Gore: Electricity bills surface at an inconvenient time

This strays a bit from my technological angle of the environment, but I couldn't resist...

Al Gore was almost as popular as Ellen Degeneres or Martin Scorsese at Sunday night's Academy Awards, with his film "An Inconvenient Truth" taking home the Oscar for Best Docuementary Feature and Best Original Song (Melissa Etheridge's "I need to wake up"). Gore's celebrations probably ended early as the Tennessee Center for Policy Research brought forth his electricity bills from the past two years, which immediately caused the the father of the fight against global warming to be rechristened as a hypocrite.

The independent, non-profit organization looked at Gore's electricity bills (public record) for 2005 and 2006, and found that the former vice president's 20 room house (and pool house) used 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, which is about 20 times the amount produced by the average American home (approximately 10, 656 kWh). Nashville Electric Services supposedly charged the Gores an average of $1,359 per month in 2006, and gas bills were at an average of around $536 a month for the main house and $544 for the pool house. According to the research group, that comes out to a price tag of $29,268 for the Gore family in 2006. That doesn't seem very economical, does it?

In response to these charges, a spokeswoman for the Gores has cited several reasons why this isn't grounds for forfeiting Gore's shiny Oscar statue. Gore is acutely aware of his "carbon footprint" (You can calculate your own footprint too), and the family supposedly uses the Green Power Switch Program to obtain most of their energy, which consists of solar, wind and methane gas resources. The Gores are also in the midst of installing solar panels onto their house, but I'd like to know why the solar panels aren't already a facet on the "green" family's home. Furthermore, the family uses compact fluorescent lightbulbs rather than incandescent ones, which are considerably more energy efficient.

Despite these admissions, the Gores are failing to set a good example of the ideal, energy conscious family. They could still live a lifestyle twice as lavish (if you quantify lavish as the amount of energy one consumes) as the average family. It's hard to scold the masses for excessive energy use when you are using twenty times the amount-- regardless of the measures taken to offset the damage. Perhaps the Gores could start out by turning the heat off in their swimming pool-- It's Nashville, damnit!