Maybe our very existence isn't threatened
Since watching An Inconvenient Truth, I've had conversations with several people about it, and one of them emailed this morning to point out that Al Gore has eight bathrooms in his house. This certainly sounds grim. It turns out the eight bathrooms factoid is a bit of a meme in the conservative blogosphere right now, apparently originating with this column by Peter Schweizer (the author of this book, naturally).
I don't have any great love for Gore (although I was impressed with An Inconvenient Truth and highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet, eight bathrooms or eighty), but I was seriously disturbed by the way Schweizer, upon savaging Gore for his liberal hypocrisy, concludes that the environment must not be in crisis. The logic seems to be that if Gore really believed what he was preaching, then he would act on it, monk-like and decisive; so if not Q then not P.
But P doesn't imply Q here. Even if Gore believes the environment is in crisis, he still doesn't have any incentive to act as an individual to reduce his consumption, because any action he takes as an individual will have a negligible impact on the crisis. Global warming is the collective action problem to end all collective action problems; it's simply not going to be solved by waiting for individuals to fix it, because there's no payoff at the individual level. For this to be fixed, I'm sorry to say, we'll have to enact laws of some kind.
Insofar as the bathrooms damage Gore's ability to get the message out and effect the kind of vast political change we'll need to address this problem, I am disappointed. But on an issue as important as this, we shouldn't confuse the messenger with the message.
Beyond your excellent point, I don't even get the proposed negation. Say he really does have eight bathrooms in his house. Is he, um, FLUSHING eight times as much as anyone else? Or taking eight times as many showers? Brushing his teeth eight times as much as anyone else? I doubt it impacts his water usage if he has one bathroom for him and Tipper to share or eight hundred.
I just don't get where the waste is supposed to be there.
Actually, there's huge waste there, because it's extra enclosed space that has to be air conditioned. The energy use for that over a year is going to be considerable. Having huge houses is probably the biggest way Americans waste energy... and it's very hard to reverse because having a big house is the American dream. Anyway...
Yeah, but in a house that big, you certainly have it zoned and probably close off wings when you don't have guests. Also, it being Gore's house, I'd be surprised if there weren't some solar or wind or other non-carbon producing energy source there, and I'm sure it's weatherstripped and insulated to within an inch of its life.
It's clearly a red herring. Attack the messanger to negate the message.
Sorry, one more thing. Contrary to the popular CW, I don't beleive you have to live small to live clean and cheap. With solar, wave, wind, and geothermal power (and smart nuclear), I fully believe we can live as large or larger than we do now without killing the planet. Our problem is we use dirty power not that we use too much of it.
OK, I'm done ranting.
Yeah, clean power sources could solve a lot of the world's problems. Either way though, American consumption is pretty repugnant when you set it against the backdrop of world consumption, and I'm not sure I'd like to give up what little cultural sentiment there is left out there against living large...
Freeman Dyson posited you could measure the technological sophistication of a society by how much energy it required. He extrapolated to the now famous Dyson sphere where a civilization would need to capture 100% of the energy put out their star by bulding a sphere around it of appropriate radius and living on the inside of the shell. For Sol, that would be a 93 million mile radius or 186 million mile diameter sphere.
I think it's in the next Bush budget, but as a military project.
I had heard of the Dyson Sphere, but I didn't know about this idea that technological sophistication might be linked to energy needs. It seems a little dated now, because technology can be energy saving... a hybrid car is certainly more technologically advanced than a regular car, but it also requires far less energy to do the same job.
You make a good point but I don't think it's necessarily dated. Certainly older technologies become more efficient as time passes, but new technologies and applications that require more energy become possible.
I'm thinking of steam engines becoming more efficient, but also leading to steam shovels and things like the digging of the Panama Canal.
I'm sure in the future we'll find things we can do using applications of high-energy physics that are just not practical now due to energy cost and supply constraints.
Of course at some point we probably blow ourselves up or create a black hole that swallows the Earth whole...
Discussing other people's must be an awful lot of fun, and even though I'm coming to this a little late, I didn't want to be left out.
If big Al wanted to move back to Tenessee, he had to either build his own house or buy something that was on the market. He couldn't exactly buy a 3bedroom-2bath starter home, not because he necessarily would look down his nose upon it(and how would I (or Schweizer, or anyone else) know if he would thus regard it)but because given his status and consequent security concerns, he needed to live in a house with at least x-number of feet distance from the street, etc.
Let's say he found a house that met all these requirements, and it had 8 bathrooms.
Al:hmmm. I really like this house, but eight bathrooms? The right would have a field day.
Tipper: I know. We really should have some of them knocked down.
Then, presumably, the right would make fun of him for being so absurdly P.C. as to knock down his extra bathrooms.
It's not so far removed from the idea that a wealthy person is a hypocrite if he's in favor of progressive taxation.
"Did you hear that Al Gore takes all of his eligible deductions?
"Yeah. What an S.O.B.!"
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