TCPR’s Campaign of Misinformation about Al Gore’s Energy Use

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about Al Gore’s energy consumption, and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research is behind most of it. This ‘research organization’, which declines to identify where it gets its funding, has now put out two press releases detailing what they call Al Gore’s “massive home energy use”, citing information from the Nashville Electric Service.

According to the TCPR, Gore, who they call a “global warming alarmist”, is wasting tons of energy while laughing all the way to the bank with “global warming hysteria” profits. From their June 17th, 2008 press release:

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month – 1,638 kWh more energy per month than the year before the renovations. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration. The cost of Gore’s electric bills over the past year topped $16,533.

Their first press release on the subject, released last February the day after Gore won an Academy Award for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, trumpeted similar claims. The problem is, the data that the TCPR gained from public records is from a period of time when Gore’s home was in the midst of a three-year renovation, which naturally caused a temporary increase in power usage. Since then, the home has been praised as one of the country’s most environmentally friendly.

‘Short of tearing it down and starting anew, I don’t know how it could have been rated any higher,’ said Kim Shinn of the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council, which gave the house its second-highest rating for sustainable design. [Denver Post]

Al Gore’s spokesperson Kalee Krieder refuted the TCPR’s allegations to the Nashville Post on June 18th:

I am happy to provide more information about this from the Gores’ perspective. First, this release yesterday are [sic] a mere re-release of old bills. If any of you have ever worked with contractors, you know that renovations take years. The Gores renovated a 80 year old house from stem to stern. This took about 3 years to go through all the ducwork [sic], to install a geothermal system, to replace all the windows, to put in solar panels (which used to be illegal in Bellemeade and took 6 months to reverse).

So, to be clear, the Gores’ achieved Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification in November 2007. The reduction in the electricity and natural gas bills–you need to look at both in order to truly evaluate their carbon footprint, really kicked in in 2008. At that point, evaluating both, there is about a 40 percent reduction.

Their natural gas bill has seen the biggest reduction as a result of the geothermal system. For electricity, they purchase green power through their utility, which is called “Green Power Switch.” It isn’t an offset, any customer can purchase green power (solar, wind, methane gas) and its a wonderful program.

Indeed, the TCPR chose to ignore the fact that the energy used by Gore’s home is now all green power, an omission that was repeated by Fox News’ Brit Hume on an airing of Special Report.

That’s not all. MediaMatters.org reports that on a February edition of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Olbermann stated that the TCPR’s claims “omits several other key facts. The former vice president’s home has 20 rooms, including home offices for himself and his wife, as well as a guest house and special security measures. Furthermore, the Gores buy energy produced from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. Tonight, Countdown confirmed with the local utility officials that their program, called the Green Power Switch, actually costs more for the Gores — four dollars for every 150 kilowatt hours. Meaning, by our calculations, our math here, that the Gores actually chose to increase their electric bill by $5,893, more than 50 percent, in order to minimize carbon pollution.”

Furthermore, Gore donates all of the proceeds from An Inconvenient Truth – both the DVD and the companion book – to environmental causes. He also donated 100% of his Nobel Peace Prize award as well as his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

What motivates the TCPR to put out this misinformation? Is it a desire to make sure the public has the facts, or an attempt to kill the messenger by a group that seeks to discredit global warming?

TCPR is a global warming denial group actively working to discredit information about climate change and anyone who works to educate the public about it. The TCPR reportedly joined the ‘Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change’, a group that claims to have “been established as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change, which are being used to justify calls for urgent action by governments.”

TCPR ‘staff and scholars’ are made up of individuals who have supported anti-environment causes and/or received support from anti-environment groups. TCPR president Jason ‘Drew’ Johnson has a long background of working for groups that deny global warming and seek to discredit it. Others have openly called environmental activism “destructive”. MediaMatters.org has some of the details:

Further, as part of the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program, Johnson interned at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in 2002. As MSNBC host Keith Olbermann noted on the February 27 edition of Countdown, Johnson worked at “the same American Enterprise Institute that takes money from big oil, cheerleads the war in Iraq, and consistently, and now to pretty consistent laughter, downplays global warming.” Indeed, AEI has received nearly $1 million in funding from ExxonMobil in recent years. Moreover, according to The Washington Post, AEI “has been soliciting critiques” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released in February and “has offered $10,000 to academics willing to contribute to a book on climate-change policy.”

TCPR scholar Charles Van Eaton also serves as a trustee for the Lincoln Heritage Institute (LHI). The institute’s “About LHI” page declares: “We … cannot stand idly by and allow … destructive environmental activism … to become an accepted way of life in America.”

The Department of Revenue commented to the Nashville Post – in a story that has since been deleted from their website – that the TCPR is “not a legitimate organization”.

When it comes down to it, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research’s attempts to discredit Al Gore and paint him as a hypocrite are a pathetic effort to derail the climate change awareness movement. As important as Al Gore has been and continues to be for climate change awareness, he is only a very small part of a growing urgency to act. The world is starting to wake up, and no matter how hard groups like the TCPR may try to stop it, the movement to act on climate change is going to keep on rollin’.

Link [TCPR] + [MediaMatters.org] + [Washington Post]

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