Heh no sooner then after I post my “alive” update do I see something I want to blog about… If you’ve been following the celebrity news, you might have heard about how Al Gore’s home in Tennessee uses a large amount of power and that he has a huge electricity bill. This info was announced a day after Mr. Gore won an Oscar for best documentary coincidence on timing, I think not.
This is typical conservative/republican mud slinging, they did it to Bill Clinton (Whitewater), John Kerry (Vietnam) and now they’re attacking Al Gore. As someone who’s done well in life Mr. Gore has a large home and as one would expect, large utility bills. But wait a minute, this conservative think tank didn’t even get its facts right (as usual)…
– Astonished by the figures, an astute journalist at AP decided to cross check. She called Nashville Electric Service (NES), from whom the think tank claimed to have got its numbers. “But electric company spokeswoman Laurie Parker said the utility never got a request from the policy center and never provided them with any information.”
– The think tank claims that the Gore household used 221,000 kWh in 2006, but the electricity service says that number should be 191,000 kWh.
– More to the point, Gore participates in the Green Power Switch programme, which offers clients the possibility of paying a premium to allow the Tennesse power supplier to include renewable energies in its power mix. The programme costs an additional $4 per 150 kilowatt hours and Gore has been purchasing the “green power” for $432 a month since November 2006. So I calculate he is buying 16,200 kWh of green power per month and using, according to NES’s 2006 figures, 15,917 kWh.
Source: NewScientist
Well isn’t this a surprise, looks like someone at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research needs to do a bit of fact checking. Yes Al Gore’s home uses a lot of energy, it’s damn big after all. I wonder how much energy does George W Bush’s home consumes or how about Rex Tillerson (CEO of ExxonMobil).
Mr. Gore has been an environmentalist right from the beginning, before it was the cool thing. He’s always worked for the betterment of the planet, let’s not forget that even if his reputation is dragged through the mud.
