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" Continuing in my current vein of bashing prominent political figures with the proverbial energy stick, I&amp;#039;d like to explain my views on Mr Gore a bit further.  We live in a working class community; we are surrounded by dairy farmers, carpenters, and plenty of folks who just &amp;quot;get by&amp;quot; in the Vermont tradition of wearing whatever hat will garner a paycheck on that particular week.  Many of these people have an innate distrust of politicians. They don&amp;#039;t like people meddling in their affairs, and they largely don&amp;#039;t feel as if wealthy politicians are in touch with the hardscrabble life of rural Vermont.  Like most Americans, our neighbors are not overly concerned regarding climate change. How do I know? Let&amp;#039;s put it this way: It&amp;#039;s hard for me to imagine that anyone concerned about climate change would spend their weekends zooming around on a two-stroke snowmobile.  So when you have someone like Gore \u2013 wealthy, political, stuffy \u2013 grandstanding about global warming\u2026 well, it&amp;#039;s a pretty darn hard sell, already. But he certainly hasn&amp;#039;t done any harm and maybe, just maybe, a few people outside those who already understand Gore&amp;#039;s message, begin to believe. Maybe they begin to understand that snowmobiles aren&amp;#039;t doing our world a heck of a lot of good.  But then they hear that Gore uses, oh, TWENTY TIMES as much energy as they use. &amp;quot;Oh, but it&amp;#039;s ok,&amp;quot; you say. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s buying carbon offsets; he&amp;#039;s buying clean power.&amp;quot; And these people, who can hardly afford their utility bill as it is, are thinking &amp;quot;carbon offsets? Clean power?&amp;quot; And Al Gore immediately joins the ranks of out-of-touch wealthy politicians who can&amp;#039;t be trusted and shouldn&amp;#039;t be listened to. If he wasn&amp;#039;t there already.  That&amp;#039;s why I&amp;#039;m unapologetic in my condemnation of Gore&amp;#039;s energy use. Yes, I understand that he needs to travel to get the word out. I would have forgiven him this. But as a public figure, and a preaching one at that, he better start practicing, because people are watching.  And with that, I need to go see if I can get our car started. It was 15-below this morning, which is only a single degree colder than yesterday morning. But it seems to have broken the camel&amp;#039;s back (or in this case, the 15-year old Saab&amp;#039;s back). "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a1452/4213265/>