I wonder if you’ve seen this house comparison on the Internet (which has been verified as true by snopes.com).

House #1: A 20-room, 10,000-square-foot mansion (not including eight bathrooms) heated by natural gas. A pool, pool house and guesthouse all require additional natural gas heating. In one month alone, this house consumes more energy than an average American home consumes in an entire year. The average monthly electricity/gas bill is $2,400. The mansion consumes more than 12 times the fossil fuel energy of the average new American home. This home is not located in the “snow belt” either, but in the South, where temperatures are moderate. This is Al Gore’s home in Nashville, Tenn.

House #2: Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature possible and uses no fossil fuels for heating/cooling. The house’s four bedrooms and 4,000 square feet include geothermal heat pumps, which draw water from 300 feet below ground, which heat the house in the winter and cool it in the summer. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000-gallon cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets is purified underground and also funneled into the cistern, then used to irrigate the land surrounding the house to provide for the indigenous shrubs and flowers. This house is in the dry Southwest, specifically Crawford, Texas, and belongs to President George W. Bush.

While this story has been circulating at least since 2007, I have never heard it reported in the mainstream media, nor on feature programs regarding “green” home building, and most especially not on any PBS specials. In contrast, I have heard plenty of hysterical fear mongering on the co-called “climate crisis,” which was popularized by Al Gore.

This manufactured crisis has undergone several name changes to deflect the growing evidence against the hypothetical culprit, carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Al Gore apparently has no problem with his excessive use of fossil fuels, he just wants the rest of us lesser human beings to pay dearly for it. The Democrats, including our own Gov. Christine Gregoire, are piling on with ideas on how to “tax” people for their energy use through a complicated government-administered taxation program using their latest golden egg scheme, “carbon credits.”

With gas prices going through the roof, it would seem that the Democrats would be front and center with their environmental friendly solutions. Instead, their answers are: A) Nationalize energy production, which is another way of saying that only the government should profit from energy; B) No drilling for our own oil on our own soil, which keeps our OPEC friends very happy and in complete control of our dependence; and C) Reduce fossil fuel emissions and start charging people for their sins of carbon dioxide emission through said “carbon credits” monitoring.

Their answers are to punish current use and obstruct new exploration before we have any means of replacing current energy sources. They, in essence, want to profit from the crisis. Al Gore has taught them well. Use fear while offering no solutions.

First, let’s make some important language distinctions. There’s global warming, then there’s man-made global warming, and finally the ever vague “climate change,” which often appears with the fear-inducing “crisis” tag, depending on the context.

Nobody argues that the global climate is in routine flux (not even Dino Rossi, despite the attack ads). Temperature fluctuations are not in dispute, but rather the cause of the fluctuations. While global temperatures warmed significantly between the 1980s and 1990s, they have actually cooled significantly in the past 10 years, hence the sudden name change, by purveyors of fear, from “global warming” to “climate change.”

The warming and cooling of the Earth is correlated most closely with fluctuations in solar activity and is entirely uncorrelated with human hydrocarbon use. While Al Gore and other alarmists travel the globe in carbon-emitting private jets, displaying computer models that purportedly predict cataclysmic weather patterns, politicians and bureaucrats at the United Nations are rubbing their hands, counting the immeasurable possibilities of profiting from carbon taxes on a global scale.

This explains why, on the one hand, they appear desperate to curb fossil fuel consumption, but on the other hand they recoil in horror at the best, most reliable answer to our woes — nuclear energy, which has been used successfully by the French and European countries for decades to provide clean, inexpensive energy.

Nuclear energy will be a hard sell on American environmentalists. Hollywood successfully scared them with a manufactured tale of their own in the 1979 Jane Fonda movie, “The China Syndrome.” In a near conspiratorial twist, the movie was released 12 days prior to an accident that occurred at Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. The accident left an ominous suspicion of nuclear energy in the American psyche, even though to this day, no injuries, illnesses or deaths have ever been attributed to the accident.

There was one nuclear accident that resulted in terrible human tragedy, and that was the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident that occurred in the former Soviet Union in 1986. Of course, Chernobyl was operated and controlled by a socialist government that nationalized energy production and manufacturing…but that could never happen here…

Federal Way resident Angie Vogt: vogt.e@comcast.net. For past columns and further commentary, visit www.soundupdate.com.