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Dec. 11, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:30
1525 True News: Eco-Hypocrisy!

What is the carbon footprint of the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen?

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Hi everybody, it's Ivan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is True News.
Current events clarified.
Hypocrisy. Environmentalism for you and I, aka the peasants.
So here's an even more inconvenient truth.
As you probably know, a number of world leaders have gathered together in Copenhagen to talk about climate change and the negative impact of man's wasteful activities upon the environment in the form of producing CO2 emissions.
So what's the fact? Well, the top hotels in Copenhagen are all fully booked at £650 a night.
A little mind-blowing. And if you know anything about economics, then you know that £650 a night is representative of the resources that are consumed in order to produce this kind of luxury.
In other words, quite a prodigious amount.
On the menu for the Climate Change Summit is scallops, foie gras, and sculpted caviar wedges, all flown in from elsewhere.
There are 1200 limousines on the road and 140 private planes have flocked to Copenhagen and some of them have been parked as far away as Sweden and have to go back and forth to the local airport which doesn't have the capacity for that many private planes in order to ferry people back and forth.
The limos are all parked, some of them up to hundreds of miles away, and have to drive back and forth quite regularly to pick people up.
And this is all quite funny.
Of course, I mean, it's ridiculous.
The Climate Change Summit will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough, which is no village, during its duration.
This is a bit easy, but let's have some fun.
Sheryl Crow, the lady of don't use more than one sheet of toilet paper unless you absolutely have to.
And she, of course, is leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America, or was, and traveled in a biodiesel bus, which to me is kind of silly.
I mean, it takes a huge amount of resources to create the bus, so biodiesel doesn't exactly cancel that out.
But her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles on the Stop Global Warming concert.
John Travolta, he encouraged the British public to fight global warming after he flew into London in one of his private jets, one of which is a Boeing 707, and even he's not that big.
In 2006, his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than 100 times the output of the average Britain.
But you see, environmentalism is for the peasants, not for the glitterati.
Tom Cruise, a man who is increasingly hard to take as sane, let alone serious, he's campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office.
He has an air fleet and a license to pilot his five, count them, five planes, including a top-of-the-line customized Gulfstream jet that he bought for his wife, Katie something or other.
Ah, Harrison Ford, grumpy and grisly und.
He's on the board of Conservation International, does voiceovers for eco-friendly projects, and actually shaved his chest to show the effects of deforestation.
He once owned a Gulfstream, but now makes do with a smaller Cessna, Citation Sovereign 8-seater jet, four propeller planes...
And a helicopter. Because, you see, it's all about carbon emissions.
Oprah preaches Echo Virtue every other week, travels in a 13-seat Gulfstream IV private jet for years, the preferred model for celebrities, and the super-rich.
She has replaced it with a faster Bombardier Global Express.
Because, you see, echo conservation is not for the leaders, not for the glitterati, not for the cultural elite.
It's for you and I, you see.
Jennifer Aniston, I brush my teeth in the shower to save the Earth's precious water resources.
She also flew a hairdresser to Europe to accompany her on a publicity tour for the film, I think it was Marley and Me.
Oh, you could go on and on.
Let's just skim them. Der Stingel and Trudy.
They run seven homes and travel between them in private jets and a fleet of cars.
Trudy Stiler was furious when her pregnant chef refused to travel 100 miles to prepare some soup and salad.
U2's world tour.
Carbon footprint is the equivalent of 6,500 UK homes.
Chris Martin from Coldplay flew thousands of miles on his private jet while lecturing the planet about conservation.
Leonardo DiCaprio has a private jet.
Barack Obama had a St.
Louis chef flown 850 miles to make pizza at the White House.
And I assume he didn't walk back.
But the winner, of course, in the echo-pocracy contest is Al Gore.
Of course, at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, he asks his audience with that overbearing creepy uncle sincerity, are you ready to change the way you live?
His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home, burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most Americans home-due in an entire year.
He spent $500 a month just to heat his indoor swimming pool.
Ah, Al constantly goring the truth.
And what's the moral? Of course, it's easy and silly, but fun to pick on celebrity hypocrisies.
But we don't live our lives according to the edicts of Tom Cruise, of course.
But what's the moral? Look, life is too short to evaluate everybody's positions and foolishness.
It really is too short. You can ask yourself the question that I ask.
Because the first hurdle really is integrity, right?
So the question that I ask people in my own mind is not what do you preach or even what do you believe, but I'm an empiricist.
So I judge by what people do.
I judge people's beliefs by what they do.
It's an old adage.
It's fallen out of favor, but it's worth thinking about.
Actions speak louder than words.
So a If John Travolta is very keen on conservation and he has studied enough to make public pronouncements about it, then I'm going to look at what John Travolta does.
I'm going to not listen to his words because people are revealed by what they do.
If he thinks it's very serious, then of course he's not going to even have one private plane.
If he has to fly, he's going to fly with the peasants, right?
And, you know, with maybe some kind of disguise on so that people don't recognize him and bother him.
But that's what he would do because that's a hurdle that you would overcome if you really cared about something.
But Barack Obama flying all over the world and these leaders in Copenhagen, they could have had a video conference.
But the organizer said, well, it doesn't have quite the personal touch of a face-to-face meeting.
Okay, so that's your hurdle, right?
Instead of having a video conference, you're going to fly 140 private jets and 12,000 limousines around Copenhagen.
In order to talk about the need to conserve the Earth's resources, then I'm just going to say, well, you obviously, you spent a lot of time studying it.
You spent a lot of time researching it.
You're proposing laws and global changes and taxes and carbon trade offsets and all that.
And so I'm just going to look at what you do.
And if you don't, If you don't believe what you actually preach, then you're going to act in that way.
And this is how these people act.
So I don't really have time to research everything to do with global warming, but I can see that all of the world's leaders don't believe it, because they don't act in a way in consistency with what they preach.
So all I know is that they don't believe it, and they've done a lot more research than I have, and they don't believe it.
So that's enough for me.
Again, it's not perfect, but it's a good rule of thumb.
It's a good rule of thumb.
And why is it important?
That these celebrities are eco-hypocrites.
Well, it's important because they're still welcome at climate change conferences.
Why, of course, do climate change conferences welcome Leonardo DiCaprio, who flew to Copenhagen?
Well, because he's cool among the youth and gets the propaganda going, and he's pretty like a lot of these people.
So they don't want to alienate or piss people off by saying, look, there's no way you're flying here in a private jet, and you better clean up your own act before you show up at a carbon reduction climate change conference.
You better get rid of these Like these private jets and all that.
This is ridiculous. It's embarrassing.
So you're not welcome here until, right?
I mean, it just says that they don't care about this stuff.
They don't care who's doing what. They just want the propaganda.
So, the first hurdle to convincing people is integrity.
Do you actually believe?
Do you actually practice what you preach?
I mean, nobody's going to buy a diet book from a guy who weighs 300 pounds on the cover.
It's ridiculous. Nobody's going to buy a smoking cessation book from a chain smoker.
It would be ridiculous.
No one would market that.
It would be like a joke. It would be like something out of the onion.
And yet, we believe all of this nonsense from these public figures.
So, Do you actually practice what you preach and you are judged by the company that you keep?
These are necessary but not sufficient for truth and virtue so you can have integrity with your beliefs and hang out with people who also have integrity with your beliefs and you can still be false but you can never be true if you don't practice what you preach and keep company with those who practice the opposite of what you and they preach.
So it's a good shortcut, and it's not perfect, but it's a good rule of thumb for getting rid of a lot of the nonsense that's floating around the world.
So it's my suggestion.
You can apply this to a lot of things, and I hope this has been of some use to you.
As always, thank you so much for watching and for listening.
You can check these out at fdrurl.com forward slash eh, the references.
And again, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
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