What Should Al Do?

Al Gore wants the developed world to cut CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050. My feeling is that I want to see Al go first. I'm serious. We just had a huge rock concert attended by celebrities who have no intention of cutting back on their lifestyle but want to send the rest of us back to the stone age. Gore made the news last Winter when his power bills came out. He burns more energy than a block of regular folks. His apologists say that he is a rich man (currently estimated as being worth $100 million) so he is entitled to live like the rich do.

I disagree. Someone who asked millions of people to pledge to push for a 90% cut in CO2 should be willing to lead the way. Here are some steps I would like to see Al make. All are doable.

Turn off the air conditioning. It makes life pleasant but people lived without it for thousands of years. Heck - I grew up without it and Al certainly didn't have air conditioning when he plowed fields behind his uncle's mules.

Turn off most of the heat. Al has a huge house but he can only occupy one room at a time (even if he has put on weight). Put in zone heating so that the room he is in has a little heat. Do the same for his wife and maybe some of the staff. He can heat the rest of the house enough to keep the pipes from freezing in the Winter but otherwise don't waste power heating rooms that aren't used. This is how the rich lived for centuries. Al can survive. He can afford heavy clothes and he's put on some natural insulation of his own.

Turn off the lights. Forget Compact Fluorescents. Our forefathers often lit a room with a single candle. Al could use one or two white LEDs per room that would more than equal a candle. He could use an LED-based book light for reading. Oh - and don't light empty rooms.

Scrap a jet. I don't know if Al owns a private jet or just leases one. If he owns one he should have it cut up for scrap. If he doesn't own one then he should buy one and cut it up. The idea is that private jets are one of the biggest emitters of CO2 that an individual can have. It's not enough to sell one so that someone else can use it. Al has to take one off of the market - maybe two.

Cut back on travel. Al travels a lot. He jets all over the world telling people to stop creating CO2 even as his travels dwarf their own emissions. Al should do more teleconferencing. If he has to travel he should be driving a Prius or a Smart Car. He should also install a governor on his cars so that they cannot be driven faster than 50 MPH. A Prius loses its advantage over other cars as it goes faster. At 100 MPH it will get terrible millage. While he's at it, Al should plan his speaking trips so that he can do one long road trip across the country per year.

Switch to Windows 98. A modern Intel dual-core chip with two gig RAM and a high-end graphic card uses a lot of power. A PC or MAC made ten years ago can do just about everything the newer PCs can do and not much slower. They just don't look as flashy doing it.

Condemn the Kennedys. At Live Earth RFK jr proclaimed that anyone who denies global warming is a traitor and should be treated as such. These are strong words coming from someone who opposes a major wind farm. His uncle Ted is against the wind farm, also. Why? Because they don't want to see it in the distance from their expensive properties. This makes them bigger hypocrites than Gore (although consorting with RFK jr raises Al's hypocrisy points). If Al is serious about cutting emissions then he should condemn anyone standing in the way of a wind farm.

Until Al does something from this list (or something similarly radical), I'm not going to alter my lifestyle. Why should I?