Extraordinary Piece on Global Warming Hypocrisy

The entire piece is here.

Some highlights:

British Royal couple Prince Harry and Princess Meghan Markle triggered widespread outrage recently after lecturing the world about climate change while flying around the world in private jets.

"With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference," the Duke of Sussex said on Instagram a few days before jetting off with the Duchess to Ibiza, Spain and then to Nice, France. 

BBC calculates that those two flights alone produced six times more emissions than the average Briton does each year and over 100 times more than the average resident of the African nation of Lesotho...

Why then do we get so upset when celebrities moralize about climate change? Because in doing so they are violating an unsaid social contract. You can be rich, fabulous, and showy, but you can’t tell us how to live. Two thousand years after the Christian revolution in morality, we take our relative prosperity seriously.

Movie and TV stars, for the most part, stick to this implicit social contract. When they pick up a new cause they tend to engage in anodyne “awareness-raising" or advocate, at most, micro-actions, like not using plastic straws...

The problem, in other words, isn’t that celebrities flaunt their rich lifestyle but rather that they moralize about it.

Al Gore wouldn’t have been busted by Associated Press for living in a 20-room home that used 12 times more energy than the average home in Nashville, Tennessee had he not claimed that “we are going to have to change the way we live our lives” to solve climate change.

Prince Harry wouldn’t have been in trouble for private jetting around the world had he not claimed: “every action makes a difference.”...

At the very moment that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are scandalizing the world about their jet-setting, their home nation of Britain is in a major debate about the future of energy.

British lawmakers are considering building a French nuclear power plant at Sizewell C identical to the one being built in Hinkley C. 

It is hard to imagine a climate cause that needs celebrity support more than nuclear energy. Anti-nuclear Greens are growing in power in Europe and fiercely oppose nuclear even though it is the continent’s largest source of carbon-free energy.

A few Instagram posts and barefooted lectures by Harry and Meghan urging people to get over their irrational fears of carbon-free nuclear energy might be enough to get Sizewell C built.

Such statements would no doubt elicit outrage from some of the couple’s green friends. But they would have the benefit of actually reducing emissions without alienating the public... 

The above statement is exactly what Big Climate is about: power and money; not about actually improving the environment. As has been stated repeatedly, if you aren't serious about next generation nuclear, then you aren't serious about reducing greenhouse gases. People will not allow themselves to have their standard of living drastically cut while those telling them the cuts need to occur are flying around on private jets. Roger Pielke, Jr., calls this the "iron law." He is exactly right.