They said, “… Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary … ?” (Italics added.)

In the Gospels, Jesus called himself “Son of Man” (a reference to a messianic description in Daniel 7:13-14) but never “son of Joseph.” If - as I said, this is just thought-experiment stipulation - the Talpiot tomb contained the bones of actual family members of Jesus called the Christ, then I think there is a stronger case to be made that the bones of “Jesus, son of Joseph” were of the Christ’s nephew than of the Christ himself.

The DNA testing featured on the show was done only on DNA remnants taken from the Jesus son of Joseph ossuary and the Mariamne ossuary. Only mitochondrial tests were done, which test only for maternal relationships. The only thing the DNA testing showed was the the presumed occupants of the Jesus ossuary and the Mariamne ossuary did not have the same mother, or any other maternal lineage in common. But they might have had the same father. Or Mariamne might have been the daughter of the occupant of the Jesus ossuary. Or a niece through a brother’s line. And so forth. My point is that the leap to assume they were husband and wife is merely one leap of several possible.

It also must be pointed out that Jesus had quite a different idea of whom were his brother or sisters than even his own family did. Mark records that Jesus was preaching to a small crowd one day when,

31Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. 32A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” 33And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

Now the show has moved 45 minutes further along since I started writing. More later on, but not tonight. So far, though, there’s a lot of provocative teasing questions, such as another tomb found (apparently) near the Talpiot tomb, now covered by apartment housing and concrete. The tease? “Could this be the tomb of Jesus’ early followers, or even another part of the Jesus family tomb?” And cut to commercial.

Update: The Beloved Disciple is Judah, the son of Jesus? The Beloved Disciple, so-called in the Gospel of John, would have been almost as old as Jesus. So I guess Jesus got married and had a kid when he was about 10. Gosh, what tripe.

Update: In the “Critical Look” post-show, Ted Koppel is doing a good job pressing Simcha about some of the objections others have raised in the past week. “Archeo-porn”! That’s the term of the night, uttered by Prof. Jonathan Reed, describing his opinion of the show.

… 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?