The Ultimate Inconvinent Truth

Yet another one of those global warming hypocrisies, this time from the patron saint himself.

In the year since Al Gore took steps to make his home more energy-efficient, the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

In February 2007, An Inconvenient Truth, a film based on a climate change speech developed by Gore, won an Academy Award for best documentary feature. The next day, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research uncovered that Gore’s Nashville home guzzled 20 times more electricity than the average American household.

After the Tennessee Center for Policy Research exposed Gore’s massive home energy use, the former Vice President scurried to make his home more energy-efficient. Despite adding solar panels, installing a geothermal system, replacing existing light bulbs with more efficient models, and overhauling the home’s windows and ductwork, Gore now consumes more electricity than before the “green” overhaul.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration. (read more)

What's the call-back procedure for the Nobel Peace Prize?

[link via India Uncut]

Sri Lanka Celebrates Earth Hour

In typical Sri Lankan fashion - about a month late and for a few more than one hour. Ok so it was an island-wide power failure. Given the frequency of these failures, (multiple times a month where I live) the folks at Greenpeace or WWF should nominate the Ceylon Electricity Board for the Nobel Prize this year.

To me the whole Earth Hour idea is symbolically a catastrophe, and today this reminded me of a post in Cafe Hayek on the subject. Here's a key excerpt from a letter written to WWF:

You and members of your organization worry that industrialization and economic growth are harming the earth's environment. I worry that the intensifying hysteria about the state of the environment - and that the resulting hostility to economic growth - might harm humankind's prospects for comfortable, healthy, enjoyable, and long lives.

So I commend you on your "Earth Hour" effort. Persuading people across the globe to turn off lights for one hour supplies the perfect symbol for modern environmentalism: a collective effort to return humankind to the dark ages.

Do read the whole thing.

Al-flation

From Bloomberg.com:

U.S. plans to replace 15 percent of gasoline consumption with crop-based fuels including ethanol are already leading to some unintended consequences as food prices and fertilizer costs increase.

About 33 percent of U.S. corn will be used for fuel during the next decade, up from 11 percent in 2002, the Agriculture Department estimates. Corn rose 20 percent to a record on the Chicago Board of Trade since Dec. 19, the day President George W. Bush signed a law requiring a fivefold jump in renewable fuels by 2022.

[..]The energy bill requires the U.S. to use 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, of which about 15 billion gallons may come from corn-based ethanol. The nation's current production capacity is about 8.06 billion gallons.

[..]Researchers led by Timothy Searchinger at Princeton University said their study showed greenhouse-gas emissions will rise with ethanol demand. U.S. farmers will use more land for fuel, forcing poorer countries to cut down rainforests and use other undeveloped land for farms, the study said. [link]

Ok ok, so it's called Agflation - the increase in price of food due as a result of agricultural products used for alternative energy resource. No, I'm not trying to blame all this on Al Gore, but as I've said before on this blog, I think the most adverse and immediate effects of climate change will be from bad policy rather than actual climate effects.

This is what happens when you meddle in the market (subsidies, mandates, etc.), you end up with something that nobody really wants at the tax payer's expense. Ethanol is bad for the planet, bad for the U.S. economy and bad for the rest of us. (Hell, even Krugman agrees)

I'd hold Gore somewhat responsible - after all he won a Nobel Price for talking about climate change - it's him and his alarmist faithfuls who demanded that something is done about climate change immediately, pushing the political climate in that direction. Unfortunately, what's to be done about climate change is not so clear, so you end up meddling in the market and do stuff like this.

Let's get this clear - the market is more likely to create an efficient, viable alternative energy source than any government bureaucrat. What's required is some trust in human ingenuity and markets, without jumping the gun and doing something stupid with unintended consequences.

Convenient untruths: Al Gore’s 9 Lies on climate change

Al Gore, the self-made poster boy for the OMG global warming! Movement has to face some ‘inconvenient truths’ himself, when a British high court judge ruled that some ‘truths’ in Gore’s Oscar winning documentary are actually convenient lies.

From the BBC:

The judge said nine statements in the film were not supported by mainstream scientific consensus.
[..]

The nine errors alleged by the judge included:

Mr Justice Burton told London's High Court that distributing the film without the guidance to counter its "one-sided" views would breach education laws. [..]

Mr Gore's assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future". The judge said this was "distinctly alarmist" and it was common ground that if Greenland's ice melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia".

Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

Mr Gore's reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned "swimming long distances - up to 60 miles - to find the ice". The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm." [Link]

Global Warming enthusiasts like to ride on this apparent ‘scientific consensus’ on global warming, but According to the last UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) the ‘scientific consensus’ is that it is ‘very likely' that climate change is caused by human activity’ that’s it. All the fantastic CG effects of flooded Manhattan and Greenland melting like ice cream in Al Gore’s documentary are not based on any scientific consensus, at best it’s just science fiction bordering on Al Gore fantasies.

But hey, that’s all you need for a Nobel prize nowadays..

..these Norwegians!