Bezos Does Venice Transcript

John Robson:

[Sung to the tune of the classic Wedding March by Mendelssohn] “Here comes the bride, All dressed in white,/ Trailing clouds of carbon, something is not right.”

What could be more romantic than a wedding in Venice? We at CDN love a good wedding. Especially when it’s such a perfect couple: rich, good-looking, and united by their shared commitment to fighting climate change.

Really this thing is the wedding of the year, filled with celebrities, business leaders and even royalty. A truly global celebration of two people who’ve just done so much to save the Earth.

Although as you may guess, it’s not really our kind of event, not that there was much danger of us getting invited. Headlines like “Lauren Sanchez blows kisses on way to Bezos wedding/ Amazon founder’s star-studded guest list includes the Kardashians, Lady Gaga and Sir Elton John” don’t do it for us, any more than gushy tidbits like “‘She looked very Jackie O,’ said one photographer, referring to the headscarf and large sunglasses Ms Sánchez was wearing.” But, then again we didn’t invite them to our backyard BBQ so fair’s fair, right?

Well, no. Because the big issue here is that Bezos and his chichi A-list guests are, virtually without exception, vocally and trendily alarmed at climate change. They’re the ones who don’t want you to be able to fly in planes, drive in cars or, needless to say, swan around the Mediterranean on massive diesel yachts. And nothing says reducing your carbon footprint like them doing exactly that while exchanging air kisses.

All their preachy rhetoric on climate change is aimed at getting you to make do with far far less. Which would be bad enough if they themselves showed a bit of restraint. But when they put on a lavish event like the Bezos wedding and make a mockery of the notion of self-control, we’re entitled to call them out.

Jeff Bezos is famous not only for his company Amazon, but also for his $10 billion dollar Bezos Earth Fund, which regularly gives money to initiatives to push for more and more stringent climate regulations.

Meanwhile his guests will be flying nearly a hundred private jets to Venice, where they will be taken by yachts to an exclusive tiny lagoon island for the big event. Not that Bezos himself has to make do with a tiny yacht. His 417-foot, 3,000 horsepower diesel sailing Leviathan “Koru” with its own Wikipedia entry, not to mention a 246-foot support vessel complete with helipad and “enclosed helicopter accommodation”, is doing it in style.

Yes. You heard that right. His yacht’s yacht has a helicopter. And he bought the yacht itself, and the sub-yacht, as part of a trendy focus on “personal growth” for a mere half-billion bucks. So, not for him the kind of personal growth that comes from discarding frills, trimming away inessentials, and focusing on the simple life and on kindness to others. But hey, saving the world from climate change can really take it out of a guy.

As one imagines this kind of wedding could. The list of beautiful people includes: Oprah Winfrey, Mick Jagger, several Kardashians dressed in the usual quiet good taste and, yes, fellow climate-maniacal self-made tycoon Bill Gates. Not to mention the Queen of Jordan.

Also Orlando Bloom. And a certain Leonardo DiCaprio whose chic credentials include his own very forgettable film about global warming, Before the Flood which like wowed the critics, man, because it was so pointed about evil deniers and how bad they were.

And it was full of clichés about polar bears, flood-droughts, vanishing tropical islands and carbon taxes. Things that don’t look very good nowadays. And of course, neither does DiCaprio being spotted taking a helicopter from his ghastly mega-yacht to a restaurant or a nightclub and then back again. But hey, he’s him and you’re not.

And you’re also not Mark Zuckerberg, whose new monster 5,000 horsepower diesel pleasure craft has an even bigger carbon boatprint than Bezos’.

But don’t worry. He and all his A-list megarich friends are really, really worried about climate change and agree that you should drive an EV, or ride a bike, you should shun meat and obviously you shouldn’t fly. Because nobody really wants you at their fancy event now, do they?

In which regard, there were actually some spoilsports. Venice is apparently struggling under the burden of so much tourism that nobody goes there anymore. Especially not actual locals living lives as opposed to the whole tourism thing where they show off past glories based on free enterprise, Christianity and vigorous pride in the Western tradition, and resent the often crass visitors who come and throw stuff in the fountains and mess with the statues.

Oh. That heritage isn’t very cool. Neither is messing the place up while visiting it. And one newspaper story sought to balance its starry-eyed celebrity hype and odious anonymous-source material by intoning “The wedding has divided Venice, with some activists protesting it as an exploitation of the city by the billionaire Bezos while ordinary residents suffer from overtourism, high housing costs and the constant threat of climate-induced flooding.”

Which is the sort of trite cliché the press would peddle, since Venice has had a flooding problem caused not by climate change but by being built on poles in the middle of a swamp, ever since it was founded, and it has been sinking ever since it was founded way back in pre-industrial times.

Anyway, this modern wedding isn’t exactly Mendelssohn and it’s not our cup of champagne. Nor is a wedding so Marie Antoinette that a national tourism ministry actually studied its economic impact. On which point we can’t help cringing at yet another Telegraph puff piece on:

“The Battersea aristocrats masterminding Bezos’s £40m wedding/ From a nondescript office in London, three secretive Italians are orchestrating the Amazon chief’s big Venice bash”.

And we also learn that this “tiny lagoon island” where it’s happening, “home to a cluster of historic churches and cloisters, has sweeping views of Venice’s lagoon. There will be a performance by Matteo Bocelli, the son of the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, followed by a fireworks display.”

Fireworks? Don’t they give off carbon? Has anyone thought this through?

And here we come to the nub of the gist. It’s not that people like Bezos are lying when they claim to believe there’s a climate crisis and you must make massive sacrifices. It’s that they think of themselves as special. They’re so successful, cool and concerned that they must live enchanted lives of privilege and if the peasants need to tighten their belts, well, who knows those grubby people anyway?

To make it worse, the Telegraph mentioned that:

“The ceremony will have no legal status under Italian law and it is thought the couple, who are both divorcees, may have already legally married in the US.”

So it’s really all just about being publicly rich, famous and glamorous, dahling. Which again isn’t our thing and frankly seems a bit trashy, especially when it comes wrapped in the mantle of climate sanctimony.

On which point, evidently the Venice protestors included the odious Extinction Rebellion. And we are not impressed that their devotion to trampling other people’s rights forced organizers to move one of the many wedding events to a more secure locale. But for all their flaws, they do have a point here, sort of.

If you really, honestly believed that excessive consumption and its energy cost in general, and in CO2 in particular, were an existential threat, you’d stay home for your second wedding or settle for just having one. Wouldn’t you? And if not, why not?

If all this self-indulgence had been done on the hush-hush, it would still be obnoxiously hypocritical. And surely embarrassing if it leaked. But what’s remarkable is that it’s so brazen. It didn’t leak. It was doled out by high-tone, high-fee publicists.

As with the Obamas, Bill Gates and… uh… say, would that be Jeff Bezos, with their seaside mansions hollering about the rising oceans, this crowd of sanctimonious virtue-signalers don’t even try to hide that they’re living a life of carbon-intensive excess while telling you to hobble, hobble or take public transit to the vegan gunk store. It's right in your face.

And it tells you that their Green New World will look very much like this wedding, where a privileged few enjoy unimaginable, wasteful self-satisfied luxury and the rest of us are watching from a suitable shabby distance or diving for coins they toss into the lagoon.

For the Climate Discussion Nexus I’m John Robson and that’s our take on the latest display of climate hypocrisy by the rich and famous.

[More of the “Here Comes the Bride” tune]

“Lovely to see, one rule for me,/And quite another one for thee.”