The Hypocrisy Continues

Remember how much I used to hate Bloomberg? I still do! Continuing today's theme of environmental personal responsibility, check out this report from the Times:

The average New Yorker uses one-half to one-third the electricity of other Americans. Our carbon footprints are just 29 percent of people who live outside the five boroughs, and City Hall has practical plans to reduce even that amount by nearly a third over the next two decades. No wonder that this month, in a talk at the New York Academy of Science, Rohit Aggarwalat, the mayor’s chief adviser on sustainability, said the city was “the most environmentally efficient society in the United States.”

So it makes perfect sense that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is going to Copenhagen on Monday and Tuesday to address the international conference on climate change: his administration is working to head off problems that will not emerge until long after he is gone. A strong case can be made that when it comes to energy and climate issues, Mr. Bloomberg is the most visionary public official in the country.

And a strong argument can also be made that on a personal level, he ranks among the worst individual polluters ever to hold public office.

Mr. Bloomberg owns a helicopter and two jets, both Falcon 900s. He flies everywhere on private jets, by far the least efficient form of transportation on or above the earth. He takes his jet to Bermuda many weekends. He has flown around the globe on it. He uses it to go to Washington. He is planning to get to Copenhagen for the climate conference by private jet, too.

Seriously, you have to see the full article.

Man, I can't stand that guy. If I ever see him in person again I don't even know what I'd do! It's not like he's have to listen to anything I said, because unlike every other single government official in our entire city and state, we don't pay him. So he doesn't work for us. Perhaps he works for the producers of the movie 2012, ensuring all that catastrophe will indeed come to pass by personally destroying the environment. Just sayin'.

But the article is actually about the moral relativism that comes with money. It's easier, the article posits, for me to sit here and point a finger because I can't afford a private jet. I don't know. I'd like to think most of my standards of social responsibility will stay in place as I become more established. Time will tell.