First off. I'm absolutely not in the "OMGZ! Al Gore left his car running!!!" crowd. As Joph said, the message is more important then the messenger. However, for me, it's not about Gore himself, but the implications for the rest of us mere mortals.
Aripyanfar wrote:
Al Gore is a proponent of reducing carbon release into the atmoshere, but where it's unavoidable, or would make life just too unpleasant, he encourages paying for CARBON OFFSETTING. It's something he does for all his airplane travel, and any excess carbon usage his family goes through.
So, if you are wealthy you don't have to worry about pollution. It's like buying indulgences...
Look. I get that for someone who's job requires them to travel and a public figure to boot, it's unfair to compare his energy use straight across. But I really do think that carbon offsets are a crock. Ultimately, it's a way to price energy out of reach of most people.
One of the more amusing aspects of the Left is how often they talk about the gap between rich and poor, yet it seems like they're the ones who make being rich so significant. When a middle class person can afford a nice comfy house in the suburbs, it's not a big deal that a rich person can afford more. But when that same person can't afford to live in anything other then a small duplex in the city so he's close to public transportation and can receive subsidized power, there's suddenly a huge difference, isn't there?
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This article sounds like the same conservative furphy as the one they like to make about Al Gore's house: a large mansion, with many many lights and electrical devices in it. That house is run on alternative energies (wind and solar) with zero carbon emissions.
Let's be fair though. It's not like he runs his own wind and solar plants. What he does is choose to use a "green energy" power company. This means that somewhere in the US, there's some wind and solar plants dumping power into the grid. But this power typically costs more then the local coalfired power plant does, so only those willing to pay that company more get the power. Of course, it's all the same electricity once it hits the grid. What Gore is doing is another form of buying indulgence. By paying more for his electricity, he can claim that he's using the electricity generated by some solar panel 500 miles away.
While I'm sure it may make him feel better, it's not a choice that most Americans can afford. Again. It's not really about being more green. It's about being willing to pay more for power so that you can claim to be green.
It's one of those "solutions" that works in the small scale. We can produce a small amount of electricity from solar, wind, etc and those who want to pay extra can buy it off the grid. But if we changed the whole grid to only get power that way, most americans couldn't afford it. Not really a solution...
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Conservatives seem to have this huge stick up their butt about environmentalists wanting to degrade our quality of life, make it less pleasant and comfortable. It's completely untrue. Most environmentalists are all about being smarter. Having your cake and eating it too, by having your present, or an even better quality of life, without taking so much out of the planetary life-support system that sustains us.
Not really. I'd argue that while most real environmentalists do believe this (and I know quite a few of them), very very few of those people are the same as those pushing this as a political agenda. You want to meet a real environmentalist, go hang out in some cabins up in the mountains, or those desert adobe homes and the communities of people who live that lifestyle. Most of those people will tell you what they think about the environment (and I've never heard one mention carbon offsets btw), but aren't particularly political. It's the folks who don't do anything in their day to day lives about the environment, but figure if they march in support of legislation to force others to change then they're doing something that represent the largest group who're actually pushing the environmental movement. And most of those people have no clue what they're supporting. They're just told to pick up their signs, put their bumperstickers on their cars, and, like Gore buying his offsets, they can feel good about themselves for having "done something".
And yeah. I have a problem with those folks, because the political leaders they're blindly following/supporting often don't care about the environment nearly as much as they care about the political power they gain by picking up the issue of the environment. And that's just the relatively harmless opportunistic politicians. The real dangers, and the folks I'm most concerned about are the ones who see this as a means to impose broader socio-economic changes. As I pointed out, most of what this does is make energy more expensive. Heck. It makes living more expensive. And the cynic in me observes that the poorer the people are (or believe themselves to be), the more willing they are to give up some of their liberty in exchange for government benefits.
How perfect is it to convince the people that they must pay more for a cleaner environment, but since most can't afford it, we'll have to impose more on those who can and provide subsidies for those who can't. For the powerhungry statist, this gets both groups at the same time. The first is taxed more, so they have less freedom. The second is now beholden to you for their very lives. The only people who continue on just peachy are the very rich that most of those supporting the environmentalist movement hate so much...
Funny, isn't it?