The Playboy of the Green Hypocrisy

I am constantly amazed by the double standards that characterize the environmental/liberal movement.

Billionaires are bad…unless they are called Oprah, Spielberg, or Soros.

Flying is bad too because of the emissions it produces is bad for the environment, or so environmentalists tell us. But it seems it is only other people flying that is damaging.

Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Rajendra Pachauri, and the tens of thousands of IPCC fellow travelers spend their lives on planes and receive no criticism from their hypocritical environmental cheerleaders.

And the hypocrisy continues with their coverage of California’s Prop23, which aims to suspend Global Warming legislation that will increase energy bills and drive businesses and jobs out of the state.

Environmentalists, and their enabling environmental “correspondents” who work for establishment newspapers and blogs, cannot wait to let us know that much of the money supporting Prop23 is coming from “out of state oil companies.”

This is true, except these companies also employ thousands of people in California in real jobs.

But perhaps more importantly, it ignores reality.

Extreme environmentalists opposing Prop23 have raised twice as much money as those supporting it, and from billionaire venture capitalists who have a vested interest in ensuring the proposition does not pass.

I have already written on BigGovernment about Thomas Stryer, the venture capitalist, who donated $5m to opposing Prop23 and stands to make hundreds of millions if it fails.

But it would be remiss of me to ignore billionaire investor Nicolas Berggruen who has contributed $250,000 to the opposition. Berggruen is an investor in wind farms, and wind energy will be state subsidized if Prop 23 is defeated. Simply put, it will be a state guaranteed investment. But Berggruen does not have a “vested interest.”

Berggruen’s lifestyle says a lot about him, he estimated to be worth $2.2bln and has sold all his houses and cars because “possessing things is not interesting.” Fawning profiles often refer to him as the “homeless billionaire.”

But Berggruen is not living in a cardboard box in Central Park. He lives in various hotels as he travels across the globe growing his investment business. Oh, and he didn’t give away all his worldly goods–he still has a very, very impressive art collection valued at hundreds of millions.

And Berggruen, who opposes fossil fuels and pushes for renewables, shouldn’t use so much fossil fuel himself. He should live the dream of a carbon-free world himself.

Before “Green” became a fashionable cover story people such as Berggruen, who fly around the world staying in elite hotels whilst adding to an expensive art collection, were known as playboys.

Now they are green heroes, who tell the rest of us we have to live more simply and pay more for our energy.