Read it and laugh. I’m not surprised, but then I’m from Tennessee and know about those Gores.
further: Asserting Carbon Offsets don’t automatically win arguments. Serious people disagree about those. Look here, read the comments. It’s complicated. Kind of like life. Is Al Gore a hypocrite? To the extent that he tells people to reduce usage while increasing his own (whatever his financial balancing act), I don’t see how he can be defended from the charge. I think his defenders are mainly saying “He isn’t so bad because he buys carbon credits,” not “his house isn’t huge and wasteful.” He is intending to change his ways, but he clearly hasn’t yet. So, is he currently a wasteful energy consumer who intends to model for the rest of us how to be a better energy consumer? Perhaps. But has he done it yet?
In our local version we did two things in the last few years, but only one of them actually as opposed to notionally reduced energy use. We bought LCD panels for all (or almost all) the campus computers. We paid the utility company to tell us that some of our power came from wind generation. One made us feel good. The other did something. Al Gore may feel good about himself, but he’s sure driving his electric meter fast.
An indulgence doesn’t mean you haven’t sinned. An offset doesn’t mean you don’t use electricity.
still further. Here’s a very amusing post about the realities of energy costs per square foot of housing in West Nashville by a well-off neighbor of the Gores. His conclusion:

And the facts are this. Four and a half years ago Al Gore bought a large home and made it larger, but did very little to reduce his own energy consumption. Instead, he spent the same time telling you how to reduce yours.

That’s what amuses me. I don’t care how he justifies his ‘carbon use’ to himself. What I care about is that as many people as possible realize that far from being an oracle or moral leader Al Gore is another predictably selfish politician who prefers that we do what he says than what he himself does.
It occurred to me after reading a number of threads on the topic that if he’s using a lot of compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy savings devices and still running up bills like the ones reported that I have no idea what he’s doing! Heating the swimming pool with electricity? Oh, well – part of the fun here isn’t mocking Gore’s carbon footprint, it’s pointing out his real estate footprint. The Gores obviously live in a really big house to be using that much power. This is a man whose entire family fortune was won by politics. Ain’t dynasticism great?

This is an interesting use of literary history! From a story at the Washington Post:

. . . when researchers recently mounted an exhaustive effort to find examples of trauma-related amnesia in literary works before the 19th century, they drew a blank. If repressed memories are one way the brain deals with painful memories, why would there be no literary examples of the phenomenon that are more than 200 years old?
In an unusual study, a group of psychiatrists and literary scholars, led by Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School, recently argued that the psychiatric disorder known as dissociative amnesia (often called repressed memory) is a “culture-bound syndrome” — a creation of Western culture sometime in the 19th century.
Pope pointed out that Shakespeare, Homer and other pre-19th-century writers show numerous characters suffering from other psychiatric disorders: the disjointed thinking that we call schizophrenia, or the persistent sadness that marks depression. Because art draws its inspiration from life, Pope said, this shows that those disorders have been around forever. In the opening lines of “The Merchant of Venice,” for example, Antonio vividly describes what it feels like to be depressed:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born
I am to learn.

Pope said a wide search of literary texts in European languages, Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese has produced no convincing example of a character created before the year 1800 who suffered a traumatic event, repressed the memory and later recovered it. The scientists recently published their findings in the journal Psychological Medicine.