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.