The President is wealthy, but he manages to have an eco-friendly house...

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0429-03.htm

Great post, Eric. I view Pandagon as mostly like Anne Coulter; and you give her a more serious read here than she deserves. Good, insightful, measured response.

Great post, Eric.

Mr. Gore also runs a small advocacy organization full time out of his house. Comparing it to other Nashville homes is misleading, comparing to other Nashville small offices would be more accurate.

Olbermann addresses this non-issue here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfvg1TuER5A

David, Olbermann doesn't really address it. He tries to argue that his home is bigger and therefore consumes more, but as Eric notes, it's inefficient on a per sq ft basis. And besides, the thrust of Eric's post here is the left's reaction to the story, which Olbermann never addresses. (On an unrelated note, Olbermann is, in my opinion, the best left-leaning commentator on television.)

I'm of the belief that Mr. Gore is entitled to more energy use since he is (presumably)much more active in that house and produces a lot of work from it. But I think a similar argument should apply on a global stage entitling the US to more carbon emissions than other countries, hence the reason the Kyoto Protocol is largely flawed. If, under the left's reasoning, Gore is entitled to more energy use, I believe the US is as well for the same reason.

What a repulsive opinion (BattlePanda's and Marcotte's not yours). I'd hesitate to characterize this as a distinction between left and right, though. Where I live, central North Carolina, there is a fairly large contigent people who strongly support individual action as well as government incentives. These are the sort of people who drive hybrids, build passive-solar homes, and fiddle around with home-brew techniques for generating environmentally friendly power or making their house more efficient. I would guess that many are lefties.

Perhaps what we see here is the distinction between narcissists and altruists, not left and right. A narcissist refuses to make any sacrifice that others aren't making, even for something that the narcissist thinks is morally right. An altruist will do what's right, even at some personal disadvantage, and hopes to encourage others.

Agreed: fantastic post, Eric.

While I agree with your overall conclusion, I'm not so sure I see it in this particular case. All you're seeing here is an effort by Marcotte et. al. to justify Gore's getting caught with his britches down. They do a pretty poor job of defending the indefensible, so one shouldn't be too surprised when when we're able to drive a truck through their faux reasoning.

I personally think Al Gore could do much better.

I would like to point out however, that Mr Gore leads a "carbon-neutral lifestyle," meaning he purchases enough renewables like solar, wind and methane gas to balance 100% of his electricity costs. That wasn't mentioned in this post, and I suspect that it isn't mentioned much on the bazillions of right wing blogs currently linking to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's hit piece carefully timed for the day after Mr Gore's Academy Award.

As for this: "What's also interesting is how the left is reacting to this," I would have instead written, "What's also interesting is how Amanda Marcotte and Battlepanda are reacting to this..." If you want to go ahead and conflate the words of two bloggers into "the way that many liberals think," go right ahead. But please excuse me if I find that to be utter bs.

JohnS, see the discussion in the post above titled "A tale of two markets".

Josh

I read it. You should also read the comments.

There does appear to be some controversy around the effectiveness carbon offsets.
However it also appears that there is also some consensus: that factoring in the price of carbon emissions in your cost of doing business is a good thing, and that more $$$ invested in renewables is also a good thing.

Getting back to the 'what does this say about the left and the right?' issue, the Pandagonians are pretty much on target, and Eric's example only further underscores their point. To be a liberal today is very much to care about substantively addressing various problems, such as global warming or poverty, and to recognize that only large-scale coordinated societal (and inter-societal, for global warming) action can have any real effect. Giving to charity or doing one's bit to recycle is seen as an important part of personal virtue -- which is clearly part of the entirety of that Pandagon post, if you actually read it -- but it is vital that it _not_ be seen as a substitute for collective action. Personal charity is utterly, completely ineffective at addressing the real, systemic problems with poverty, and so while it's definitely a nice thing to do, it's foolish to let it compete in your mind with real governmental action. (I should note that you need to see this as also a liberal-vs.-far-left debate, too, with lots of folks in the latter group fetishizing their own low-emission, organic, etc. lifestyles but unwilling to take a responsible part in the political process to change things.)

To be a conservative these days, as near as I can tell, is to care more about feeling good about your personal virtue, and about your ideological commitments, than about actually addressing any problems. So, sure, you have people giving away a few thousand bucks to feed a handful of poor people -- and then giving away a few more thousand to politicians to keep their taxes and/or the minimum wage from ever being raised, in ways that might allow _real_ measures to help the poor. Conservatives today are full of excuses for inaction, but simply don't give enough of a damn about the country's or the world's problems to do what needs to be done about it, at least not when that gets in the way of your own personal virtue or your ideological commitments. There are people like this on both sides of the political spectrum (like I said above about uber-lefties), but it seems these days that there are almost no nonideological pragmatists in any positions of power or even mininmal influence on the right. Y'all need to start doing something about that; not spending so much of your time & energy fretting about Al Gore's personal habits would be a good start.

I just lost a very long comment - readers should feel quite lucky - but really, John S. and philosopher say most of it. A little bit from the clipboard:

'Of course, the details of Gore's lifestyle and charcter aren't actually relevent to the larger issue - of what we can do about global warming (except in that they're being used to smear the messenger by groups who oppose the message.)

As to the "profound difference between right and left" - well, first off, Amanda's position isn't coming through very well in the bit you quoted; I don't think she's actually representing the attitude you ascribe to her. She goes on to add:

"[The Right has] grown accustomed to believing that the only legitimate government restraints on liberties are those that strike at behaviors that are suspect only because they bring pleasure to the unwashed masses. As such, they view the necessary restrictions on carbon use as some sort of moral crusade against sins they personally like to indulge and so they grasp at the “hypocrite” slander, as if that meant something.

The thing is, global warming isn’t a punishment enacted on us by a vengeful god for disobeying his dictates . . . Making environmentalism a modern day version of puritanical abstention doesn’t do much to actually help the planet. Carbon taxes would make a difference."
Agree or disagree, that's what she's actually saying - although as she isn't actually the mouthpiece of the Lefty Hivemind, not everyone on the left does agree with her. Shocking, I know.'

As to Amanda's point, I'm right now looking at a recent (Wednesday) piece by crazy lady Ann Coulter, entitled "Let Them Eat Tofu" (a (presponse to Gore's Oscar?) where she rants about how "Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation," and to destroy the economy and kill 299 million Americans - that ""Global warming" is the left's pagan rage against mankind . . The entire fuel-guzzling, tacky, beer-drinking, NASCAR-watching middle class with their over-large families will simply have to die," leaving only elite liberals in solar-powered mansions.

(Interestingly, while this is presented as a kind of evil long-term master plan, liberals are also presented as simply so dumb that "haven't the foggiest idea how the industrial world works," nor that in such a world "they'll be chasing the rear-end of an animal every time their stomachs growl," - taking its place among other classics of hate-propaganda where the Enemy is simultaneously fiendishly clever and laughably dumb.

But an-y-way,- while I don't entirely agree with Battlepanda, you can see the point: unless self-sacrifice is seen as a moral good in and of itself, such actions could be simply, well, pointless. (I think there's a role for examples, social pressure, and attitude change at the individual level, and certainly some things you do just because they're right, regardless - but that doesn't even come close to starting to fix things). Like philosopher points out, for most of the crowd, the goal isn't personal virtue points, it's practical change. And of course, Gore's approach - like other moderate strategies trying to address this - aims at setting up things so it can rely, to a fair extent, on individual action: he stresses a largely market-based solution that tries to correct for costs currently being externalized away (onto our kids and grandkids, mostly).

And as pointed out elsewhere, while folks are trying to push a old strawman - liberals want you to live in squalor and poverty, with teeny crappy houses and no plane rides or heated pools (or simply (Coulter) to die off) - self-denial, asceticism, etc. have nothing to do with this issue. In fact, the aim is to try to work out how to maintain (or even improve) our standard of living as much as possible, while finding ways to fix the problem and not crap up the planet - ie, without making life a fair bit worse. Hence carbon offsets and green power and etc. After all (for example) if you're getting all your energy from solar power, you could be leaving all the lights on 24/7, be running all sorts of fun energy-suckin' stuff and taking limos to the grocery store every day - it won't present the slightest problem in terms of global warming. Getting to something like this in time for it to make a difference, though, is going to require "government action . . . setting up proper incentives for people to modify their behavior."

Obviously that should be "an old strawman"; also the bit that starts "The thing is . . ." to "Carbon taxes would make a difference" is part of Amanda's quote.

It's a bit like skipping meals or eating a lot less because kids are starving in Africa - by itself, it's just kinda stupid. Spending some of the money you might have spent on food on relief efforts and such is good: you might help save a few children, or if combined with many, many, many donations, help make the kind of changes that might save many. Global warming's even worse. Gore could be absorbing 20 times the average person's carbon emissions, and it wouldn't make a difference. There isn't any 'whatever anyone else did, I did my part, at least I saved one kid' effect.

(Imperfect analogy ahead)

Imagine there was this guy, Egor, who had decided to champion the cause of global hunger, and had been traveling around for years trying to raise awareness of the reality of this problem. While he suggested various things individuals could do, his main focus was on convincing people to elect officials who took this issue seriously, and on various big-picture wonky technocratic things. And it turned out that when he traveled around raising awareness, he stopped at restaurants and ordered nice meals! He even brought in food for the people at his presentations!. And back at home, he had a rather large food budget! (although a lot of the cost came from purchasing pricy fair-trade sustainable items, supporting a project intended to help poor, hungry communities become more prosperous and self-sufficient).

(You can fill in the bit about how some of the organizations linked to these attacked just happen to be associated with companies that profit from the export of luxury crops from poor countries at very low wages, etc.)

So, is he just a total icky-sicky double-plus-ungood bloated elite hypocrite?

Following on this Matt Yglesias post about conservative failure to care for our veterans
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/03/privatizing_walter_reed/
we can see the same dynamic in play that I was discussing above. If you really care about veterans, then you take the time & effort to find out what is or is not working in taking care of them. But if you care more about an ideology of private-better-than-public, then you'll let our soldiers rot while feeling all proud of yourself for privatizing their (lousy) care.