Ed Begley Jr., actor and super-Green advocate, has sometimes been the subject of derision, and even a TV series on his excessive devotion to environmentalism. But let’s give him credit; he walks the walk:

Begley’s been driving an electric car since 1970. He recharges the current one, a Toyota RAV4, with the solar panels that provide all the electricity for his modest, two-bedroom home in sunny Studio City, Calif. He grows his own veggies and cooks them in a solar oven. He even powers his toaster with a stationary bike.

That’s a far cry from many of the folks praising Al Gore but living in 40,000 square foot homes. That is why this video is getting lots of laughs: hypocrisy, especially at gargantuan levels by oblivious do-gooders is always fun. But there is a point to highlighting the hypocrisy that goes beyond trying to knock the ultra-Green set off their high horse and debunk their more extreme rhetoric. (It is good for that too, of course.)

The point of the hypocrisy-watch is to illustrate that the message of self-sacrifice and personal deprivation, even among the super rich and educated, is very hard to put into practice. Put differently, the notion that you can get millions and millions of people not only to inconvenience themselves minimally but to alter radically their life styles is probably not realistic. In fact, it is a fantasy. That suggests that hectoring and forcing people of modest means to undergo more sacrifice (yeah, $8 gas is a great idea) is a losing proposition.

So until everyone uses home exercise equipment to cook breakfast it might be a good idea to set our sites on more modest conservation efforts and look at some real options on the production side. (While in Europe Obama might want to check out how successful nuclear power has been.)