Here's the story.

A fake policy group, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research publishes Al Gore's Personal Energy Use Is His Own "Inconvenient Truth", an article alleging that Al Gore, because of the amount of money he spends on power is a hypocrite.

Within hours, the story travels to the wingnutosphere via Drudge. Interesting how a fake group with a website with no traffic is immediately picked up by Drudge and then Fox news?

After this legitimate (ha ha) news agencies like ABC and CNN pick up the story. Because, you know, it's true if the story is propagated by a fake policy group and a right wing nut like Drudge. No one bothers, you know, fact checking to see if this group is real (Huffington Post shows that they actually have no traffic on their site, it's clearly a set up).

Finally, someone bother to ask Al Gore about all this. What's the real story? He buys all his power from green/renewable sources and offsets his carbon footprint with carbon credits. He's also apparently installing solar panels and taking other steps to decrease power usage.

So, power usage != huge carbon footprint. But are the conservatives and libertarians satisfied? You think they'd approve of a market solution to a pollution problem? Nope, they're just hacks. So when AEI and CEI and all those other BS denialist groups say they're "non-partisan" or when Reason says it's guided by libertarian principles, you know they're full of shit. Their guiding principle is they hate Al Gore, they hate environmentalism, and they're only interested in the "freedom" of their corporate financiers.

Labels: Al Gore, assholes, libertarians