The Jolly Brown Giant

Caveat Bettor, per Diem links to Steve Milloy's Junk Science, who links to his own story at the Fox News website:

[T]he Tennessee Center for Policy Research reported that Gore’s Nashville mansion consumed more than 20 times the electricity than the national average. Last August, the Gore mansion burned more than twice the electricity in a single month as the average American family uses in an entire year. Gore’s heated pool house alone uses more than $500 in electricity every month....

And then carbon offsets enter the picture.

A Gore spokesman tried to deflect the charges of “do as I say, not as I do” by stating that the Gores “purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero.”

Milloy isn't sold on offsets:

The actual offset purchaser is a London-based investment firm, Generation Investment Management (GIM), that Al Gore co-founded with former Goldman Sachs executive David Blood and others in 2004.

GIM supposedly purchases carbon offsets for all 23 of its employees to cover their personal energy use.

Skipping over the implications of the "Investment" in "Generation Investment Management," let's look what Milloy says about the offsets themselves.

The Carbon Neutral Company – one of the two vendors that sell offsets to GIM – says that offset purchases “will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… in the short term.”

Instead, they merely: (1) demonstrate commitment to taking action on climate change; (2) add an economic component to climate change; (3) help engage and educate the public; and (4) may provide local social and environmental benefits that help to encourage the use of low-carbon technologies.

The real design behind offsetting, then, is to impact the public debate, not to avert the dreaded global warming.

I haven't talked about carbon offsets since my March post, but this is probably as good a time as any to see how Carbonfund.org attempts to calculate carbon offsets:

Our Carbon Calculator uses averages and statistics from the US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency to estimate your usage based on your inputs. What we...know is the average American is responsible for about 10 tons of CO2 emissions annually in direct emissions (home, car, travel) and about 23 tons annually in total throughout the economy, including when we buy clothes, food, and other goods and services. This number was derived by taking total US emissions and dividing by the U. S. population.

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