The hypocrisy is astonishing: Well-heeled folks like Gore, Feinstein, Schwarzenegger (and many more) who express their enormous concern about global warming, often fly private jets, which spew pollution at remarkable rates. It's one thing to fly a private jet once in a great while...but it's quite another to lecture us about global warming but fly in private jets consistently.

The LA Times recently published an article on this, noting that one cross-country trip in a Gulfstream IV, the model owned by Feinstein’s husband and often flown by DiFi, spews between 83,000 and 90,000 pounds of carbon dioxide on a *single* cross country trip. According to the article, the average American produces 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from *all activities* for an *entire year.* DiFi won't disclose how many she trips made last year the hubby's g-four.

Carbon offsets, which in fairness, DiFi does pay for, are nice (politicians and movie stars are all over carbon offsets to assuage their guilty consciences) but planting trees simply does not get around the fact that DiFi and others are responsible for spewing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.

In other green news, an article on the front page of WSJ today described the very interesting wind power market in Texas. However, my take-away was of the depressing variety, derived from a chart that accompanied the article. The chart showed that in 2004, 50% of US electricity generation was from coal, 20% nuclear, 18% gas, etc....and 2% was from renewables, and of that little sliver, 14% was from wind. Here's the depressing part: the same chart was re-created as a prediction for 2030...and for 2030, it was 53% coal (!) and 8% renewables, of which 44% was wind. (Source: International Energy Agency). Good grief.

As a general rule, I can't stand new taxes, but here's what our country needs: a new gas tax, collected to fund renewable energy projects and research. Let me suggest starting at 10 cents a gallon and increasing at the rate of 10 cents per gallon per month for the next 20 months. When it reaches $2.00 per gallon, the tax can stop increasing, and stay at $2.00 per gallon. Even with the new taxes, we would still be paying less per gallon than people in many, many countries pay currently. To me, even if global warming is a complete fraud (and I don't think it is) we should institute the gas tax for national security reasons alone.