Confederate Yankee: Another Plate Of Mac And Cheese [UPDATED]
Yes, he got me again. It was his very next post after this one, and I haven’t even gotten to the rest yet. Here’s our prominent booster of right-wing ‘citizen journalism’ showing us the standards to which he believes all media should attain:
The worlds greatest environmental hypocrite wastes so much energy that his consumption would power 232 normal homes.
Sigh. The link goes to a blog post at the user-content site, Digital Journal. The post sums up an ‘investigative report’ by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, the folks who brought us last year’s thoroughly hinky Al-Gore-uses-electricity contretemps.
But wait. Check the ‘investigative report’ and you’ll find that it’s actually nothing more than a press release. It includes no actual citations, checkable figures or verifiable information of any kind. It reads like this:
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.”
Yes, they’re actually quoting themselves. Plus, of course, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is one of those apparently infinite phony-nonpartisan groups that produce conservative nonsense and flapdoodle as their raison d’etre. Its head, Drew Johnson, is a 28-year-old American Enterprise Institute beneficiary and frequent right-wing TV and radio guest. Its Director of Legal Policy is a right-wing activist fresh out of law school, who hasn’t even taken his bar exam yet.
At that point we stopped digging, because this investigative report is obviously solid gold!
Sadly not content with even that level of wastefulness, the Goracle has now taken to directly belching balls of energy into the atmosphere.
Okay, that’s actually pretty funny.
But the adverb, ‘sadly,’ yields insight. “What’s a word that goes naturally with funny?” asks Confederate Yankee’s subconscious. We’ll be onto him for certain if he starts picking up characteristic locutions like ‘bonk-headed’ or ‘poo-cano.’
Update: Steve Strum notes (correctly) that Gore’s annual usage would power 232 normal homes for a month. Not quite as bad as originally thought, but still horrific.
Well, that’s one correction so far. Another is that the so-called Tennessee Center for Policy Research is wrong in claiming that Gore “scurried to make his home more energy efficient” in response to their first cornball investigative report (i.e. press release). That part of the story is summarized here. Also, the ‘normal homes’ assertion actually says ‘average households.’ Which means that Mr. Yankee has swallowed the bait and is comparing a 10,000 square-foot mansion to, you know, a figure that includes a vast preponderance of smaller dwellings, including apartments. That’s an old one, the sneaky use of ‘average’ to conceal disparities in the things that you’re comparing.
Anyway, to sum up, a questionable conservative activist group has asserted in an unsourced press release that Gore’s 20-room, 10,000-square-foot house uses 19.3 times the amount of power of an average housing unit of unknown but much smaller size.
And repeating these assertions blindly equals journalism.
Are we embarrassing him yet?
No, I didn’t think so either.
Correction: As Evan reminds us, it would be more accurate to say that Gore’s 20-room, 10,000-square-foot house in which he and his family run small businesses employing a staff of 20-odd people, and have a round-the-clock security detail — plus a guest-house and some outbuildings -– uses 19.3 times the amount of power as an average housing unit.
To which we would also add that Gore participates in Nashville Electric’s Green Power Switch program, in which he pays a premium for power that comes from renewable sources. And also that the house is carbon-neutral due to offsets. And so on down the line, and so forth.
Is Confederate Yankee embarrassed yet?
Further Correction: If you look at last year’s attention-seeking press release from the Tennessee Center For Policy Research, they claim that Gore’s electricity usage in 2006 was 18,400 kilowatt-hours per month. Now they’re claiming a 10% increase to 17,768 kilowatt-hours.
Employing mathematics, we find that the number 17,768 is not larger than the number 18,400.
Embarrassed yet, etc.? And not to pick on Confederate Yankee unduly, so how about our old pal Glenn Reynolds?
AL GORE: Still guzzling energy in Nashville. “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.”
Lots of talk, but more bloated than ever. It’s almost like a metaphor.
Something is, no doubt.
Gore’s 20-room, 10,000-square-foot house uses 19.3 times the amount of power of an average housing unit of unknown but much smaller size.
Correction: Gore’s 20-room, 10,000-square-foot house in which he and his family run a couple of small businesses employing a staff of 20-odd people, and have a round-the-clock security detail–plus a guest-house and some outbuildings–use 19.3 times the amount of power as an average home.
What a hypocrite. I’m so buying an SUV now.
Is Al Gore aware of all internet traditions? He should be, since he invented the fucking thing.
In other news, failing to repair his wind-dun-blown-over grill, as opposed to replacing it, meant that TIDOS Yankee was more or less responsible for the death of five Chinese workers.
If we’re making shit up, let’s try something plausible.
For fuck’s sake.
They need to push farther. I think Gore’s usage would power 900 homes for a week! In fact, Gore’s usage would power 6300 homes for a day! We’re not done here, folks. Shocking as it is, Gore’s power usage could supply 151,200 homes for an hour. But that’s not all!
Also, I wonder what the average home is. I mean you know how they figure the average Walmart salary by including executives in the equation? I wonder if the average home includes a bunch of underpasses or vacant New Orleans lots?
Assholes.
Hell, yeah!
Good find, J. Pez. All the best people are named “Johnny,” by the way.
You missed the fact that TCPR’s own figures show that Gore’s energy use went down.
Oh, and Drew Johnson was John Lott’s intern at the AEI.
Today TCP says “In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours”
October 10 2007 they say “In 2006 Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh”
that is it went down from 221,000 to 213,210.
So how do they say today “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.”???
So how do they say today “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.”???
They lie.
It’s a well known internet tradition, I’m surprised you weren’t aware of it.
I was aware of it, but then I might be lying.
Senator McCain is unaware of all internet traditions.
I wish he would turn his investigative skills to the Mexislamofascist scheme to poison us all with bad tomatoes. Someone needs to track down the plant where these juicy red pellets of doom are being produced. This is chemical terrorism within our borders, people. Wake up!
TCP is an Internet tradition.
Oh, come ON!!!
Everyone knows numbers have a liberal bias, and as such can’t be trusted, unless of course they are used to explain how tax cuts make money, how the war in Iraq is going great or how the economy is strong.
You guys could of course ask the CY how much effort he put in to this post of his, in terms of checking sources etc.
Either none, in which case he is unreliable, or a lot, in which case he is stupid for not noticing these things.
Win-win
Dear sirs:
I HAVE FOUND THE MOTHER LODE!
You have no choice but to mock this wingnut:
Democrats Continue to Make Fools of Themselves
Let me give you but a taste:
1.) we are a nation currently at war with a nearly invisible international enemy of the most brutal kind.
Damn those invisible acts of brutality!
2.) His mother was a white atheist from Kansas, who obviously had a thing for black men.
Stay classy.
3.) resume’
is that you, Marie Jon’?
Oh. also, it’s been Farked (so, no, I didn’t find it myself), so feel free to mine the comments
a nearly invisible international enemy of the most brutal kind.
I remember that story — The Saliva Tree by Brian Aldiss. It taught me that when you’re dealing with a nearly invisible enemy (especially a most brutal one), you should always prepare yourself with a tin of paint, ready to splash onto it and reveal its location.
sigh, indeed. The Tennessee “Center” for “Policy” “Research” is located in Drew Johnson’s basement apartment. He’s a well-known blob of bilious ridiculosity here in the great border state, and to say that that’s really saying something is to yet again die a little inside. Especially when remembering that once we had Al Gore. sigh.
Offsets.
Nice rebuttal.
And the troll on the comments is comedy gold. (Gold, Jerry, gold!)
Should you want to know more (and who wouldn’t?) about Mr. Drooler and his Legion of Flat-Earthers, check here:
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2008/06/tennessee-flat-earthers-tcpr-continue.html
PLEASE NOTE: I am not responsible for, nor do I in any way endorse, many to most of the wacko nutjob comments that appear at this site.
I am not that familiar with Confederate Yankee (and what an oxymoronic name to come up with) but the barbecue grill thing has clicked it into place.
Geez Louise, what a whackjob of long standing.
Also, I wonder what the average home is…. I wonder if the average home includes a bunch of underpasses or vacant New Orleans lots?
Yes. Also, it’s foreclosed. So arguably Al Gore’s unbridled home energy use caused the subprime loan crisis.
the former Vice President’s home energy use surged more than 10%
Dandy! I see a VP choice for Petraeus. Get this man to the front.
He should be, since he invented the fucking thing.
Al Gore invented the fucking thing? We all owe him a debt of thanks.
(Except for Ben Shapiro and K-Lo, I suppose.)
He did stumble upon some humor with that picture and caption. Is it possible that they are finally getting close to actually developing a sense of humor? Because I’ve heard that once the Wingnut brain expands and the Humor Gland develops, it’s possible that a Liberal infection can occur, swelling the brain and cause great amounts of thinking and cravings for lattes. Of course, the only remedy for that is to be as humorless as possible, which is easier on the Wingnut brain, enabling the swelling to subside.
But still, just the idea of that picture with a caption of “The Goracle” provides me with a few laughs.
For a man who goes through over 1,000,000 barbecue grills per year due to wind damage, the Conyankerate Federee shouldn’t be criticizing anyone else’s environmental record, nor attempting to use English in a written format at all for that matter.
I must’ve missed this one with CY and wind-damaged grills… what’s that all about? Last time I checked, the only way a grill could get damaged by wind is if it were a hurricane or tornado, and at that point, you have a lot more to worry about than a frikkin grill.
BB—see here.
I have so much contempt for the Right’s conception of “citizen journalist” that I can’t even pull the thoughts together into some coherent screed. Please imagine that I have done so, and that it was funny, pointed, and loaded with devastatingly on-target links to examples of wingnut “citizen” “journalism.”
One wonders how many homes could be powered by the amount of money Drew Johnson gets from wingnut welfare.
That’s right Cornfederate Yanker! Al Gore uses shitloads of ekeltricity, so you and your savvy readers should use shitloads of ekeltricity.
Go ahead! Turn on all of your lights and appliances and never turn them off. That’ll show the elitist tree huggers and, as an added bonus, your power company will send you a token of its thanks at the end of every month!
In other news, Al Gore’s super inefficient boiler plant, that only burns ancient old growth hardwoods, which he uses to make his lattes, consumes more energy in one year than all of the rest of the United States uses <small>in a picosecond</small>.
oops, forgot my semi colons. Well, (wev) I don’t give (one over) two shits.
I read (from a rigorously veracious source, The Basement of Wingnut Factobilia) that teh Internets use 50 kajillion megawatts of power every second. Confederate Wanker should do his part and stop utilizing it (it’s an internet tradition).
Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession? Heh. Indeed. We’re winning! Read the whole thing. Obama’s a gaffe-o-matic! Dude, where’s my recession?
The Tennessee “Center” for “Policy” “Research” is located in Drew Johnson’s basement apartment.
So, like Gore, Johnson’s home is also an office? Does he have employees? How does his power usage compare to that of his neighbors? How would it compare if he had 20 employees? Would he complain that it wouldn’t be fair to compare his daytime, 20-employee-office power usage with that of neighbors who are
actually employedaway from home all day long?Ooh, I love that picture of Gore! That’s my new computer background image, replacing the poster of Chairman Meow.
The numbers must be tortured before they will obey.
Ok, so am I the only one that thinks this statistic is completely retarded? Al Gore’s house uses more energy in a year than X houses use in a month? Qua? Pardone? Fun with math much?
I mean, phrased differently, one could note that Al Gore uses enough energy in a day to power 1/6th of your average home in a financial quarter. Le Gaspe! What an energy whore! Al Gore uses more energy in a trimester than 12 houses use in a fortnight. Hypocrite! And wait till I switch over to metric time. It gets even worse.
I thought that, when fighting an invisible enemy (nearly or otherwise), you threw paint on it came from Johnny Quest. That’s where I learned it, anyway.
I have not actually had the chance to put this strategy in place yet. People keep asking me why I am carrying around a 3/4 full can of eggshell white indoor/outdoor latex semi-gloss. But, I figure, SOMEDAY… And boy, will I be ready.
It might be pointed out that Gore’s Nashville home is ENTIRELY dependent on the Green Power Switch program.
I mean, phrased differently, one could note that Al Gore uses enough energy in a day to power 1/6th of your average home in a financial quarter. Le Gaspe! What an energy whore! Al Gore uses more energy in a trimester than 12 houses use in a fortnight. Hypocrite! And wait till I switch over to metric time. It gets even worse.
Tell you what, Bob, I’ll trade you the weight of a bowling ball on the eighth moon of Jupiter from my lunch for the weight of a feather on the second moon of Nepture from your lunch.
Confederate Yankee gets embarrassed by being wrong?
Huh.
Who would’ve figured.
I reserve judgment until I’ve seen Gore’s counter-tops.
The more I check out these folks’ POV, the more I keep flashing back to “well, those people are all gay Nazis who hate Jesus – are YOU a gay Nazi who hates Jesus?”
Come on, it’s just obvious: Al Gore, the liberal media, & the tomatos are all in on it together, along with the pelicans & The Dixie Chicks – it’s all part of a sinister conspiracy (to make eating babies mandatory & usher in a new ice-age) being controlled by the diabolical Dr. No, uh, I mean Osama bin Laden.
Tomatos are aware of all Internet traditions.
Is Confederate Yankee embarrassed yet?
Doesn’t that take self-awareness? Has TIDOS Yankee EVER shown ANY self-awareness?? On anything?
Have dogs stopped licking their balls?
Have actual bears started using toilet paper?
Has the Right stopped worshipping Jack Bauer?
Remember this?
And from this post:
Well, get a load of this:
Oh!
That fuckin Gore uses more electricity than me?
Well then, the whole global warming thing must be false then.
That is, I must say, central to my point…
mikey
We’re winning! We’re winning!
Read the whole thing.
This particular piece of bullcrap came from the GOP-funded Tennessee Center For Policy Research which seems to exist solely to examine the Gores’ electricity bills. (I live in Nashville, we hear this BS a lot).
OK so get a load of this:
Pop Goes The Weasel
“Mike Slater talks to the crew flying a hot air balloon over Al Gore’s Belle Meade mansion on Friday in protest of his environment policies”
Err … wouldn’t a fleet of Hummers been more appropriate?
This has probably been discussed before, somewhere, but it just occurred to me that the words “Confederate” and “Yankee” are sort of at odds with each other when used in the same name. I guess that is supposed to be indicative of something by M. Yankee. No doubt he is trying to infer… something. I am not quite sure. But still, when placed in the context of where those words have the most meaning (O.K., outside of baseball) is the American Civil War (also still known as the War of Northern Agression by the constantly aggrieved in the Deep South), these two words are very incompatible with each other. So, wouldn’t the choice of this particular posting name, by examining the origins of the terms used, be indicative of a very confused and conflicted individual? Wanting to be one thing, but constantly being another?
Then again, I suppose he could just be a dumbass.
“Mike Slater talks to the crew flying a hot air balloon over Al Gore’s Belle Meade mansion on Friday in protest of his environment policies”
Gee. Gore must be an awful president.
Well, I know I promised to stop doing this, but since we’re talking about Al Gore, there are no rules.
Perhaps the reason that Al Gore’s carbon footprint is so big is because he’s, you know, fat.
Then again, I suppose he could just be a dumbass. – zeppo
Actually, he’s trying to be one of those sensible centrist contrarian types: he’s indicating that he sees both sides of issues like the War of Southern Rebelian/Northern Aggression and that each side has some good points and some bad points and the truth is somewhere in the middle. He’s trying to be contrarian because the “everybody knows” (and the liberal media will insist) is that you have to either be a Confederate or a Yankee, while he is a Smart Sensible Person who knows you can be both … like the smart and sensible state of MO.
IOW, he’s a dumbass. I guess you are right after all.
Isn’t that, essentially, a complete non-metaphor?
I mean, a metaphor is a figurative comparison of two unlike things, right?
So what is the subject of the comparison? Is he comparing Al Gore to Al Gore? Al Gore to Al Gore’s house? The … “environmental lobby” to Al Gore or Al Gore’s house?
I feel like these two sentences have achieved an almost complete impenetrability. They should use these as cloaking devices on military aircraft and Klingon warships.
Yes, he’s a dumbass.
It’s interesting that the Tennessee Center for Policy Research hasn’t got around to researching Cong. Marsha Blackburn (R-Wingnuttia) for giving her kids $400,000+ from her campaign coffers. There are some thing the TCPR won’t reasearch–Republican things. Guess there’s just so many hours in a day!
A note to the Ole Perfessor: It’s generally not wise for someone of your physical stature to be mocking someone’s bloated-ness. Looking at you too, Surber.
I guess they didn’t think the annual number of 19.3 sounded dramatic enough. Like OMG Al Gore eats enough ice cream in a year to feed 13.2 normal people ice cream for A ENTIRE MONTH! WOTTA PIG LOL!ELEVENTY!GURGLE
Of course even this dipshit sleight of hand would blow right over the head of your average CY-reading moron.
This is the best sentence ever.
I smoke enough cigarettes in an hour to supply all the clowns in one of those little cars full of clowns for an entire week. Providing only one of the clowns smokes. And only when he’s drinking.
Opossums are notoriously bad at math.
Major Woody: NO ONE can replace Chairman Meow. I believe you know this, comrade.
I smoked seven times as many cigarettes last week than I did yesterday, so I must be making progress toward quitting. Right?
PLEASE NOTE: I am not responsible for, nor do I in any way endorse, many to most of the wacko nutjob comments that appear at this site.
I’ve seen you and your friends trying to salvage the comments section of that blog, MzNicky and I wish you good luck. But I’m not sure what can be done under the current management since egalia seems comfortable with some of the viler commenters and the obvious ratfuckers. Maybe you could take it over? If you do, first order of business would be to restore the old blog subtitle to include racism and the right wing as targets worthy of beatdowns.
Have dogs stopped licking their balls?
The bigger question is why do dogs lick their balls.
The simple answer is that they do it because they can.
Lawnguylander:
TGW isn’t my blog, although a couple of years ago I was an occasional poster there. I quit even visiting because of all the, uh, turmoil and unpleasantness of the last few months. Some of us who’d been around a while kind of resented being called trolls and subjected to other impolite abuse from the apparently deranged and the obvious ratfuckers who had taken over. We’re hoping things will continue to improve. Why, just this week I’ve seen the reappearance of some of the old generic misogynist/rightwing gasbag trolls that we used to torment constantly! How frightening that by comparison they now seem fairly benign.
As for the blog’s motto, I couldn’t agree with you more.
I never metaphor I didn’t skin.
Is Confederate Yankee embarrassed yet?
More to the point, has he demonstrated convincing proof of sentience?
Still a dumb inbred. Why do you ask?
.
SUV is the new single-wide!
I haven’t seen any retraction or apology about this lie. So it will become another AL Gore myth.
I realize that the Internet tradition forbids anyone in the right wing death squads from admitting that they screwed the pooch again, but really these people are the suckiest sucks evah, aren’t they?
Al Gore flies in a airplane! Al Gore flushes the toilet when he pees! Al Gore sometimes drives with the AC on and the window open! Al Gore’s car gets five hogsheads to the furlong! Or the other way around! Whichever is worse! Also Al Gore took over twenty parsecs to do the Kessel run! And one guy who monitored a Navy weather station for three years says the scientists are wrong and you hardly ever hear about that except in like every motherfucking Op-Ed page like every damn day because they’re being silenced because Al Gore makes money off your carbon credits!
Anyone ever figure out how much electricity the McCain’s seven mansions use up?
The thing is, when you compare things appropriately (a per-area basis, looking in the same geographical area, comparing houses to houses, etc) Gore’s house is slightly more efficient than average. In comparison, George W Bush’s pig farm in Crawford is astoundingly green — it produces only twenty percent as much pig shit as the average pig farm, his swimming pool counts as wetlands, and the big piles of brush he’s always chopping up are like a carbon sink or something.
We shouldn’t be comparing Gore’s house and McCain’s houses, though. It might be more instructive to add up for Gore:
energy usage (mansion)
miles of air travel
cost of John Edwards’s haircuts
and for W and Cheney:
energy usage (White House, Crawford Ranch, Undisclosed Location)
miles of air travel
total energy used invading Iraq to look for non-existent WMDs and to occupy it for five years and counting
Dare we measure Drew Johnson’s commitment to his beliefs? Does anyone have the stomach to peek behind the closed doors of Johnson’s own home?
I could speculate that his beliefs involve the daily deliberate destruction of millions of reproductive cells, but I suppose that would be irresponsible.
Please let us not be measuring things behind closed doors at Casa Johnson *shudder*.
How much power does the Johnson bot use as it lurches around making things up. Obviously the head unit is long ago burnt out but there must be some requirements for the feet and hands and the “Danger, Danger, Will Robinson” type messages.
My house uses enough energy in one year to supply energy for 52 of my neighbors for a week! I tried to use this logic to get my wife to turn off the AC but she wouldn’t buy it.
Hey y’all to show there’s no hard feelings I’m going to share my weight-loss tip with you: ice cream.
See, a half-cup (four ounce) serving of ice cream has about 250 calories. BUT, when you eat it it’s like twenty degrees, and your body has to give up energy* to get it up to 98.6 degrees, so that’s nearly 80 degrees times four ounces which comes out to over FIVE THOUSAND CALORIES that you expend! So every serving of ice cream really has NEGATIVE 4750 CALORIES which is like doing TEN HOURS on a STAIRMASTER.
No need to thank me.
* one calorie raises one “gram” of water one degree “celsius”; I have assumed that ice cream has the same specific heat and also converted the atheist units into Godly measurements.
Update: apparently we have been lied to by foreign scientists, and the ice cream actually has 250 “kilo”calories. A reader notes (correctly) that each of those is equivalent to over ten “regular” calories, so you may need to eat more ice cream before seeing substantial weight loss but indeed this only serves to underscore the importance of blogofacts.
My heart hurts!
My favorite rebuttal for tearing down the “average” arguments:
Bill Gates is worth 50 billion dollars. Put him in a room with 49 bums, & on average, everyone in the room is a billionaire!
I actually just posted on this… somehow, I trust Gore more than a GOP astroturf group funding by oil companies:
Former Vice President Al Gore’s Belle Meade house is bristling with brand-new solar panels, energy-efficient windows and uncountable multitudes of energy efficient light bulbs. Retrofitting the 80-year-old house earned the Gores a gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
How could their utility bills possibly be going up?
They’re not, says Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider.
In fact, over the past year the Gores’ utility bills have dropped 40 percent, thanks largely to the house’s spanking new geothermal heating and cooling system, which has reduced the Gores’ natural gas bill by 90 percent in the past year.
The Tennessee Center for Policy Research issued a gotcha press release today, revealing to the world that the global warming crusader’s house used 10 percent more electricity in the past year than it did the year before — despite extensive renovations to make the home more energy efficient.
So what’s the deal with the electric bill? Did the Gores screw in all those energy-sipping LED light bulbs in vain?
Kreider pointed out that the renovations weren’t complete until November, so it’s a bit early to be attempting before-and-after comparisons. In addition, the Gores participate in the Nashville Electric Service’s Green Power Switch Program, which allows them to buy their electricity from renewable sources like wind power, solar power or methane gas from landfills (the house’s 33 solar panels only supply 4 percent of its power needs, per Kreider.) So any energy they burn won’t be burning them a bigger carbon footprint.
As for the record, Gore is not thrilled by the prospect of a 70-foot-tall hot air balloon buzzing his home on Friday. Kreider said his staff is “making inquiries” to see if the global warming skeptics from Americans for Prosperity might be violating any local ordinances.