Are you surprised? I'm not.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research reports that just one of Al Gore's homes used electricity last year at a rate more than twenty times the national average. According to the article, his one home used more than "twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year."

This fellow makes some interesting calculations, too, although they may be of dubious accuracy. Nevertheless, he has the best quote of the week: "If a tree gets planted in the forest and no one is around to give Gore credit, can it still reduce CO2?"

Would any of you guess that Mr. Gore's energy consumption is not alone among his admiring fans at the Academy Awards ceremony? Did any of you compare the number of stretch limos to the number of Prius at the ceremony?

The most obvious explanations are hypocrisy and elitism. Let's give Al Gore the benefit of the doubt. Let's assume he is not a hypocrite. Let's assume he really does know more than the rest of us. And let's assume that whatever his true beliefs are, he holds them sincerely and will act in accordance with them.

Doesn't that strongly imply that the whole global warming "catastrophe" is bunk?

UPDATE: I was wrong. Al Gore doesn't waste energy...er...well, he doesn't waste energy he can't afford. But wait, maybe he is a hypocrite:

"[Al Gore's] purchasing offsets only means that Gore doesn't want to make the same kind of sacrifices that he's asking other families to make. He's using a modern form of indulgences in order to avoid doing the penance that global-warming activism demands of others. It means that the very rich can continue to suck up energy and raise the price and the demand for electricity and natural gas, while families struggle with their energy costs and face increasing government regulation and taxation. It's a regressive plan that Gore's supporters would decry if the same kind of scheme were applied to a national sales tax, for instance.

And basically, it doesn't address the issue of hypocrisy. If Gore and his family continue to increase their consumption of commercial energy with all of the resources they have at hand, then they have no business lecturing the rest of us on conservation and down-scaling our own use.