Hypocrites Anonymous

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Droves and droves of hypocrites – more than ten thousand of them – have descended upon the resort island of Bali to attend a conference on global warming. Politicians, scientists, and other activists will discuss critical issues such as “dangers of rising temperatures, melting polar ice, worsening droughts and floods, and lengthening heat waves.” Of course, all of this comes at a significant cost to the environment:

The U.N. estimates 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference in Bali, mostly from plane flights but also from waste and electricity used by hotel air conditioners.

But, but, but…

In largely symbolic gestures, 200 bright-yellow mountain bikes are being offered to participants so they can pedal around the heavily guarded conference site, and recycled paper is being used for the documents being handed out. Bins separating plastic and paper dot hallways — a rare sight in a country where formal recycling is virtually non-existent.

Bright yellow mountain bikes? How many attendees plan on biking to the remote island of Bali? Unfortunately, that would be a grand total of zero (Couldn’t Al Gore stand to lose a few pounds?) Obviously, a vast majority of the conference attendees will arrive via less “green” methods — namely, good ole pollutin’ airplanes. For the next twelve days, host country Indonesia gets to celebrate the hypocrisy with the rest of the globe. In fact, Indonesia has been ceremoniously painting lipstick on the global warming pig, in preparation of Hypocrites Anonymous:

Host Indonesia, which has one of the fastest rates of deforestation in the world, averaging 300 football fields an hour, said it had planted 79 million trees across the archipelago nation in the past few weeks.

That’s all well and good, but this is not the first meeting of Hypocrites Anonymous, and it won’t be the last…

Two big climate conferences have been held in less than a month, both in idyllic, far-flung holiday destinations — first Valencia, Spain, and now Bali. They were preceded by dozens of smaller gatherings. In Bangkok, Paris, Vienna, Washington, New York and Sydney, in Rio de Janeiro, Anchorage, Helsinki and the Indian Ocean island of Kurumba.

The cost of this whole thing? Chris Goodall, author of the book “How to Live a Low-Carbon Life” has an opinion:

If correct, Goodall said, that is equivalent to what a Western city of 1.5 million people, such as Marseilles, France, would emit in a day.

But he believes the real figure will be twice that, more like 100,000 tons, close to what the African country of Chad churns out in a year.

A statistic like that should make Al Gore and like-minded hypocrites cry a low-carbon tear in their SUVs.

As for global warming? My ass…

Source – Seattplepi.com – More than 10,000 jet into Bali for global warming conference