The Goracle Is A Big Fat Hypocrite, And Other Green Stupidity

Remember Earth Hour?  It didn't really accomplish anything other than allowing environmentalists to feel significant (to themselves) for an hour or so.  As the self-appointed high priest and spokes-godling for the Green Religion, Al Gore surely led the charge into darkness, right?  If you believe that, I've got some land on Pluto that I'd like to sell you.  While we're negotiating the purchase price, read this:

Do as I say, not as I do? Seems like former Vice-President Al Gore may be embracing that motto as evidenced Saturday night with the environmentalist's failure to turn off the lights of his Nashville home for "Earth Hour."

Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research —the same organization that also found Gore's home consumes 20 times more electricity than the average household — told Yeas & Nays that Gore's Belle Meade-section mansion did not go dark during the global campaign's designated hour between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Johnson did admit that although it wasn't as bright as can be,  Gore did have on "a dozen or so" floodlights on his trees, a light shining on his address number, and a noticeable "bluish glow" from his powered-on televisions and computers coming from inside his house.

"It was very noticeable compared to the fact that even the streetlights on his street were off for the hour," Johnson said. He also added how ironic it was that Nashville was one of the "official" U.S. cities of "Earth Day."

Those must be some fantastic trees if they need their own floodlights!  Gore is, of course, denying the obvious -- and thus very fact-checkable -- reality and saying that 'no family is perfect'.  That's true, but very few families have made a gigantic fortune jetting all around the world lecturing and berating millions of other people into doing the same things you refuse to do yourself.

I guess that's why he deliberately dodged a potential debate with one of his harshest critics, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus, in a public setting:

Once again Al Gore has ducked the chance to debate critics of his global warming doomsday predictions. The former vice president loves to lecture others on the need to address global warming, but usually insists on appearing alone and largely unchallenged at conferences.

At the Wall Street Journal's ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara, California, Mr. Gore was initially scheduled to appear with Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a noted skeptic on global warming. Mr. Gore changed his schedule so he could appear the previous day. President Klaus told me this week that the major reason he agreed to travel from Europe was the chance to interact with Mr. Gore. "I don't understand all of this reluctance to engage with others," he told me.

Sounds to me like a case of bologna rejecting the grinder. Mr. Gore knows that the science backing up his calls for dramatic reduction of carbon emissions is increasingly shaky and that even adopting the Kyoto targets for such reductions would do little to address the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Several other critics of Mr. Gore also tried to interact with him at the conference -- with little success.

Zealots he commands, but a zealot he is not.

Moving on...

I recently blogged about how no one wants a hybrid.  Apparently, people aren't too thrilled about Smart Cars, either:

Tiny Smart cars are stacking up at some of the 75 U.S. Smart dealers because people who ordered them are refusing to take delivery.

Cheaper fuel prices blunt the appeal of Smart's 36 mile-per-gallon rating, and the recession has scared off some who ordered.

Also, they're just over-sized golf carts.  Lawn mowers with a roof.  Pop cans with wheels.  Who genuinely wants to drive that kind of a car?  Will it even reach 70mph on a highway?  Studmobiles these things are not.

How about green jobs?  Obama's promising a bunch of those, but how's that going to work out?

Barack Obama promised that his cap-and-trade energy policies would fund an explosion of "green jobs" as government pushes for mass-production-capable alternative energy sources.  Spain used to think the same thing, but Bloomberg reports that the explosion turned into an implosion (via Barcepundit):

Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain's experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.

For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

U.S. President Barack Obama's 2010 budget proposal contains about $20 billion in tax incentives for clean-energy programs. In Spain, where wind turbines provided 11 percent of power demand last year, generators earn rates as much as 11 times more for renewable energy compared with burning fossil fuels.

Spain wound up paying $775,000 for every green job they created through subsidies since 2000.  That's almost $100,000 per year per job, and that cost only includes the created jobs.  The cost of the 2.2 jobs lost would hike that cost considerably, as well as the lost tax revenues, the increased government assistance, and the opportunity costs for pulling capital out of the markets.

Yet another lie being told by the Obama administration that is easily disprovable.  His cap-and-trade and energy policies aren't going to help anything inside America's borders; in fact, they'll make things far, far worse.

Some more entertaining reading on global warming idiocy:
Global warming is the cause of global cooling.
Global warming protest frozen out by massive snowstorm...
...that was so big Pelosi couldn't make it there to speak.
The Great Lakes freeze up again.
Black cars are destroying the environment.
The rise of sea levels is a giant lie.
Reusable toilet paper.

Environmentalism would be absolutely hilarious, if it wasn't always attached to economy-destroying, freedom-oppressing, socialist legislation.

There's my two cents.