Like most A-list celebrities in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio is frequently in the news.
There’s DiCaprio, in Cannes, France, on David Geffen’s mega yacht, alone. And there he is on a different yacht in St. Tropez with his blonde of the month.
There he is getting off a private plane in the celebrity uniform of sunglasses and hoodie. And there he is getting on one again.
And last week, there he was in Davos, Switzerland, lecturing us all and blaming corporate greed for causing global climate change.
It might be funny if it weren’t so galling.
Polls have long shown that Americans either don’t believe in global climate change or don’t consider it a serious issue. A Pew poll last November found that the United States was behind only China in its “concern” about climate change — but that such concern has grown substantially.
What polls also show, however, is that Americans are learning another lesson from our supposed elites: Believing in the existence of climate change or feeling “concern” is enough. Furrow your brow, and you’re a hero. Even as belief and concern has increased in America, our behavior has stayed the same.
Could it be that we are hearing the hysterical pleas of “environmental activists” to change our ways or face doom and noticing that not only are they not changing their ways, but that their ways are far worse than our own? The loudest, most obnoxious and aggressive voices telling us the world is about to end plain old don’t act like it.
Who can forget Al Gore predicting the North Pole would be ice-free by 2014, and starring in the environmental catastrophe film “An Inconvenient Truth,” all while racking up an electric bill 20 times the national average for his 20-room house and pool house?
We’re willing to believe the science we don’t fully understand, but it would help if the actions of the lecturing class caught up with their alarmist rhetoric.
We abandon ship when we see rats making a run for it, but these rats are lounging by the heated pool and playing shuffleboard on the Lido deck. When Leo heads for a lifeboat (admittedly his track record isn’t great on that score), the masses might follow.
All these activists sound very worried. But they don’t act worried at all.
One of the Sony emails leaked by hackers last year revealed that DiCaprio took six private flights in six weeks. We might not know science, but we know math. A plane for one, taken once a week, hurts the environment far more than what regular people who “don’t believe” in climate change can do.
But back to Davos: How did all those “thought leaders” and super-serious people get there? According to The Guardian: “about 1,700 private flights in and out of Zurich and other airports.”
That’s a lot of flights. Should we be worried about carbon emissions? Sure sounds like it! According to the eco-warriors at the Brooklyn-based TreeHugger.com, “while there’s no real substitute for face-to-face interactions, it seems ridiculously hypocritical to waste so much hot air — about 12,000 tons of CO2 — in order for the world’s economic elite to talk to each other.”
Silly TreeHugger. There’s no such thing as too much hot air when it comes to Davos. It’s the whole purpose of the gabfest.
And that’s the point, isn’t it? That no one who claims the sky is falling is also ducking for cover.
Several years ago, writer Gregg Easterbrook, criticizing environmentalist Laurie David in The New Republic, calculated that one of David’s cross-country flights was equivalent to driving a Hummer for a year.
David, who produced “An Inconvenient Truth,” admitted her private plane usage was a problem. She said, “This is not about perfection. I don’t expect anybody else to be perfect either. That’s what hurts the environmental movement — holding people to a standard they cannot meet. That just pushes people away.”
Actually, what pushes people away from the environmental movement is that those who proselytize changing our ways to help the environment seem most far removed from doing the same.
“You can make history,” DiCaprio once scolded the United Nations on climate change, “or be vilified by it.”
If these elites’ behavior is any indication, that’s an empty threat.