Al Gore is back in the spotlight with his new documentary, An Inconvenient Sequel, making him a top target again of the right-wing counter-intel complex. On Thursday, the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research released a report, “Al Gore’s Inconvenient Reality,” that paints the former vice president as a hypocritical climate advocate. In near-creepy detail, NCPPR author Drew Johnson maps Gore’s home in Nashville, Tennessee, down to the number of windows, and concludes that “Gore’s own home electricity use has hypocritically increased to more than 21 times the national average this past year with no sign of slowing down.” Johnson also slams Gore’s numerous attempts to modernize his home through energy efficiency, solar panels, and geothermal heating, saying they have been inadequate in offsetting his energy use.

“No matter how the numbers are viewed, Al Gore uses vastly more electricity at his home than the average American—a particularly inconvenient truth given his hypocritical calls for all Americans to reduce their home energy use,” Johnson writes. “Al Gore has attained a near-mythical status for his frenzied efforts to propagandize global warming. At the same time, Gore has done little to prove his commitment to the cause in his own life.” The report was a smash hit on the right. In less than 24 hours of its publication, it was picked up by Fox News, The Daily Mail, The Washington Times, The Washington Free Beacon, and The Daily Caller—which, in case there was any doubt about NCPPR’s political motivations, allowed Johnson a guest column so he could declare that “Gore’s hypocritical home energy use and ‘do as I say not as I do’ lifestyle has plunged to embarrassing new depths.”

Gore’s team disputes NCPPR’s claims—just as they did in 2007, when Johnson put out a similar report attacking Gore’s personal energy use following the success of his first documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. “Climate deniers, funded by the fossil fuel industry, continue to wage misleading personal attacks on Al Gore as a way of trying to cast doubt on established climate science and distract attention from the most serious global threat we face,” Gore’s communications director, Betsy McManus, told me in an email. She didn’t dispute Johnson’s claims of Gore’s energy use, rather his assertion that Gore has been ineffective at getting as much of his energy consumption as possible from renewable sources. “Vice President Gore leads a carbon neutral life by purchasing green energy, reducing carbon impacts and offsetting any emissions that cannot be avoided, all within the constraints of an economy that still relies too heavily on dirty fossil fuels,” McManus said.

McManus did not respond to a request for evidence of Gore’s offsets. But let’s set aside the dispute over Gore’s carbon footprint, because the report raises a much bigger question: Should prominent climate advocates be expected to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle? Are they hypocrites if they don’t? Right-wing critics would have you believe so—that these moralizing elitists are making rules for the public that they themselves don’t have to follow. This has a powerful appeal, especially today. But ultimately the argument is deceitful faux-populism, and the real hypocrites here are the purveyors of it.

Gore is hardly the only climate advocate whose personal energy use has been attacked by the right. It’s a familiar, longstanding tactic among conservatives who don’t accept the truth about climate change. Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz told me he thinks Rush Limbaugh “started the argument that the Hollywood Left flew their private jets to global warming conferences.” The first reference I could find was in 2006, when the conservative Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Debra Saunders, then writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, bemoaned what she called “Learjet liberals who burn beaucoup fossil fuels in the sky as they soar around the planet fighting global warming.” Fox News host Sean Hannity picked up “Learjet liberals” soon after, using it in numerous segments in 2007 and 2008 and as recently as January.