Where Global Warming Denial Has Come to Die -- In the Pretense of Stupidity

If you want evidence that the debate on global warming is over, look no farther than the attacks on Al Gore for daring to win an Oscar. After having every argument against the reality of human caused climate change shut down, there's nothing left to them but to attack the messenger. NewsBusters (the right wing 'answer' to Media Matters) tells us "Sean Hannity Exposes Al Gore’s Inconvenient Global Warming Hypocrisy" -- as if Hannity were anything other than a shameless PR tool. Next up, Ann Coulter 'exposes' the fact that all liberals eat brie and drink merlot while performing abortions at gay wedding receptions. The only people still on the global warming denial train are the idiots who don't matter.

So what is Gore's 'Global Warming Hypocrisy?' He uses electricity, flies on jets, drives, and generally behaves like someone who doesn't live in the stone age.

Hannity, via NewsBusters:

In short, flying in a private jet does more than four times the carbon emission damage to the environment than flying a regular commercial jet. So if you were worried about your quote-unquote "carbon footprint" on the environment, and if you are concerned about carbon neutrality, the last thing that you should be doing is flying on private jets. Sit in coach, you might save a polar bear.

Hannity can't even keep his bullshit straight. Despite previously telling viewers that global warming is just a liberal scare tactic, he's now all worried about the 'carbon emission damage' of Al Gore's plane.

Of course, Sean Hannity's a freakin' idiot. If you need proof (other than Bush's deficits) that the modern conservative movement is filled with people who are bad at math, look no further than their misunderstanding of the concept of carbon offsets (for a good explanation of carbon offsets, check out Killfile's post here).

See, it works like this, X-X=0. In fact, X+1-(X+1)=0. As long as I'm subtracting the same amount, I can't add to the sum. Crazy how that works. By buying carbon offsets, Gore reduces his carbon footprint to zero.

I couldn't put it better than Jim Henley does at HighClearing.com (via Gristmill):

Al Gore uses a lot of electricity. Al Gore buys carbon offsets. Libertarians who take anthropogenic global warming seriously - count me among them - generally favor markets in emissions over hard regulatory targets for individual homes and businesses. That way people and companies can decide to conserve or offset or buy unused capacity as they see fit, minimizing emissions while maximizing utility.

Curiously, the "free market" think tank that gives us our first link declares that Gore's free choice to use his own money to offset his family's carbon output makes him a "hypocrite," since he thinks global warming is bad. This may seem odd, but perusing the Hit & Run comment thread from which I got the above links will clarify: libertarians believe in principles, and one of the most important principles is

AL GORE SUCKS AND IS FAT FAT FAT!!!!

Therefore anything he does is wrong. I believe this is explained somewhere in the works of Ludwig von Mises.

That pretty much sums it up. If Gore were living the lifestyle chumps like Hannity pretend they want him to live, Hannity would be asking, "You want to ride a horse everywhere and read by bioluminescent moss like Al Gore?" He's being criticized for not living like a character in The Flintstones. What do you want to bet he'd catch as much flak if he did?

Another bit of fun is some idiot from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. This guy has been all over the place telling everyone who'll listen that Al Gore sucks up juice like nobody's business. But the truth is that if Gore buys enough offsets, he could use as much energy as freakin' China and still have an effective output of zero. It's that crazy math thing again.

I heard TCPR's president, Drew Johnson, on the Ed Schultz Show yesterday and the guy was a freakin' moron. He attacked Gore for saying he buys renewable energy by pointing out that there's no direct line from a renewable generator to his house. At that point, I yelled at my radio, "It's math you freakin' idiot!"

Let's ignore the fact that Gore has solar panels, so he does have a direct connection to renewable energy. No one who buys renewable energy from a utility has a direct line to the generator -- there's no reason to build a separate grid. If I buy X kilowatts of renewable and my utility generates X kilowatts of renewable, then X kilowatts of renewable energy are generated -- if X% of consumers buy X% of green, X% of the juice in the grid is green. That involves the arithmetic, so it's beyond the understanding of your average modern conservative. Again, X-X=0.

This is where the global warming denial argument has come to die; Al Gore's a hypocrite. Even if it were true, it wouldn't do a damned thing to disprove his point -- a smoker, for example, can tell you smoking's bad for you and be 100% correct. But that's what you call your 'logic.' Logic is similar to math, so these guys either pretend to misunderstand it or are stupid enough to misunderstand it.

Unfortunately for the global warming deniers, there aren't many who are as stupid as the deniers pretend to be.