When I grew big enough as a child, I would affix freshly washed sheets, towels, pants, shirts and more to a backyard clothesline, forsaking this duty only when my family obtained a convenience Al Gore does not much like: the clothes dryer.
“You can save 700 pounds of carbon dioxide when you air-dry your clothes for six months out of the year,” says the Web site of the former vice president’s Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and I am ready to sign up. As a practiced if somewhat rusty clothes-hanger-upper, I am willing to salute his ideals, to follow his wondrous, emissions-diminishing example, to … but wait a minute.
Despite the movie’s dire warnings about global warming, his example, it turns out, includes the annual expenditure of some $30,000 in natural gas and electric bills for a 20-room, 10,000-square-foot Tennessee abode. On the estate is a pool house with a heated pool. Its utility bill alone, I’ve read, is $500 a month.
So there I am some summer day, further developing my clothespin technique while Gore is improving his backstroke and one of his public relations staffers is continuing to explain why Gore is innocent of ignoring his own anxiously expressed moral obligations.
The excuse is that Gore is giving money to a company (one he helped found) that then gives it to energy companies that use it for a compensating cause. The companies invest the funds in renewable energy sources and thereby decrease the amount of fossil-fuel energy they would otherwise need. Fine, but it doesn’t get Gore off the hook.
The offsets can’t do much more than make up for the house’s carbon impact, if that. It’s as if you were mugging one person a night, but contributing to a police fund to prevent mugging one person a night someplace else. Gore could obviously donate the same money to this cause as he is now while simultaneously cutting back on the lavishness of his lifestyle. The environment would be better off through the two acts in combination than by one alone, and his utility bills would be far less. It’s what you might call win, win, win.
Until then, the Gore house remains an interesting symbol of a political hypocrisy that sadly extends far beyond this discrepancy between sermon and behavior. His pretense that everything can get a lot better with a little effort is a lot of hooey.
Supposing the warming alarm-sounders are right in what they fear from greenhouse gas accumulation, the only preventive answer short of new technologies is a reduction in fossil-fuel consumption so massive as to ensure continued poverty in all those places it now exists and to throw the developed world into a disastrous economic tailspin.
The cure would be worse than the disease, and what’s more, no nation will undertake it. Taking small steps toward greater energy conservation and efficiency — hanging up wet clothes — may be desirable for various reasons, but global warming does not get solved that way. What will count, some bright people have been writing, is adaptation and building up resources both for that and for implementing the new technologies as they come our way. Gore should know his proposals are Pablum and say so.
If on the other hand, he wants to contend that with a little care here and a little care there everything is eventually A-OK, he ought topoint to the home of another multimillionaire politician as exemplifying the one, true answer. It’s less than half the size of his house and includes about every energy-saving device known to modernity. The owner is George W. Bush.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
