Al Gore's new "documentary" has earned $389,000 at the box office at the time of this posting. "An Inconvenient Truth" is a warning about the "evil" of carbon dioxide and the "fact" that Hollywood liberals in their private planes are causing the Earth to turn into a sauna.

If you've read Hoystory for any period of time, you know that I'm of the opinion that global warming -- as described by the Al Gore types -- is bunk. If the Earth is undergoing drastic warming that in the next 30 years will cause the sea levels to rise and Escondido (where I live) to become beachfront property, then the best solution is probably to scoop up a lot of water, shoot it into space and dump it on the Sun. In short, I believe that the current global warming is part of a natural cycle that humans have little effect on. The global warming scare is largely a scam run by a bunch of environmental scientists to get funding for research.

Having said that, I thought the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Web-only ad taking aim at Al Gore for all his globe-trotting as he made his documentary was pretty funny and on-point. FactCheck.org, a "nonpartisan" public policy watchdog group (and by nonpartisan I mean, it doesn't tilt the the left as much as most of the mainstream media), took issue with CEI's ads.

What I really want to focus on is this bit from the FactCheck analysis.

Heeding his own advice

Even though CEI minimizes the impact of carbon dioxide, they still take Al Gore to task for his carbon footprint as a result of his travel surrounding his "Inconvenient Truth" presentation and documentary.

They posted a video with their TV ads as a "special web only bonus." It includes quotes from Gore's film about personal accountability for global warming by taking such actions as telecommuting, and limiting air travel. The video then shows Gore's lengthy air travel schedule and displays a rolling meter of carbon dioxide output and challenging Gore to start "walking the walk."

He says he is. According to NativeEnergy, Paramount Classics and Participant Productions plan to announce that they offset 100% of the global warming impact from production activities. In addition, NativeEnergy is offsetting all CO2 from Mr. Gore’s travel to discuss and promote the film and book. This is achieved by calculating how much CO2 your activities produce and purchasing the corresponding amount of credits to generate renewable energy.

This sounds good, unless you know how "credits" typically work. First, Company A puts some high-technology into their production facilities which puts them below their "energy allowance." "Yea!" everyone cheers at the fact that less CO2 is being put into the atmosphere. Company A then has a "credit" which is the difference between what they were allowed to use and what they actually did use. Company A then sells that extra energy to Company B so Company B can go over their allowance by that amount. The total energy output then really doesn't change.

(For purposes of this exercise we assume that Company B would've shut down if they hadn't been able to purchase credits, because in Al's world there'd be a law against continuing to employ people under those circumstances.)

Curiously, these sorts of credit-trading exercises were very big at Enron because there's all sorts of opportunities for mischief.

So, Al Gore is making all of his air travel and car-convoy five blocks down the street "carbon-neutral" by buying credits at Native Energy. That's great. But Al Gore could've stayed home and done all of his promotions via bicycle-powered webcam and spent all the money he would've shelled out for plane flights at Native Energy anyway. Al Gore is aspiring to be "neutral" when he could've been "negative."