Note: I updated this in response to a diary here by stardate.
From Peter Schweizer, fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and author of the ridiculous Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy:
Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
Al Gore has spoken: The world must embrace a "carbon-neutral lifestyle." [...] But if Al Gore is the world's role model for ecology, the planet is doomed.[...]
Mr. Schweizer
continues:
In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up.[...]
But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.[...]
The DNC has not signed up to pay an additional two pennies a kilowatt hour to go green. For that matter, neither has the Republican National Committee.
Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.
Note: Gore's office has refuted virtually all of the objections rasied by Mr. Schweizer here. Apparently Mr. Schweizer is just as disconnected from reality as he is from logic and cleverness
Before I get to why this op-ed only demonstrates Mr. Schweizer's disregard logic, let me welcome Mr. Schweizer, to the club of people who make an inconvenient choice to use an inconvenient pun in their articles an inconvenient number of times. We get it; An Inconvenient Truth is a popular movie, so if you want your article to be hip and cool, just throw in "an inconvenient ______"! I swear, the desperate search for relevance would be funny if it weren't so gosh darn obnoxious to hear inconvenient so terribly overused.
Unfortunately, in addition to his dangerous lack of wit, Mr. Schweizer also suffers from a paucity of reason.
You see, Mr. Schweizer's article is basically one very long, very smug logical fallacy. It's a doozy too: Ad hominem tu quoque, the "you do it too argument." Wikipedia has a neat diagram of what it looks like:
A makes criticism P.
A is also guilty of P.
Therefore, P is dismissed.
This is a very common fallacy, because it's so effective in rhetoric. But at the end of the day, either an argument is sound or it isn't, and the private life of one former vice-president can never change an argument's validity.
So yes, it is unfortunate that despite Al Gore's tireless work on behalf of environmental causes, he has not reached environmental perfection in his private life. But to hold up Vice-President Gore's personal environmental failures as if to say "gotcha!", and then to ignore his profound and urgent message is the height of stupidity.
If Mr. Schwiezer and his allies on the right are going to take us on about climate change, they're going to have to do better than a logical fallacy, hack scientists, and a corperate parody, because something tells me that the American people aren't falling for it.
