Al Gore:How Green Is He?

[Alex]

Originally Posted by scaeagles

Look at how Gore travels around the globe to preach his message. By jet. Has he ever heard of a satillite link or a phone call? I really don't care that he flies somewhere to do it. Just don't tell me that my SUV (theoretical - I don't own an SUV) is going to destroy the planet when one of your plane trips burns more fuel than my SUV does in several years.

Gore doesn't claim to not emit carbon pollution. He does claim to be carbon-neutral meaning that what carbon he does put into the atmosphere he takes out an equal amount.

Now, I have no idea if he lives up to that and it is certainly a valid argument that he is engaging in checkbook environmentalism (he gets to keep being profligate while simply writing a check that pay some non-profit to plant a lot of trees). But you can't (or, rather, shouldn't) label him as a hypocrite for not doing what you decide he should have said he would be doing.

Further, even if that were not the case, "you have to break some eggs to make an omellet" is also not necessarily hypocrisy. If he believes that by giving the presentation in person he can do a better job to convince people of his argument than by a satellite uplink then it makes sense to do so (especially if he does travel in a carbon neutral way).

Disagreeing with that evaluation also does not make him a hypocrite, it just makes him at odds with your evaluation.

I would prefer to see him be carbon-negative rather than carbon-neutral (I'd like to see all of be carbon-negative; even if the certainty of man-made emissions causing global warming isn't 100% it still makes sense to make the easy reductions) but again him not doing what I would prefer he do is not hypocrisy.