‘Energy Hog’ Al Gore: New Film Flops, But He’s Still Living Large

Al Gore, whose energy-squandering Nashville home earned him an “energy hog” rating, has a hypocritically large carbon footprint.

This, along with the public’s fear fatigue over global warming fright-peddling, may account for An Inconvenient Sequel bombing at the box office.

Despite huge help from the liberal-left establishment, Al Gore is having big trouble selling tickets to his new global warming apocalypse film, An Inconvenient Sequel. Unlike the original 2006 film rant (which also garnered him Nobel and Oscar prizes), his latest offering has been a bomb at the box office since its release on July 28.

The former vice president, who has been jetting around the globe to promote the new “documentary,” was given friendly coverage by the BBC to preach his global warming gospel and bash President Trump during a tour-stop in London on August 10.

However, as London’s Daily Mail noted, the movie is “clocking in at just 15th place — six spots under where the original was at this point in 2006,” and Gore’s box-office woes are not likely to improve. CNN provided a special Townhall segment featuring a fawning interview of Gore by Anderson Cooper. Other networks and media organizations, likewise, lavished millions of dollars’ worth of friendly, free publicity. It hasn’t seemed to help.

Some of the reason for the lackluster film performance may have to do with the messenger. Al Gore has packaged himself as a preacher/prophet with a moral, messianic message. Indeed, he has repeatedly said global warming is “a moral and a spiritual issue.”

Do What I Say, NOT What I Do

The website for his film calls on visitors to take the “PLEDGE TO #BEINCONVENIENT,” which includes a pledge to: “Use my choice to switch my home/business/community/university to 100% renewable energy.” But don’t expect Mr. Gore to inconvenience himself or interrupt his lavish lifestyle.

You see, Preacher Al does not practice what he preaches, and his monumental hypocrisy has many erstwhile acolytes suggesting that he is an embarrassment as a spokesman, and ought to be excommunicated from the Church of Green. In his BBC interview, Gore claimed that current climate catastrophes — storms, hurricanes, droughts — are right out of the Book of Revelation. But the revelation he has to worry about is dealing with his mammoth carbon footprint.

Just as An Inconvenient Sequel was hitting the theaters, a new think tank report came out showing that Gore, who is calling on everyone else to sacrifice, sucks more than 20 times more energy off the grid than the average American family — for just one of his luxury homes! And some months his energy consumption has soared to 34 times the average family usage.

After picking up a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work in 2007, Gore solemnly stated in an interview from Norway: “The only way to solve this crisis is for individuals to make changes in their own lives.” However, Al Gore’s carbon-hog lifestyle shows he believes that the commandment to change is “For thee and not for me.”

The details of Gore’s energy guzzling can be found in a new report from the National Center for Public Policy Research titled “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality.” The report, authored by Drew Johnson, examined records of energy usage at Gore’s colonial-style 20-room mansion in the posh Belle Meade section of Nashville, the eighth-wealthiest neighborhood in America according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Gore mansion, with five bedrooms, eight full bathrooms, and two half-baths on a 2.09-acre lot, was purchased by the Gores in 2002 for $2.3 million. Among the details revealed in “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality” are these points:

• The past year, Gore’s home energy use averaged 19,241 kilowatt hours (kWh) every month, compared to the U.S. household average of 901 kWh per month.
• Gore guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years.
• In September of 2016, Gore’s home consumed 30,993 kWh in just one month — as much energy as a typical American family burns in 34 months.
• During the last 12 months, Gore devoured 66,159 kWh of electricity just heating his pool. That is enough energy to power six average U.S. households for a year.
• From August 2016 through July 2017, Gore spent almost $22,000 on electricity bills.
• Gore paid an estimated $60,000 to install 33 solar panels. Those solar panels produce an average of 1,092 kWh per month, only 5.7 percent of Gore’s typical monthly energy consumption.

Gore Earns “Energy Hog” Rating

The Gore mansion consumed 22.9 kWh per square foot during the past 12 months, more than four times what an energy efficient home should use, according to Energy Vanguard, a company devoted to making homes more energy efficient. Homes that consume more than 20 kWh of electricity per square foot per year earn Energy Vanguard’s worst rating: “energy hog.” Gore qualified for that dubious distinction.

But Gore’s “energy hog” mansion scandal is only part of the story. As Johnson observes in his report, Gore’s Tennessee mansion energy consumption is all the more staggering when one considers that Al is presumably living there alone and part-time. The Gores’ four children are grown and do not live at the home. Al and Tipper Gore separated in 2010 (but apparently never divorced), and Tipper lives in a luxurious ocean-front villa in Montecito, California (alongside Hollywood celebrity neighbors Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Drew Barrymore) that the couple bought in 2010 for $9 million.

Al Gore has another luxury town home at the St. Regis Tower in San Francisco’s ritzy water-front area. According to Liveinsf.com, a site that specializes in luxury real estate, the St. Regis Tower provides “spectacular views of the city and bay.” Moreover, the website continues, “Amenities at the building include 24-hour room service, butler service, a fitness center, spa, lap pool, even a world class restaurant that’s been receiving rave reviews.” Butlers, spa, room service — nice, but a little plushy, no? Where’s all the sacrifice?!

Then there is the Gores’ historic family farmhouse and property in Carthage, Tennessee. Added to all this are all of Preacher Al’s globe-hopping, carbon-spewing private jet and limo trips to Davos, Switzerland (to hobnob with the billionaire titans of the World Economic Forum); Cannes, France (to hobnob with his Hollywood celebrity pals); New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, and on and on.

As to be expected, the “green” Fake News establishment has, for the most part, ignored Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality, essentially giving the hypocritical preacher a free pass on his blatant betrayal of the core dogma he prescribes for everyone else. Gore has plenty of enviro pals in the media who rushed to his defense, of course, offering rationalizations for his sins of omission and commission.

One of the most ludicrous attempts in the rationalization genre comes from the New Republic’s Emily Atkin, who penned a convoluted and confused argument titled “Al Gore’s Carbon Footprint Doesn’t Matter.” “Should prominent climate advocates be expected to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle?” Atkin asks. “Are they hypocrites if they don’t?

Right-wing critics would have you believe so — that these moralizing elitists are making rules for the public that they themselves don’t have to follow. This has a powerful appeal, especially today. But ultimately the argument is deceitful faux-populism, and the real hypocrites here are the purveyors of it.”

Yes, according to Atkin and The New Republic, it is not Al Gore but the critics who point to Al Gore’s hypocrisy who are the real hypocrites that deserve scorn. She avers that the profligate opulence of the green-minded plutocrats — she names actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Tesla carmaker Elon Musk, besides Gore — are beyond critique.

They are exempt because they are doing “good.”  According to Atkin, “people like Gore are using their wealth for good,” regardless of the fact that they are squandering natural resources that they insist we must forego, or at least “reduce, reuse, recycle.” The clincher, she knows, for many of her readers is that Gore has received a benediction and dispensation from the high priest of global warming, Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann. “‘He’s devoted his life to making sure we act in time to avert a global climate crisis,’ the climate scientist Michael Mann told me,” Atkin wrote.

Read more at New American