Pirate's Cove

Somehow, this random act of journalism by Jim Dwyer slipped through the layers and layers of #Resist editors

Battling Climate Change from the Back Seat of an S.U.V.

Purring in the mild winter day, a small armada of S.U.V.s was parked Thursday morning along 42nd Street outside the New York Public Library. Inside was Mayor Bill de Blasio, at an interfaith prayer breakfast that went on for quite a while.

By divine right of mayoralty, or someone, 13 vehicles waited at the curb in a no-standing zone, among them four black S.U.V.s (three Chevy Suburbans and one Yukon XL) an ambulance, a huge E.M.S. vehicle and a police school safety van. The engines on those big boys were running while the mayor was inside, for about two hours. (snip)

One day earlier, Mr. de Blasio announced that the city would sue five big oil companies for the hardships and costs inflicted on New York by climate change. For an archipelago city with 520 miles of coastline, rising seas are no joke. Among the targets of the suits was Exxon Mobil, whose own scientists found, as most scientists have, that climate change was real and that human behavior was contributing to it. Even so, Exxon supported organizations that attacked those very conclusions. In the suit, New York follows the lead of governments around the Bay Area in California that have filed similar cases.

Whatever the merits of the suit, Mr. de Blasio and his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, are the very embodiment of a possible line of defense by the oil companies. Namely, that it wasn’t the oil companies that created the greenhouse gases, but society in general — companies and individuals who used oil to generate electricity, or for transportation.

In other words, De Blasio is a climahypocrite, a guy who talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. The article goes on to note that De Blasio takes a fleet of vehicles 11 miles to go to his gym in Brooklyn There’s plenty of gyms a lot closer.

Former Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire, rode the subway most days. On the other hand, Mr. Bloomberg routinely splurged on carbon usage by deploying his personal fleet of carbon-inefficient private jets and helicopters for long-distance travel. He would use them to fly to a weekend home in Bermuda, for instance, or to Europe. In an episode so rich you could choke on it, Mr. Bloomberg brought an entourage aboard his personal Falcon 900 to Copenhagen, at a cost in carbon emissions that was 37 times more than if the group had flown commercial.

Said trip was to a ‘climate change’ meeting, the UN IPCC at Copenhagen, which complained quite a bit about Other People’s use of fossil fuels. For people who tell us that Mankind is mostly/solely responsible for the minor temperature increase since the end of the last Holocene cool period, they sure have a speck of trouble doing something about their own oversized carbon footprints, eh?

And Mr. Dwyer is correct: Exxon and the other companies should highlight the hypocrisy of people like De Blasio. In fighting back against the suits emanating from California Believer municipalities, Exxon highlights the hypocrisy of said municipalities. In a slightly different manner.

Again, all those fossil fuels companies threatened by De Blasio should refuse to sell their products to the City Of New York. The place couldn’t operate without them.

Crossed at Right Wing News.