Carbon Footprint

How much greenhouse gas does one single cheeseburger emit into the atmosphere? According to one study, about 6.5 pounds per burger; considering that Americans eat an average of three burgers per week, it adds up to be the same carbon contribution as 75,000 to 15,000 SUVs each year -- that's a lot! Can you say Carbon McCredits?

The Academy Awards Changed the world!! That's when we saw a beaming Al Gore waddle on stage to the roar of Hollywood's dream-makers to get his Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth.
It should have been for the former US vice president -- now the world's most famous global warming alarmist -- his finest hour.

Here he was, receiving film's highest honour for his smash documentary, in which he warns that within a century the seas will rise up to 6m while monster hurricanes tear through what's left of our cities.

Never mind that scientists reject such wild claims. Gore was getting the endorsement that counts -- an ovation from the diamond elite of showbiz and the media -- for preaching that only one thing could save us from the apocalypse he imagines.

And how wildly this Use Less preacher was cheered on Monday as he stood there in his hair-shirt tuxedo. Cheered by actors who'd actually flown in by private jet. By actresses who'd driven up in stretch limos. By agents with solarium tans glowing under the brightest lights.

At almost the very instant Gore was handed his Oscar for best documentary, The Tennessean, his home state paper, reported he'd in fact won an Oscar for hypocrisy.

Billing records of the Nashville Electric Service revealed that the local Gore mansion -- a 20-room, eight-bathroom behemoth with a well-lit heated pool -- used more electricity each month than the average American household used in an entire year.

Use Less Gore had so many lights burning, heaters running, computers humming and gadgets whirring that he burned up 221,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year, or more than 20 times the national household average. Worse, he was using more electricity now than he did before he made An Inconvenient Truth to hector us into making do with less. And this isn't even counting all the power he uses for his other two homes, and his endless flights around the world, in private jets and civil, to flog his film.

Gore's staff, sensing a PR disaster the size of the Exxon Valdez, rushed to explain away this great oil spill. Unfair, wheedled spokesman Kalee Kreider. See, Gore and his wife tried to offset their "carbon footprint" by buying their power through the local Green Power Switch program.
"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.".
But time is also up for this kind of easy virtue. Let's work through those three common excuses.
So Gore has low-energy light bulbs.

And he still uses all this power? !! So Gore uses the local green power program. But isn't that green power just an add-on to the Nashville Energy Service's main source of base-load power -- gassy coal-fired power plants? And doesn't the NES's green methane-burning plant still need to burn some dirty coal to work properly? Don't its emissions still contribute to global warming?
And so we get to Gore's final excuse -- the get-out-of-jail card of so many of our warming prophets of doom, from Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery to that Jeremiah of the airport lounge, David Suzuki: Gore buys carbon offsets!

That actually means he pays other folk to use less dirty power themselves, or take out the carbon dioxide he pumps out. It's a bit like paying someone to starve so you can gorge.
But there are at least four problems with such offsets, the first of which is very particular to Gore. And that is Gore buys his offsets through Generation Investment Management, whose chairman is . . . Al Gore.
What's more, GIM's business is not to itself remove carbon from the air, but, it says, to "buy high quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns".
Oh, and by the way, those companies have to be green. Some are even wind farms, although even they -- don't kid yourself -- produce some greenhouse gasses. So Gore isn't so much buying offsets as investing in fashionable companies for profit. Lucky him. Rich him.
The second problem with his offsets is that if global warming really is going to fry us to Hell, shouldn't Gore cut emissions, rather just be carbon neutral?

Third problem is that even green groups now doubt many carbon offsets actually work.
For instance, the most common offset scheme -- especially here -- is to simply plant trees, often in places where people would probably plant them anyway. But trees die and rot, and when they do they release much of the carbon they've trapped back into the air. As Prof. Oliver Rackham, the Cambridge botanist and author, says: "Telling people to plant trees is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels." What goes in will come out.
Besides, who checks these schemes to see they do what they claim? The band Coldplay, for instance, last year found that most of the trees of the mango plantation it planted in India to offset its world tour had actually died.

And, lastly, there's a moral problem. Offsets are really best suited for people rich enough -- like Gore -- to afford them. They let the rich pay someone else to use less so they can use more. And so the aristocrat can party on under the chandeliers, while the power-rationed peasants sit out in his dark.

Of course, one hypocrite like Gore shouldn't discredit an entire cause. Yet it can't be an accident that global warming attracts more hypocrites than most faiths. There's Tim Flannery, criss-crossing the world by jet to tell us to use less oil. There's British PM Tony Blair lecturing Britons to cut their emissions, but declaring it "unreasonable" to expect him therefore to stop flying off on his overseas holidays. And there's Prince Charles booking out all of a jet's first and second class to fly to New York to accept a green award from Gore. Ah, Gore again. Which reminds me of Laurie David, one of the producers of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. David, too, demands we save the world by cutting our gasses, yet turns out to be as addicted to private jets as her friend Al. Asked recently to explain such inconvenient hypocrisy, David spluttered: "Yes, I take a private plane on holiday a couple of times a year." But -- and here's where she shows she's nobler than you -- "I feel horribly guilty about it."

See? The global warming faith is more about how you feel than what you actually do. Even the makers of An Inconvenient Truth demonstrate that. What a circus. So what is the moral in this carnival of hypocrisy?

It's that global warming is an apocalyptic faith whose preachers demand sacrifices of others that they find far too painful for themselves. It's a faith whose prophets can demand we close coal mines but who won't even turn off their own pool lights. Who demand the masses lose their cars, while they themselves keep their planes. It's the ultimate faith of the feckless rich, where a ticket to heaven can be bought with a cheque made out to Al Gore. No further sacrifice required.
Except, of course, from the poor. While Gore's lights burn brightly, for you the darkness is coming.