Tucker Carlson Unloads on 'Climate Criminals' — And They're Definitely Not the Ones the Left is Condemning
It seems like there’s a new “climate criminal” every day, if you listen to the left.
A group called Just Stop Oil seems to think art museums play some kind of ineffable part in the so-called “climate crisis”; else, why would they be hurling mashed potatoes at Monets or super-gluing themselves to Botticellis?
Greta Thunberg and her ilk have found a rather large climate criminal of late: Sweden. That’s right, the whole country. A group of young Swedish climate activists sued the government — in effect, suing themselves — because they claim it’s not doing enough to avert carbon catastrophe.
In a way, Greta and Co. might have been getting closer to the heart of the matter than most. Sure, Thunberg and her associates likely had the country’s conservatives in mind when they pressed the lawsuit, but it turns out the biggest “climate criminals” are the ones who say they’re doing the most to help the Gretas of the world out.
Two of them, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson says, are right in the Biden administration: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and climate czar John Kerry.
On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host noted that both men talked a huge game on climate change — and yet, were some of the most prolific users of private jets one could find.
Buttigieg, as Carlson noted, has been an evangelist for green infrastructure and other hard-left agenda items, such as spending gobs of money to destroy “racist” roads. (Seriously.)
And, as Secretary Pete noted in a recent interview, he views the environmentalist agenda through a lens of faith, practically viewing the climate as a secular substitute for God.
“Climate is a moral issue, and this is about stewardship. It is about justice,” Buttigieg said.
“There’s a moment here where we should invite those who are motivated by religious, moral considerations to know that those are some of the things that are at stake in what we’re doing to this planet.”
“So this was really a milestone in modern Christian theology. Climate, declared Father Buttigieg, is a moral issue,” Carlson said. “Not a meteorological matter, not even a policy topic. It’s a moral issue. Climate is a question that bears directly on the fate of your immortal soul.”
“OK, Reverend Pete. So you set the terms here. So how’s your climate record?” Carlson asked.
Spoiler alert: Not terribly great.
“Fox News Digital just got a hold of the Reverend Pete’s travel schedule, a list of trips he’s taken since getting the job at the Transportation Department. And it turns out that Reverend Pete is the Jimmy Swaggart of climate clergy,” Carlson said.
“He was commanding you not to do it the same time he was doing it himself in a very big way, way more than you ever thought of doing it.”
Buttigieg, according to Fox News, has taken almost 20 trips on private jets at taxpayer expense — including to places like Ohio, Florida and New Hampshire.
And these weren’t all necessary trips, either: One flight, in September, was so that he could pick up an award for LGBT advocacy given by a Canadian gay rights group.
This use of private jets on the taxpayer dime, Carlson also noted, was the exact thing that led to former President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, getting the ax. However, that’s an ancillary issue, particularly when it comes to what Rev. Pete has been preaching.
As Carlson noted, “There is likely no mode of transportation in the history of machines that emits more carbon than private air travel,” with private jets emitting “an average of two tons of carbon dioxide in an hour.”
“A 50-minute flight on a private jet can emit as much carbon as the average person’s car does over an entire year,” Carlson said. “Fifty minutes.”
Oh, but Pete isn’t the original sinner. That would be climate czar John Kerry, who, as Carlson points out, “was famously busted flying to a climate summit in Iceland on his personal Gulfstream. But don’t worry, he had no choice. He’s too important.”
And then came Kerry’s infamous self-exculpation: “It’s the only choice for somebody like me, who is traveling the world, to win this battle,” he said. “I believe the time it takes me to get somewhere — I can’t sail across the ocean, I have to fly — to meet with people and get things done.”
“Oh, someone like me. You never heard of Zoom, pal?” Carlson quipped.
“You should be in jail by your own standards. You’re a climate criminal. You’re a climate criminal,” he continued. “You should be in prison by your own standards. Not just him. Virtually every recognizable person in American politics and entertainment flies private.”
“Nancy Pelosi flies private. Barack Obama flies private,” Carlson continued. “Leonardo DiCaprio flies private. You know who flies private, a lot? Al Gore flies private. Michael Bloomberg. Boy, does he fly private. In a four-year period, the U.N. climate envoy, Mr. Bloomberg, took more than 1,700 private flights, burning more than 10,000 metric tons of CO2.”
But these aren’t the people taking the heat from the left — because they’re supposed to be the good guys, even if they’re not as good as the extremists want them to be.
Barack Obama isn’t going to get any mashed potatoes thrown at him by the Just Stop Oil people, and not just because the Secret Service do a bang-up job of stopping that sort of thing. There’s a reason why Greta Thunberg is suing Sweden and, say, not Leonardo DiCaprio.
These are all people who say the right things — to the plebes, of course, not to each other. They all preach enforced scarcity as a necessity, provided that scarcity isn’t enforced upon them.
And, as Carlson noted, the carbon emissions of the elite are hardly just a drop in the bucket: “Roughly half of all emission created by airplanes are emitted by the richest 1 percent of the population flying private,” he noted. “The great majority of these, Biden voters and big fans of, you guessed it, the Reverend Pete Buttigieg.”
These are the real climate criminals, if there is such a thing. But “climate justice,” like its equally insipid cousin “social justice,” only works if real justice is flipped on its head.
Thus, the villains become the heroes — and the rest of us get punished, instead.
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