This week we will look at some of today’s best known ‘do as I say, not as I do’ hypocrites. These are the same people who feel comfortable burdening the public…and the world if they can find a way to do so…with policies that do away with life as we know it without any replacement solutions. We see this all the time in the world of the self-appointed aristocracy. The Bible tells us to not think too highly of ourselves. Apparently they didn’t get the message. Let’s take a look at some of our crusaders against global warming and ‘carbon footprint’ and for climate change. Surely they do all they can to support their earth friendly agendas…right!!
Billionaire investor Richard Branson tells audiences not to “be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment ” with carbon. To spread that message, he travels on his own Dassault Falcon 50EX. He also uses the plane when he flies to his private island in the Virgin Islands. What’s wrong with a ‘high-speed train’ or sailboat? Like most billionaires, Bill Gates just knows that climate change is “a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved”, as he ponders the problem on his Bombardier BD-700 Global Express. The same applies to Elon Musk as he jets around the country in his Gulfstream G650 ER, worried that climate change could lead to “more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined.” Isn’t it nice to know that these crusaders are so concerned!?
Not to fail to recognize one of society’s greatest climate change crusaders, Hillary Clinton, who once demanded…yes, I said demanded…her own private jet plane because she didn’t want to share one with Michelle Obama. Months after promising to put “a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” for their ‘sins’ against the climate, she flew twenty miles on a chartered jet from Martha’s Vineyard to Nantucket for a fund-raiser with Cher. I guess the ‘high speed train’ wasn’t running that day.
On the last day of his presidency, Barack Obama took Air Force One from Washington, DC, to a donor’s home in California, an eleven-thousand-square-foot air-conditioned mansion in the middle of the hottest desert in North America. After a few days, he flew on Richard Branson’s plane to a yacht that ferried him to Branson’s island. A few weeks later he boarded another private plane to French Polynesia, where he planned to write his memoirs on yet another private island, one owned by Marlon Brando.
New York mayor Bill de Blasio presides over an unusually filthy city, but nevertheless the health of the environment is important to him…just ask him! In 2017, he reminded radio listeners that “everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the Earth.” To show he was really truthful in his commitment he announced a number of new measures aimed at other people’s behavior, including a ban on plastic bags in the city and a crackdown on idling vehicles. (For those who have driven in New York City you know it’s impossible to do so without idling your car in the traffic.) When a caller to a radio show pointed out that de Blasio takes a five-SUV motorcade from his Manhattan mansion to his gym in Brooklyn, he agreed that was true but that he was special and did so “for obvious reasons.” He added that it would be “cheap symbolism” for him to give up his many SUV’s. Besides they’re “fuel-efficient hybrids.”
Al Gore is probably the closest thing to America’s ‘climate saint’. Strangely he still flies everywhere he goes…no high speed train…and lives in his home in Nashville that uses twenty-one times the electricity of the average American home. Thankfully in Gore’s defense the New Republic cleared up any conflict!? The magazine ran a piece titled “Al Gore’s Carbon Footprint Doesn’t Matter.” The article attacked literal-minded conservatives for pointing to what was not actually hypocrisy at all. I am so glad that the magazine cleared that up!? Gore’s office followed up with a response of its own: “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.” It went on to say, “Vice President Gore leads a carbon neutral life by purchasing green energy, reducing carbon impacts, and offsetting emissions that cannot be avoided, all within the constraints of an economy that still relies too heavily on dirty fossil fuels.” In other words, it’s a fallen world, but Al Gore is a good person…after all he gave us the internet…much better than most other people.
In defense of these ‘crusaders’ one might say they have done nothing illegal or that which others have not also done, and you would be 100% correct. After all they are only human trying to get by on a complicated Earth. And once again you would be 100% correct. Their only sin is ‘hypocrisy’, a sin addressed in ‘God’s politics’ which has come to mean very little in ‘man’s politics’. One might ask: If you really believed that the future of the planet was imperiled by carbon emissions, why would you fly private? Next week we will look at a sense of false sincerity and how predictions of doom over the years have proven to be nothing but meaningless predictions designed at best to engender public fear and support a ‘money making’ agenda for those who are above it all. The Bible tells use to not think to highly of ourselves. While some of our politicians go about quoting the Bible, I wonder if any of them have read that part?
– Bob Munsey
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Lenin
Geezer Politics 