Media mogul Michael Bloomberg is one of the richest men on the planet, with an estimated personal net worth of more than $34 billion. Since stepping down as mayor of New York City he has stepped up his propaganda activities in the climate wars. On January 31, 2014, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that he had appointed Mr. Bloomberg as his Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change, assisting him in rounding up political support for a new UN global climate treaty to replace the expired Kyoto Protocol.
In June of this year, Bloomberg released a new report, “Risky Business: The Economic Risk of Climate Change,” along with fellow billionaire Tom Steyer and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the bailout king who previously served as CEO of Goldman Sachs, the infamous Wall Street firm that is commonly known as the “Vampire Squid.”
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The message from these folks is clear, and it is the same one that the UN and the science fraud practitioners of the global warming alarm choir have been singing for years. You know the tune: By burning fossil fuels, man is putting CO2 — carbon dioxide — into the air, which, they say, is causing global warming, which threatens to extinguish all life as we know it, etc., etc. Melting ice caps. Dying Planet. Apocalypse. Ergo, mankind must drastically reduce energy usage and carbon footprint. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle goes the mantra. We must also get used to a lower standard of living, says the Bloomberg choir. Meaning less travel, smaller homes, fewer appliances, less (or no) heating and air-conditioning, less (or no) meat, etc.
But wait a minute. If the climate apocalypse is as dire and imminent as the alarmists claim, should they not be leading by example? Let’s look at Mr. Bloomberg. He has an assortment of eye-popping, multi-million dollar homes and vacation getaways: a palatial mansion in the Hamptons; two luxurious townhouses in Manhattan; a private beach and lavish “bungalow” in Bermuda; an extravagant ski lodge in Vail, Colorado; a spacious, historic farm estate in upstate New York. Plus, of course, the obligatory private jet, yacht, and luxury cars. That’s a carbon footprint that probably dwarfs the prints of entire third-world countries. Ditto for the carbon footprints of many of the loudest — and most hypocritical — singers in the Bloomberg-UN climate choir. Let’s look at just a very small sampling.
Besides being heir to the throne of England and one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, Prince Charles is one of planet’s most outspoken enviro-activists and climate alarmists. He frequently jets about the planet to warn the rest of us to stop wasting resources and causing global warming. Of course, he is doing his part, right? Or is he? His official website provides telling pictures of his official residences: Clarence House, Highgrove House, Birkhall, and Llwynywermod, not to mention Buckingham Palace.
Pretty shameless for a genuine greenie, is it not? But that’s not all. As the Daily Mail reported last year, Prince Charles has come under fire from residents of rural Cornwall for his plans to tear up a historic and spectacularly scenic countryside for a lucrative housing development that would include 1,000 homes. The headline for the Daily Mail story reads: “How Prince Charles the Green champion is concreting over the countryside to pay for his lavish lifestyle.”
Other members of the climate alarm choir include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, two of the best-known glamour faces on the planet.
Brad Pitt has spoken passionately regarding the need for global action on climate change. His speech at the Clinton Global Initiative is one example.
Here’s an August 25, 2014 story from the Daily Mail: “Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie touch down at Nice airport with their brood on a private jet … as they enjoy a summer break in France” Just a hunch, but it is doubtful that their jet was powered by solar panels or windmills. The Daily Mail reporter did not know it at the time, but the couple had taken thier “summer break” to secretly marry at the Chateau Miraval, a wine chateau and estate that serves as their vacation home in France.
Now the point of all of the foregoing is not to suggest that Michael Bloomberg, Prince Charles, or the Brangelinas don’t have a right to enjoy their wealth to the fullest. But it is worse than unseemly for them to preach austerity — and attempt to force austerity — on the rest of us while they, “the great and the good,” live the champagne and caviar lifestyles. The Bloomberg hypocrite climate choir is big and noisy, including millionaires and billionaires such as David Rockefeller, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Ted Turner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Eric Schmidt, Al Gore, George Soros, and Madonna, to name a few.
The “green” policies promoted by these pampered, privileged plutocrats are not only morally offensive, they are lethal. According to the studies of Dr. Indur Goklany, an author and expert reviewer for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the rising global food prices attributable just to “green” biofuels production may have led to at least 192,000 excess deaths and 6.7 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) in 2010 alone. DALYs is a sort of misery metric used by the World Health Organization to calculate both the number of years lost due to premature death from disease, and the number of years spent in a disabled condition due to disease.
The policies and actions demanded by the UN and the Bloomberg choir are exacting truly catastrophic costs to both our planet and our human race. These anti-carbon, anti-growth policies and actions are keeping poor people poor. Which translates into real death and misery here and now for a staggering number of the most vulnerable members of our global family, as opposed to the highly speculative, exaggerated numbers generated by dubious computer models of future harm allegedly attributable to the effects of rising CO2 levels a century from now.
The reality now is that seven out of 10 inhabitants of the continent of Africa have no electricity at all. They must rely on wood, grass, and animal dung for heating and cooking, and often must carry infected water long distances for daily use. Africa’s abundant and relatively cheap coal and natural gas deposits offer them a hopeful lifeline out of this dilemma. But that lifeline is being snatched away by the climate fanatics who insist we must all “decarbonize.” The jet-setting Hollywood celebrities, Wall Street billionaires and politicians demand, in effect, that Africans, Indians, and other lesser beings remain in their squalor, restricting their energy upgrades to the pathetically minuscule offerings provided by so-called “renewables.”
The hypocrisy and hubris of the climate alarmist choir are beyond astounding. While luxuriating in a splendor made possible by the exploitation of hydrocarbon fuels, the climate alarmists continue riding a non-existent crisis that is denying the Earth’s most vulnerable peoples access to the energy they need for the basics of life. The alarmists are literally killing the poor. Will no one stand up and say this is immoral, this is unconscionable — even, this is criminal? It’s about time more of us begin to do so.
See also The New American’s video interviews with leading climate authorities at the Heartland Institute’s 2014 Climate Conference in Las Vegas:
Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysicist/Astronomer Dr. Willie Soon Tackles Global Warming Fallacies
Heartland President Discusses Climate Skeptic Conference
Dr. Arthur Robinson Explodes Bogus Global Warming Consensus
Dr. E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance: Fighting the Corruption of Science
German Scientist-Author Dr. Sebastian Luning Challenges Global Warming Alarmism
Greenpeace “Heretic” Dr. Patrick Moore: CO2 Good; Greenpeace “Anti-human”
Tom Harris: “Making it Safe” for Liberals to be Climate Realists
Photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: AP Images
