Options for Al Gore

My congratulations to Drew Johnson and his gang at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research for their research exposing Al Gore's HUGE carbon foot print caused by the fact that he lives in a mansion that consumes nearly 20 times more energy than the average American home --

http://www.tennesseepolicy.org/main/article.php?article_id=367


If Al Gore wasn't such a hypocrite about the environment he would abandon his mansion to live in what is known as a "small house" which can be found at --

www.tumbleweedhouses.com

and

www.smallhousesociety.org
"The Small House Society is a voice for the Small House Movement. That movement includes movie stars who have proudly downsized into 3000 square feet, families of five happy in an arts and crafts bungalow, multifamily housing in a variety of forms, and more extreme examples, such as people on houseboats and in trailers with just a few hundred square feet around them. Size is relative, and mainly we promote discussion about the ecological, economic and psychological toll that excessive housing takes on our lives, and what some of us are doing to live better. It's not a movement about people claiming to be "tinier than thou" but rather people making their own choices toward simpler and smaller living however they feel best fits their life."

Indeed I would love to see Al Gore down size his life (and carbon foot print) by "walking his talk" by selling all of his homes (three of them based on an article I read earlier this year) to live in a small house thus doing his part to save Mother Earth.

However, the small house movement could have a far greater impact beyond cleansing Gore of his hypocrisy which includes:

1.) Housing and Urban Development (HUD) -- time for Congress to close this federal department and use the money saved from its $31 billion budget ( http://www.hud.gov/about/budget/fy05/) to build small houses for the 744,000 homeless people I recently read that HUD had counted. The remaining money (over $30 billion at least since small houses cost about $50,000 each) would be sent as tax refunds.

and

2.) Habitat for Humanity (www.habitat.org) -- I have always enjoyed working on Habitat projects to build homes for the needy so when I read about the small house movement I thought this could be an ideal tool for Habitat to use to build even more homes on a faster schedule.

Innovation helps people not government programs,

Todd