Inconvenient Truth, Convenient Timing

Wouldn't you know it? As soon as 'Inconvenient Truth' won an Oscar, a right wing hack organization issued a statement saying that Al Gore's family home in Tennessee uses "more than 20 times the national average" kWh of electricity per year. (I refuse to add the link to this drivel to give them more traffic!) And who picked it up and ran with it? The Drudge Report, of course, Rush Limbaugh, and many other "anything-liberal-is-bad" news organizations.

On the HuffingtonPost, David Roberts gives some pertinent talking points to refute this ridiculous allegation. Here are my favorites:

1. The Tennessee Tax Dept. does not consider the "Tennessee Center for Policy Research," which roughly no one had heard of before this, a legitimate group. It's run by a long-time right-wing attack hack, and its only registered address is a P.O. box. Why is everyone in the media taking what it says about Gore's electricity use at face value?
2. Gore's electricity company has no record of being contacted about his bills.
3. The "average" home electricity use quoted by TCPR is a national average that includes apartments and mobile homes. In Gore's climatic zone, the East South Central (Dept. of Energy PDF), the average is much higher, thanks to hot, humid summers and cold winters. Within that zone, Gore's usage is three (not 20) times average, and his per-square-foot usage is squarely average. (More here.)
4. The Gores are not an average family. He's an ex-VP with special security arrangements, and has live-in security staff. He and his wife both work on their many business and charitable undertakings out of their house, so they have space for offices and office staff. All that would be tough to cram in an average size house.

So if you hear anyone spouting TCPR's nonsense about the Gore family being hypocritical, you know what to say! The reason the right wing wackos are up in arms about this is because clearly, the rest of the world has realized that a) Global Warming is a big problem, b) we are all responsible, and c) something must be done. Hiding their right-wing-heads in the sand won't make the problem go away... indeed, it will only make it worse when, lifting their heads out of the sand, they realize that half of the low-lying communities around the world are under water because the polar ice caps melted!