Al Gore's Electricity Bill: An Inconvenient (and embarrassing) Truth

I haven't seen Al Gore's Oscar-worthy film An Inconvenient Truth --- and i will, i promise --- except for the meantime, i'm more interested in the controversy over his Nashville mansion's electricity bill.


Apparently, the electric bill for this house averaged $1,200 last year --- quite hypocritical for the owner who's supposed to be campaigning against global warming.

Here's the statement from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, posted February 26, 2007:

Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”
Gore’s home uses more than 20 times the national average

Last night, Al Gore’s global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature, but the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has found that Gore deserves a gold statue for hypocrisy.

Gore’s mansion, located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).

In his documentary, the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home.

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

“As the spokesman of choice for the global warming movement, Al Gore has to be willing to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, when it comes to home energy use,” said Tennessee Center for Policy Research President Drew Johnson.

In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006.

my source: Yahoo! News

Singular Thoughts III

American Idol is back! Syempre Rockstar (INXS & Supernova) fanatic pa din ako ever pero AI6 should be good enough for now, lalu na kung wala ng 3rd installment sa Rockstar saga. I will definitely not get into recaps like I did with RS:SN Siguro pakonti-konting commentaries lang. Most likely, my links will be pointing to rickey.org, so far the best site for AI fanatics.

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I took a short YM (Yahoo! Messenger) survey recently and I realized how dependent this brain of mine has become to the global knowledge that the internet provides. One question asked how often I used search engines. I ticked the bottom option, "several times a day."

Ang masasabi ko lang… There’s really no excuse anymore for people who don’t do their research. So to everyone pretending to know so much about something when they actually don’t, I have 6 letters for you: GOOGLE.

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And speaking of Google, I recently read about Google winning top place in Fortune Magazine’s survey of Top 100 Companies to Work for in America 2007. Employees not only get the prestige and the free lunch. They also play as hard as they work.

Read the CNN article here.

Read the Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google here.

Watch the Today Exclusive (NBC): Inside Look at Google:

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Enough about Google. Here’s a recommended site if you wanna know the exact time here in the Philippines: PAG-ASA Philippine Standard Time

Cheers!

busy si ynseng

Hindi naman sa nakalimutan ko na ang blog ko… I have the best excuse in the world for not posting sooner --- I have in fact been awfully busy.

I’m [happily] juggling a little too many tasks right now. My fulltime job has been keeping my work hours busy. Fortunately, I now have assignments that I look forward to doing because they provide opportunities for me to truly challenge myself. Medyo nakakangarag lang kasi I have a whole year of IT training courses to design and finish ASAP, and a Trainers’ Training on Tourguiding manual to finish by the end of April. At syempre andyan pa rin ang backlog at intervening assignments.

I also have an interesting part-time knowledge-based telework job. This home-based editing job is challenging enough to keep me on my toes and discover taken-for-granted skills that I want (and need) to master. The work is also pretty innovative --- I actually find myself doing a little research about it. And despite the additional load, getting the job done actually feels kinda liberating!

I’m also in the second semester of my master’s course in Industrial Relations. I have so far enjoyed going back to school, despite the heavy study load. That is, 6 units worth of stress that includes an endless list of reading materials, hunger strikes for the sake of library time, megabites of html, pdf and doc files and other research materials saved in my USB, and never-enough time to read everything... all these for the sake of higher education and deeper social consciousness. I’m learning lessons that I could confidently say will benefit me for life as I learn realities I wouldn’t have understood had I preferred an apathetic life.

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I remember the time when I first set up this a blog. It was about mid last year and I was shamelessly bored and unproductive that I had to find a way to extract some creative juices to fill the hours. (Not that there was nothing at all to do at work. I just didn’t feel compelled nor motivated to do them.)

Hence, my work hours were spent learning the art of web writing, or more specifically, learning to use HTML codes to improve the look of my blog. I’m no artist but this blog keeps me creatively challenged, what with all the innovative technologies booming every second. Nung una, pagsusulat lang ang inaatupag ko. Nakaka-conscious pa kasi hindi naman talaga ako sanay mag-journal. Then I learned how to upload photos and put links in my posts. Then came the scrolling lyrics and the tagboard. Kasama na jan ang pag-personalize ng sidebar ko. And of course, who wouldn’t upload yuotube videos? Nakakaadik!

I’m not sure about this widgets thing though that’s supposed to be the key to the new Blogger Beta. Haven’t used that yet because I’m afraid it might mess up the HTML codes I tried so hard to create. Feeling ancient tuloy ako for getting stuck with html codes instead of [supposedly] conveniently using widgets. And what’s with the BETA thing anyway? Yahoo has them, even webshots and photobucket? Hay. Pag ako lang nagkaron ng panahon, humanda yang ka-beta-han at ka-widget-an na yan...

I should be blogging more often... that should at least keep me sane.