COPENHAGEN? More Like Carbonhagen! I’ll believe it’s a crisis when they do these shindigs via videoconference.

Related: Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, flew 443,243 miles in a 19 month period while speaking against global warming. A fraud, a hypocrite, and probably a liar. Somebody tell this guy about Skype and iChat.

Plus, Taking the private jet to Copenhagen.

SAME REASON A DOG LICKS HIMSELF: BECAUSE HE CAN. Why is Buttigieg using taxpayer-funded private jets? “I doubt many members of the media will rouse themselves to ask Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg many tough questions about why he’s used taxpayer-funded private jets at least 18 times since taking office, even though that sort of thing was a big deal back when former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price did it. I mean, if there’s anybody in the administration who shouldn’t be flying on private jets, it’s the guy who’s always nagging you to reduce your carbon footprint by buying an electric car. But hey, Buttigieg is a Democrat, so when he flies on a private jet at taxpayer expense, it isn’t a bad thing.”

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

Which apparently means never.

THEY’RE NOW GIVING ADVICE ON HOW TO LIVE ONCE THE GREENS BAN AIR CONDITIONING: 11 ways to sleep better in unbearable heat: No AC? No problem.

I say, start with the parasite class: Ban A/C for DC! “We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.”

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when they start making actual sacrifices.

WELL, YES, BUT RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Karol Markowicz: Our hypocritical leaders refuse to obey their own COVID-19 rules. “Actually, all the COVID rules are for us, not them. COVID-19, and the accompanying lockdowns, have made it painfully clear: We plebes have to follow the rules; the elites do not.”

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN THING ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT: David Attenborough: upper-class warrior. “So a man who has clocked up more air miles than the average African dictator is deeply concerned that your once-a-year package holiday to Spain is destroying the planet. If Attenborough had his way, a certain class of people (by coincidence, his class) would be allowed to jet around the world enjoying themselves, while others would be restricted from doing so.”

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis — by making any sort of actual personal sacrifice at all.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Too Many People Want To Travel. International travel should be limited to the better sorts, you know?

Related: “I like to see how the NYT deals with this subject — the NYT, with all its concern-mongering about climate change and all its travel articles and ads and its need to serve the emotions and vanities of its readers. What are we having today? A little shame, spiced with humorous self-deprecation, along with the usual self-esteem boosting about our progressivism and our love of the good life? . . . What’s morally bewildering? If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel. Everything else is morally wrong. If you are bewildered, you’re just bewildered about whether you — as opposed to those other people — want to center your life on morality. . . . Newman presents himself as the model for the NYT reader’s miniature moral reasoning. You mean well, you’ll buy an indulgence, and you have such exquisite taste.”

Climate change is a crisis urgent enough to demand immediate sacrifice from others, but not yet so urgent as to demand immediate sacrifice from oneself. Personally, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

JOEL KOTKIN: Making Life Worse: The Flaws of Green Mandates.

“Saving the planet” should be an unbeatable political slogan. Yet consistently the imagined “green wave” mindlessly embraced by most of the media continues to fall short, as evidenced by recent elections in Canada and Australia, as well as across much of Europe.

These results reflect climate scientist Roger Pielke’s 2010 notion of “the iron law of climate policy.” Pielke noted that support for reducing greenhouse emissions is limited by the amount of sacrifice demanded. “People will pay some amount for climate goals,” he noted, “but only so much.” At $80 a year per household, he suggested, polls found most people would support climate measures but raise it to $770 annually and support drops below ten percent. . . .

Greens can only succeed only if they abandon their dystopian scenario for humanity. This trend was epitomized by the 1970s predictions of Paul Ehrlich about an impending “population bomb,” that would lead to mass starvation on a planetary scale. Needless to say this didn’t occur. Over the last thirty years some have predicted the North Pole ice would all but disappear but this apocalypse has not remotely occurred.

Sadly, such gross errors have not led a moment’s hesitation about making ever more far out assertions. It seems that every decade the planet has five or ten years left if draconian measures are not taken. Just this year a writer for the New Yorker predicted the familiar scenario of a “famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us,” adding suggestions that to meet this challenge may require displacing our democracy with an enlightened rule from above.

The predicted apocalypses change, but the solutions are always the same. Meanwhile, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

THERE’S A BULLSHITTER IN THE WOOD: Ashe Schow: If bears killed 1 in 5 people.

Late last week, College Humor (partnered with the Obama administration) released a video asking: What if bears killed one in five people? It was supposed to be a humorous attempt at getting people to consider just how dire it is that “one in five women will be sexually assaulted by the time they finish college.”

Except there’s no evidence that one in five women are sexually assaulted during college. That statistic has been debunked again and again and again. Only the most incredulous (or calculating) media outlets still print it as a fact without noting what it actually refers to or that it has been disputed.

The statistic comes from surveys of college students who are asked whether they have ever experienced a broad range of sexual activity. The students are also asked if they have ever engaged in said activity while drunk or on drugs. Based on answers students give to these questions, biased researchers hoping to prove “rape culture” exists determine that these students have been sexually assaulted. . . .

But what if it were true, as the video implies? Then the response from the Obama administration and activists would be wholly inadequate.

Using the bear analogy, if people were being killed by bears at such a high rate, how would we respond? I’ll tell you how, we, as a society, wouldn’t respond. We certainly wouldn’t be asking our condo boards, homeowner’s associations or the Housing Department to take care of the problem simply because the problem was occurring in our homes or on our property.

No, we’d be calling animal control, the people trained and dedicated to the problem. And you can bet we’d be telling people how to protect themselves from bear attacks.

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis act like it’s a crisis.

JOEL KOTKIN: At The Mercy Of The Climate Jihadists:

Years ago, I heard the Jewish comedian Jackie Mason performing in Beverly Hills, riffing on the primary motivation of wealthy liberals. They do things, he suggested, not because they actually accomplished anything, but because “I have to look at myself in the mirror.”

Mason was prophetic, particularly regarding here in California, where progressive politics – outside of promoting race and gender grievances – has boiled down to a single-minded attachment to slowing climate change.

To satisfy the gentry’s urgent need to feel noble and better than others, we are embarked on an ever-more extreme jihad to battle global warming, with the state, pursuant to an executive order from Gov. Jerry Brown, committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 – and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 – versus the previous mandate of reaching 1990 levels by 2020. It seems clear that we are about to wage a war of increasing intensity on climate change, surely not at the expense of depriving Google executives and other oligarchs their private jets, but certainly down to the last affordable single-family house or decent factory job. . . .

Yet such problems do not seem to impinge much on Sacramento’s political class. Any group willing, as is most egregiously the case with the Latino caucus, to wage war on their own people, are not going to worry too much about such subtleties.

So then, who wins? It’s certainly not the environment, but some of the oligarchs in Silicon Valley may benefit as they have been feeding at the renewable-energy trough at the expense of less-well-off ratepayers. Then there’s the whole bureaucracy, and their academic allies, who can enjoy profitable employment by dreaming up new ways to make life in California more expensive and difficult for average citizens – envisioning schemes that the taxpayers have to finance. And, certainly, the climate change agenda could benefit multifamily housing builders, who will seek to force often-unwilling Californians into residences in which most would rather not spend their lives.

Yes. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis — instead of just filling their pockets, and their egos, at the expense of others.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN THING ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT: Leonardo DiCaprio the ‘eco warrior’ flew on a private jet from NY to LA SIX times in SIX weeks, Sony hack documents reveal. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER GODDAMN THING ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT: Greenpeace executive flies 250 miles to work: Environmental group campaigns to curb growth in air travel but defends paying a senior executive to commute 250 miles to work by plane. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

SUPPORT FRACKING, FOR GAIA’S SAKE. “America’s carbon dioxide emissions are actually falling. In fact, they have not been this low since 1992. And while no single factor can account for the entire shift, much of the credit goes to something environmentalists often detest: hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. . . . All of that was achieved without government direction — and in the face of considerable environmental resistance. Now the world’s worst CO emitter, China — which gets 80 percent of its electricity from coal — has taken up fracking, too. China’s natural gas reserves are 50 percent bigger than America’s. If climate change is the worst danger facing the planet, as some environmentalists contend, then Chinese fracking should be good news. But most environmentalists hate fracking.”

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

CLIMATE CONFERENCE FACES BRUSH WITH REALITY: “In case you missed it – and judging by the complete lack of coverage on the cable news networks you may very well have – there was yet another climate conference held this week in Bonn, Germany. But rather than the usual singing in the round of Bob Dylan tunes and boisterous plans to alter the world, there was a decidedly depressed tone to the discussions. It’s not that they’ve suddenly begun to question their previously held beliefs concerning anthropogenic global warming, (AGW) but rather a grim realization that most of the nations involved are a bit too busy making sure their economies don’t collapse to dump a significant portion of their GDP into carbon emission control. . . . The other problem causing the talks to essentially fall apart until their next meeting in December was the lack of buy-in by both China and some developing countries. Even if China participates, they are insisting on a ‘trust me’ approach where no outside verification of compliance would be allowed.” Yeah, that’ll work.

Related: Climate change panel in hot water again over ‘biased’ energy report.

The world’s foremost authority on climate change used a Greenpeace campaigner to help write one of its key reports, which critics say made misleading claims about renewable energy, The Independent has learnt.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the UN in 1988 to advise governments on the science behind global warming, issued a report last month suggesting renewable sources could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050. But in supporting documents released this week, it emerged that the claim was based on a real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years – and that the lead author of the section concerned was an employee of Greenpeace. Not only that, but the modelling scenario used was the most optimistic of the 164 investigated by the IPCC.

Critics said the decision to highlight the 77 per cent figure showed a bias within the IPCC against promoting potentially carbon-neutral energies such as nuclear fuel. One climate change sceptic said it showed the body was not truly independent and relied too heavily on green groups for its evidence.

Also: Changing Tides: Research Center Under Fire for ‘Adjusted’ Sea-Level Data.

And: Rex Murphy: Climate Scientists Make A Mockery Of The Peer-Review Process. “Much of what the world bizarrely allows to be called climate ‘science’ is a closet-game, an in-group referring to and reinforcing its own members. The insiders keep out those seen as interlopers and critics, vilify dissenters and labour to maintain a proprietary hold on the entire vast subject. It has been described very precisely as a ‘climate-assessment oligarchy.’ Less examined, or certainly less known to the general public, is how this in-group loops around itself. How the outside advocates buttress the inside scientists, and even — this is particularly noxious — how the outside advocates, the non-scientists, themselves become inside authorities. . . . A report on renewables, by the Renewable Energy Council of Europe, and Greenpeace, peer-reviewed by the man who wrote it. . . . Kind people may put this down to pure sloppiness on the part of the IPCC. Coming after its disastrous handling of the Himalayan glacier melt, however, it looks to me more like deliberate mischief. The IPCC cannot be that stupid by chance.”

You know, I’m entirely ready to believe that CO₂ emissions are having an effect on the climate. But the scientists involved aren’t acting as if they’re confident in letting the data speak for themselves, which is a big deal since they’re asking us to make enormous economic sacrifices based on what they’ve predicted. If, say, pharmaceutical companies were caught doing the same kinds of things, the politicians and the news media would be after their scalps.

Meanwhile, for the political leaders, well, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Until they start foregoing private jets and beachside mansions, it’s going to be hard for me to take their calls for sacrifice on my part seriously.

A SMALL METAPHOR: The end of Nancy Pelosi’s “Green Capitol Initiative.” Which didn’t extend so far as her forgoing the Gulfstream or anything. . . . But note this:

It turns out that the composting program not only cost the House an estimated $475,000 a year (according to the House inspector general) but actually increased energy consumption in the form of “additional energy for the pulping process and the increased hauling distance to the composting facility,” according to a news release from Lungren.

As far as carbon emissions were concerned, Lungren concluded that the reduction was the “nominal … equivalent to removing one car from the road each year.” He plans to switch the House to an alternate waste-management system recommended by the Architect of the Capitol, in which dining-service trash would be incinerated and the heat energy captured.

“Composting releases methane,” said Lungren’s spokesman, Brian Kaveney, and methane gas, as even the most warming-conscious among us have to admit, traps atmospheric heat far more efficiently than carbon dioxide, the usual bugaboo of the climate-change crowd.

Lungren’s stick-a-biodegradable-fork-in-it (if you can) stance toward a linchpin of Pelosi’s grand green plan marks the latest skirmish in a lifestyle war that may on its surface seem purely partisan: GOP global-warming skeptics versus a Gaia-worshipping Democratic Party. But I’d say the battle lines are really between an elite determined to impose upon a captive populace its notions of what is good for it — cost be damned — and the populace itself, which would rather not be coerced.

As I said before, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Pelosi could have saved a lot more energy/greenhouse gas by flying commercial, but that was never on the table.

WORRY ABOUT CARBON FOOTPRINTS IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: BBC lectures us incessantly on climate change. So why did their bosses make 68,000 domestic flights in two years? I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

(Via NewsAlert).

HOW IMPORTANT IS CONTROLLING CARBON EMISSIONS? NOT VERY. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like a crisis.

HOT AIR AND CARBON: Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

GREENHOUSE UPDATE: Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Like, you know, substituting videoconferences for tropical-island junkets.

U.N. GREENHOUSE CONFERENCE WILL overload Bali’s airport with private jets:

Tempo Interaktif reports that Angkasa Pura – the management of Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport are concerned that the large number of additional private charter flights expected in Bali during the UN Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) December 3-15, 2007, will exceed the carrying capacity of apron areas. To meet the added demand for aircraft storage officials are allocating “parking space” at other airports in Indonesia.

I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. That clearly hasn’t happened yet.

CHINA: No binding emissions limits: “China will reject any agreement that calls for binding limits on carbon dioxide emissions that will replace the Kyoto Protocol, an EU official said Wednesday.” China’s now the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, which makes this pretty important.

UPDATE: MARK STEYN: “It’s fascinating to observe how almost any old totalitarian racket becomes respectable once it’s cloaked in enviro-hooey. For example, restrictions on freedom of movement were previously the mark of the Soviet Union et al. But in Britain, they’re proposing limits on your right to take airline flights to other countries – and, as it’s in the name of environmental responsibility, everyone thinks it’s a grand idea.”

I’ll buy it when they stop jetting off for global-warming conferences in Bali. As I’ve said before, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting as if it’s a crisis.

GREEN FAKERS: Radar on why eco-hypocrisy matters:

Take Laurie David, soon-to-be-ex-wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry, and producer of An Inconvenient Truth and other save-the-earth extravaganzas. Though she boasts about using recycled toilet paper and compact fluorescent lightbulbs, David has been pilloried for, among other excesses, flying on private jets. Here’s what she has said in defense of her travel habits: “I’m not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don’t expect anybody else to be perfect either. That’s what hurts the environmental movement—holding people to a standard they cannot meet.”

Apparently, when you’re worth a few hundred million dollars, being asked to refrain from the most carbon-intensive indulgence known to man qualifies as “holding people to a standard they cannot meet.” Note, too, her use of emotional jujitsu: the ones who are really hurting the environment are the ones who are so impolite as to point out her bad behavior. . . . It’s always galling to be exhorted to curb your consumption by people who are living the poshest lifestyle imaginable. But the problem here goes beyond aesthetics. Eco-hypocrites undercut the very message they’re trying to peddle. How desperate could the planet’s plight be if the people who present themselves as most concerned about it consider flying first-class commercial an unacceptable sacrifice?

Read the whole thing. As I’ve said before, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.