Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Bush versus Gore: How Green is my house?

Iain Dale added to the Green debate with his attack on Al Gore, commenting that he would be addressing the Shadow Cabinet:

He will no doubt be instructing them all on the art of preaching climate change religion bollocks while at the same time creating a carbon footprint the size of a mammoth's.

I made a milder remark about Gore on the same day.

I was interested to read from Iain that:

It's a little known fact that George W Bush's Texas ranch is very environmentally friendly.

I googled this and came up with this interesting article from CNSnews.

Bush's Crawford ranch has indeed been hailed as "eco-friendly haven" with grey/black water recycling and geothermal heating/cooling system. That's interesting given his anti-Kyoto stance.

Gore, on the other hand, has been accused of consuming "more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year."

However, David Roberts, staff writer for the online environmental magazine Grist criticised this slamming of Gore:

It was unfair, he said, to compare Gore's electrical consumption to the national average, which "includes apartments and trailer homes and is an average across all climatic zones, some of which are quite temperate."Gore and his wife, Tipper, "both work out of their house" and "have special security measures for an ex-vice president, all of which naturally increases the electricity use in the home," Roberts added.Moreover, Gore "pays almost a 50 percent premium to buy the 'green power' offered from his electrical company," which generates its voltage from hydroelectric and nuclear power rather than coal, he said."If every national leader did as much as Al Gore does to ameliorate their impact on the climate, the world would be a much better place."

So all, is not what it seems.

2 comments:

  1. I wish people would stop criticising Bush for not signing up to Kyoto.

    Kyoto is unworkable and is there to assuage the guilt of leaders and make it look like they're doing something. Its typical of the unworkable big government solutions which dominate political thinking.

    Criticise Bush on his environmental record in other areas, he deserves it, but he did the right thing by not signing up to the unworkable Kyoto protocol.

    As for Gore - he's a big state leftist, not a liberal, and he is seeking to whip up hysteria for his own gains. No scientist says we're going to have the rises in sea level he claims in 'An Inconvenient Truth' yet its taken at face value. Its the sort of nonsense which is unhelpful to those of us who wish to push a rational liberal human centred green agenda which does not condemn people to poverty and a worsening environment.

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  2. By "people" did you mean me? All I said was: "That's interesting given his anti-Kyoto stance". That hardly seems criticism, let alone fierce criticism.

    You'll see from the linked article from last Sunday that I was sarcastically critical of Gore.

    " "Gore jets in to address (Tory) Shadow Cabinet"

    That is the headline in the hard copy Sunday Telegraph today. It is delightful that Al Gore is relentlessly increasing his carbon footprint to encourage us to reduce ours. After his private jet photo-op trip to Norway, David Cameron obviously sees a kindred spirit in Al Gore.

    Presumably, like medieval indulgences, Gore and Cameron are buying carbon off-sets like no body's business."

    But I enjoyed your comments as usual Tristan - thank you

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