Top international global warming expert Sean Penn has given his verdict on the COP21 Paris climate conference: everything’s going to be OK because both his kids drive Priuses and because climate change “deniers” don’t actually exist.
Penn, who met with France’s President Holland in Paris last week in his capacity as co founder of the Haitian Relief Organization, has made his views known in an interview with Bloomberg Business.
Asked what he would say to a “climate denier” if he ran into one in a bar, Penn replied:
Well, I don’t believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It’s like talking to a member of a cult. I’m not a deprogrammer, so I think what I’d do is turn away and order another vodka tonic.
And anyway, even in the unlikely event that those “deniers” do exist, it doesn’t matter because Penn’s twentysomething kids Dylan and Topper have a millionaire father and have been raised in impeccably liberal Hollywood circles and can therefore afford to choose expensive Japanese hybrid vehicles rather than cheaper, less virtuous alternatives.
I have a 22- and a 24-year-old, so I find myself in the company of them and their friends quite a bit. And when I see them very diligently using the recycle bins or choosing a Prius over a Cadillac—and I see a lot of that starting to happen in our culture and in others, and certainly in Western Europe—you are seeing this shift in young people that [my generation] never occupied.
Penn does believe in ISIS though. As he told the Telegraph earlier this year, he uses them to provide ultra-realistic snuff videos as inspiration for his acting performances.
“The problem is we are not seeing enough of real violence,” Penn told the paper. “We are being anesthetized when you don’t see the horror of war. In the Sixties, we grew up with the horror of Vietnam on our television screens every day. Today we have become anesthetized by political correctness. The American news channels did this with the Iraq war; they wouldn’t show what it was about, they wouldn’t show the caskets coming home.”
Of the ISIS videos, Penn added: “Uh huh, I’ve watched them. And anyone who sees them and claims that they were anesthetized by violent movies, that they weren’t horrified by what they saw, on the most primal level, is intellectually dishonest or existentially unpresent.”