The Great Gore Scam

May 4, 2007

 

You ever heard the old adage ‘turning lemons into lemonade?' That's exactly what the PR department at Nashville Electric Service is trying to do. NES is where Al Gore gets his power. This is also the place where records were dug up on ole Spotted Al that revealed he was consuming twice the electricity in one month that the average household uses in an entire year. Remember?

 

Well, now NES has issued a little newsletter in their latest bill heaping praise on their “Academy Award winner” customer. Al was shamed into signing up for their Green Power Switch program after a column in USA Today back in November outed him. Now he has apparently become the biggest customer of Green Power Switch. Forget that the program has been available to Al for seven years and he just decided to make the switch, NES is singing his praises. They're also singing the praises of this wonderfully successful program, revealing that they've almost doubled the customer base since Al Gore generously brought all this attention to GPS. Last year they had 33 customers, now they have 60. (Woo-hoo)

 

The irony is, it wasn't Al who brought them the attention, it was Peter Schweizer, a research fellow with the Hoover Institute, who first pointed out the fact that Al was not on the program in his USA Today editorial, which prompted Al to jump on it. What kind of difference is Al making? Well, he buys, according to NES, 108 blocks of green power at four bucks a pop. That comes to a whopping total of $432 per month. That may sound like a lot to you and me but consider that Al's average power bill runs over $1,300 per month. In other words, for all of his exorbitant consumption of electricity, Al pays penance to the power gods of an extra $432. I don't get it.

 

Something else I don't get. NES claims GPS “offers our customers a choice in the type of power they buy.” They make it sound like some guy's standing up there on Buffalo Mountain beside a wind turbine with a work order saying, “Okay, Fred. Pump some of this wind power down to Al Gore's place.” That's not the way it works. This renewable energy is produced and added to the grid. It's not like we can place an order for it and just get green energy, but that's exactly what Al Gore is claiming and NES is playing along.

 

I'm all for renewable energy. I don't quite understand why the wind blowing or the sun shining should cost more than burning coal, still, I'm a big proponent of renewable energy. However, I don't appreciate being misled and treated like an imbecile by people trying to pull the wool over our eyes. If Al Gore really cares about energy consumption he'll sell his four houses – including his 10,000-square-foot mansion – and he'll move into something just large enough for Tipper and him. And he'll stop flying all around the world on private jets. NES is allowing Al to treat the GPS program like another carbon offset scheme which is one of the biggest scams perpetrated on humanity. We're not falling for it. If you care about the environment, stop with all the smoke and mirrors. Carbon offsets make no more sense than Dom Imus buying racist offsets. If you believe something is damaging to the environment you stop doing it. You don't pay someone else to let you keep doing it. Shame on Al Gore for trying to bamboozle us and shame on NES for giving him cover.