Take that Al-Gore!..

My Energy provider has a web tool I can use to calculate my energy usage at home. And look at that, I pay about $1,100 less in energy cost than most of the similar homes in the area. Your energy provider might have similar tools that you can use to calculate energy usage and tips on how to reduce cost.

If you have not heard, in his documentary (An Inconvenient Truth, collected an Oscar for best documentary feature), the former Vice President calls on Americans to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption at home. 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 (In total, Gore paid nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for his Nashville estate in 2006).

Al Gore’s response is that he buys carbon credits to offset his pollution. Let’s try to apply this logic to a diet. You and I go on a diet, we both buy food, but I buy the food from you and eat twice as much. But that’s okay, because you didn’t eat when I ate your food!.

The Al Gore debacle reminds me of old practice of Catholic Dispensation. Pay a fee to a Priest in The Church Of Global Warming, and continue polluting, free of guilt, without worry of purgatory...

I am in no way an environmentalist and do not buy into the gloom and doom future they predict. When they start accurately predict weather three weeks into the future, I will start paying attention to what they have to say about 30 to 150 years into the future. Until then, to me, this is all a pointless exercise to instill fear in peoples mind.

Do not think I don’t care about the environment. I don’t pour engine oil down the drain or over fertilize my lawn. But I do care more about my bottom line. And I have measures at home to drastically reduce energy bills. For example, our homeowner’s association requires all houses in the development to have two lights outside the garage that go on at sunset and go off in morning. One of the first things I did was to change the 60W incandescent lamps to 13W compact fluorescent lamps. That change alone saved me $34 per year in energy cost. Not to mention the money saved by the extended life on the fluorescent lamps. Change all the interior bulbs, add a programmable thermostat, opt for energy star appliances and voilà, upwards of 1k in annual savings.

Calculate how much you can save by switching to fluorescent!