Few appear to care about climate change more than global celebrities. In 2019, Leonardo DiCaprio told the U.N., “Climate Change is our single greatest security threat.”
Late last year, DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence starred in the Hollywood climate disaster movie, “Don’t Look Up.” Said Lawrence, “You’re watching these hurricanes now and it’s hard, especially while promoting this movie, not to feel Mother Nature’s rage or wrath.” [emphasis, links added]
In a United Nations speech earlier this year, Prince Harry said “Climate change is wreaking havoc on our planet, with the most vulnerable suffering most of all.” All have urged individuals and nations to radically reduce their carbon emissions.
And yet global celebrities are, along with global political leaders, the planet’s biggest climate hypocrites.
DiCaprio, Lawrence, Harry, and Meghan have been flying on private jets, partying on gas-guzzling yachts, and riding jet skis for years.
Already 400 private jets, which are five to 14 times more polluting than commercial flights, have arrived in Egypt for United Nations annual climate talks.
Last year, 40,000 people flew to Scotland, many on private jets, for climate talks, generating an estimated 102,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of burning 237,000 barrels of oil.
After they arrived, they were treated to a video of a talking CGI dinosaur, voiced over by Jack Black, urging African nations to not use fossil fuels.
It’s true that celebrities have promised to do better. DiCaprio flew commercially to climate talks last year. Meghan and Harry flew commercially back to London last year. Lawrence flew commercially after her private plane nearly crashed. And most of the 30,000 participants in this year’s climate talks will arrive in commercial airplanes.
But DiCaprio still jet-sets around the country for short stops, giving him a much larger carbon footprint than the people he’s asking to sacrifice.
Lawrence expresses guilt for it (“I know, flying private, I deserve to die.”) but still does it. Harry and Meghan returned from London to their home in Santa Barbara in their own private 12-seater luxury jet.
And simply flying across the Atlantic in a commercial jet emits more carbon emissions than the average human produces in an entire year.
What’s worse, global elites are demanding that poor nations in the global south forgo fossil fuels, including natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, at a time of the worst energy crisis in modern history.
None of this has stopped European nations from seeking natural gas to import from Africa for their own use.
Rich nations have for years demanded that India and Pakistan not burn coal. But now, Europe is bidding up the global price of liquified natural gas (LNG), leaving Pakistan forced to ration limited natural gas supplies this winter.
India will need to build 10 to 20 full-sized (28 gigawatts) coal-fired power plants over the next eight years to meet a doubling of electricity demand.
At last year’s climate talks, 20 nations promised to stop all funding for fossil fuel projects abroad. Germany paid South Africa $800 million to promise not to burn coal. Since then, Germany’s imports of coal have increased eightfold.
Consider the case of Norway, Europe’s second-largest gas supplier after Russia. Last year it agreed to increase natural gas exports by 2 billion cubic meters to alleviate energy shortages.
At the same time, Norway is working to prevent the world’s poorest nations from producing their own natural gas by lobbying the World Bank to end its financing of natural gas projects in Africa.
It’s monopolistic imperialism dressed up as green altruism. Rich nations are only agreeing to help poor nations so long as they use energy sources that cannot lift themselves out of poverty.
UN climate talks aren’t about the rich helping the poor. They’re about bribing corrupt leaders in poor nations to leave their fossil fuels for rich nations.
The IMF wants to hold hostage $50 billion as part of a “Resilience and Sustainability Trust” that will demand nations give up fossil fuels and thus their chance at developing. Such efforts are working.
On Thursday, South Africa received $600 million in “climate loans” from French and German development banks that can only be used for renewables.
The Europeans hope to shift the $7.6 billion currently being invested by South Africa in electricity infrastructure away from coal and into renewables.
Celebrities and global leaders say they care about the poor. In 2019, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s wife, told a group of African women, “I am here with you, and I am here FOR you… as a woman of color.”
Why, then, are they demanding climate action on their backs?
Read rest at SubStack
Such “Celebrities” are living proof of the old sayng “Where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise”!
I have personally known two people who served as missionaries in Africa. What they told me is of course limited to their experience. One told me of a school that only had over head cover and no walls. The kids stood at a table. She questioned if they even had pencils. The other reported that the people where he was spent their entire day looking for something to eat. Without affordable energy, these conditions are not going to improve.