Today’s climate hypocrite of the week is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. As a recent news story in the Toronto Sun opened fire: “Despite assertions by a cabinet minister that summer road trips cause wildfires, just under half of the nearly 182,000 kilometres flown by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau so far this year took place during the past three months.” Coming in a close second is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, hailed by the press as bringing new energy and focus to Kamala Harris’s energetically focused climate policy, who was caught (h/t Marc Morano) by The Midwesterner flying between campaign stops less than 54 miles apart. And it is not unfair to ask them, when they say we not only must but easily can cut down our carbon footprint (or wingspan), to ask them to show us how.

And Trudeau is off again, to New York City for something called the “Summit of the Future” summoned by UN Secretary General António Guterres, and then the 78^th meeting of the UN General Assembly. You see, these things are simply too important for him to skip because, or so he claims:

“Canada will have a leading role in making the world fairer and more prosperous. I look forward to working with other leaders to accelerate progress on our shared priorities and build a better future for everyone.”

And who could begrudge a man a few thousands of litres of jet fuel when he has such important things to do? Even if one is inclined to wonder why, if he really knew how to do any of it, he waited nine years to start, and why he couldn’t have just sent them all a memo outlining the key points and giving his phone number for those interested in details. Especially since, according to a calculation in the National Post, Trudeau has already burned through a staggering 300,000 litres of the stuff since June 1 alone while taking 58 airplane trips, yes, one every two days on average, totalling 92,104 km or enough to go round the world twice or between Canada’s widely separated east and west coasts no fewer than 18 times. And yet his overheated Health Minister hollered in the House of Commons in late May, deploring Conservative calls for a temporary suspension of the carbon tax on gas:

“Good news, kids. You could take a summer fun-time vacation, where you’re locked in a car for 10 consecutive days, non-stop with no bathroom breaks. And the Conservatives have a plan for you to have that summertime fun. And the cost? Give up the future of the planet.”

Where Holland got the idea that normal parents do not stop the car when kids have to pee has never been explained. But the idea that our car trips are a planet-destroying indulgence and the PM’s plane-trips a planet saving necessity has deep roots.

The issue here isn’t simply hypocrisy. Someone urging people to eat fewer calories for better health might well be right even if they themselves were given to binging on fast food, as an alcoholic might rightly urge one to avoid drinking to excess. Indeed perhaps especially so since as Benjamin Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanack a quarter of a millennium ago:

“Altho’ thy teacher act not as he preaches,/ Yet ne’ertheless, if good, do what he teaches;/ Good counsel, failing men may give, for why,/ He that’s aground knows where the shoal doth lie.”

On those grounds, the fact that climate scolds like Al Gore or Jeff Bezos frequently own mansions, mega-yachts and so on does not prove that someone cannot be healthy and happy living off the grid.  But the sight of politicians like John Kerry jetting to climate conferences because his work was too important to travel steerage on a freighter or even, apparently, to use videoconferencing, demonstrates something much more important than that the flesh can be tempted.

The problem here is the Manhattan Contrarian’s oft-demanded “demonstration project” on a micro scale. The simple fact is that these people who insist not only that we must get to Net Zero but that we can do so without significant sacrifices are themselves quite unable to function without a massive carbon footprint.

If Tim Walz could govern Minnesota, and campaign for Vice President, from his front porch or a mud hut, and simply chooses not to, well, boo Tim Walz. But if he doesn’t because he can’t, if his whole Net Zero vision is refuted by the legitimate requirements of his functioning in the modern world, then it proves the vision itself is unsound.

Likewise, if Justin Trudeau proclaims himself a feminist then hurls one independent-minded woman after another under the bus, he might just be a hypocrite. But his plane travel is a more serious matter. The Sun story notes that some of his flights are long, the longest being a June 12 7,100-km one to Italy for the G7 summit in Taranto. And he’s been on some major ones within Canada, which lends itself to long internal flights rather more readily than, say, Belgium, though taking such a flight for one’s pampered vacation sets a dubious example.

Worse, far worse, are the short ones, the shortest being 53 kilometres from Nanaimo to Vancouver, both inside the province of British Columbia. He also flew just 66 km, a 14-minute flight, from Toronto to Waterloo within Ontario. Have you, dear reader, ever taken a 14-minute flight?

He has taken the 45-minute flight from Ottawa, where he lives, to Toronto, where many voters live, something like 32 times this year alone. And in total he took fully 47 flights under 400 km, all plausible drives or, if you’re super-busy, chartered bus trips with office and/or sleeping facilities. And why? Because his busy lifestyle demands it. He just couldn’t get the job done any other way. As, one might say, farmers have trouble growing crops without quite a bit of tractor fuel and fertilizer, not to mention diesel for trucks to get them to market. But the PM has no more time for that stuff than, apparently, for you driving for a summer vacation while he blasts past overhead trailing clouds of CO2 rather than glory.

Greta Thunberg’s effort to sail across the Atlantic rather than fly drew a lot of justified flak for the massive logistical support including, awkwardly, crew members flying to be ready in the right location. But at least she tried. Is there one political leader fond of espousing green dogma whose flight manifest doesn’t undermine the whole thing?

As we’ve said before, it is logically possible that the climate crisis is so severe that we must make major sacrifices to stop or slow it. How we would get everyone to do so would remain a massive practical issue but the principle is unaffected. The problem is that most alarmists have said it’s sacrifices for thee but not for me, and added injury to insult by claiming the deprivations will make us all better off. But the biggest problem is that they demonstrate daily by their choices that we cannot get by without a great deal of hydrocarbon energy and they don’t begin to grasp this elementary truth.

QED.