Thursday, October 28, 2010

While Gore's Car Idles, He Gives a Speech About Saving Energy

It no longer surprises anyone that those who serve in the Al Gore Is A Clown Watch are burning up their calculators in trying to keep track of his gaffes, over-hyped alarms, self-aggrandizing boasts, outright lies, denials of established scientific fact and acts of over-the-top hypocrisy. Here's a revealing incident in that last category connected to Al Gore's recent visit to Scandanavia.

Gore arrived in Gothenberg, Sweden to give one of his usual Chicken Little speeches. But he didn't arrive by train, although the conference had urged all of its guests (even the speakers) to travel by the most eco-friendly form of transportation. But Gore didn't want to do the four-hour train ride so he came by a government plane from Stockholm, rented a car to drive to his speech, and then left that car idling the entire hour he was in the hall!

Now local law prohibits any car engine running on idle for more than 60 seconds. And the fines are pretty severe. Except, of course, when they involve the carbon-spitting vehicle of the Climate King himself.

Gore's return route, by the way, included that rental car back to the airport (running low on fossil fuel by that time) then the same Swedish government plane which, as an expensive courtesy, flew him all the way to Frankfurt, Germany. From there it was a trans-Atlantic flight back to the U.S.

That's quite a lot of carbon points used up to make one speech. But then, when you're the one man responsible for saving the planet from complete environmental catastrophe, whose gonna' care about a little self-indulgence, a little luxury...a little hypocrisy?