Global Hypocrites
In our present culture, celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore, Robert Redford and other multi-millionaire jet-setters are quite vocal about how the rest of us should live our lives. They advise us to sell our gas-guzzlers and buy an electric or hybrid car, exchange our incandescent light bulbs with annoying ‘green’ low-energy light bulbs, recycle our garbage, compost our kitchen scraps and generally spend an inordinate amount of our precious time taking care of mother earth. Fair enough, but what about THEM? What do THEY personally do to make our earth better? By all reports, very little except gorging themselves on our finite energy resources and having a blast in the process.
This became abundantly clear when Al Gore was exposed as a green douche-bag when it was revealed his Nashville, Tennessee home consumed significantly more energy than a regular Tennessee household, up to 20 times according to some reports. After his hypocrisy became public knowledge, Mr. and Mrs. Gore began an extensive renovation to make their mansion much more energy efficient and cut their summer electrical consumption by 11%. But that’s AFTER telling us all how to live our lives and save energy.
But the granddaddy of all the celebrity environmental whiners is James Cameron, big Hollywood director and probably the biggest douche-bag of the lot. He’s been telling us all to conserve energy, cut back and be nice to Mother Nature during his recent global press junket for his latest movie Avatar and recently donated a million U.S. dollars (equal to a million Canadian dollars) to fight California’s upcoming proposition 23, a ballot measure to strike down the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act clean air legislation. But in all his zest for planet saving, people-saving and tree-hugging Mr. Cameron seems to be one of the largest private consumers of energy on the planet. To quote The Daily Caller:
In a single day last week, James Cameron flew from the rain forests of Brazil, where he had been protesting a proposed hydroelectric dam project, to Washington, DC, where he attended an event on Capitol Hill held in his honor. And while the movie director traveled to both places in his capacity as a semi-professional environmentalist, a man so committed to the movement that he once endorsed “eco-terrorism,” a man so in tune with nature he posed for the cover of the New York Times in indigenous face paint, it’s likely Cameron made at least part of the trip in a private jet.
“He took a boat, a Cessna, and a jet,” confirmed his publicist, refusing to specify whether the jet was commercial or chartered. Common sense, however, suggests the latter. The nearest airport with commercially available flights is 500 miles to the west of where Cameron was, and flights from there would have included at least 19 hours of travel and three layovers.
For principled environmentalists, any air travel is hard to justify, but private planes (with their vastly lower passenger-to-emissions ratio) are all but impossible. A chartered jet flown from Los Angeles to the Amazon and back could burn over 10,000 gallons of fuel, the carbon equivalent of driving a Hummer back and forth across the United States 40 times, and all in 12 hours. For Cameron, who is given to lectures on the immorality of cheap gasoline (only with $15 to $20-a-gallon gas can we achieve “a real paradigm shift,” he said recently), it would amount to hypocrisy on an epic scale.
So it doesn’t appear that Mr. Cameron practices what he preaches. But the above report barely scratches the surface of the hubris demonstrated by this Hollywood ass-wipe. For an entertaining and awe-inspiring look at his lifestyle, watch the 2 minute video. And think of him the next time you’re sorting your garbage, trying to see by the light of a low-energy light bulb or attempting to surpass the 76 kph speed threshold in your spunky Toyota Prius.
Interesting way of putting somethings in perspective. It is important to remember to walk the walk and not just talk the talk