Soliloquy: Epocrisy, The Atlas Society | Ayn Rand, Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged

November 2007 -- As Kermit the Frog lamented, it’s not easy being green.

For several years, news stories have exposed the fact that the lifestyles of rich and famous environmentalists are anything but green.

Back in April 1994, the New Zealand Herald revealed that environmentalist icon Jacques Cousteau “mistreated and even killed sea creatures while staging scenes for his films, according to a shocking new book by his son.” In fact, “Before his death, Cousteau admitted the allegations and apologized to his millions of animal-loving fans.” However, “Captain Cousteau’s reputation as one of the ‘fathers of environmentalism’ should not be thrown overboard because of his occasional ill-treatment of dolphins, killer-whales and fish,” declared his son, Jean-Michel Cousteau. “‘For him the ends sometimes justified the means. Isn’t the important point that, at the end of the day, he served the cause of animals?’ . . . His son says that the captain’s devotion to marine life was sincere but he had the old fashioned view that it was the survival of species that really counted, not the welfare of individual creatures.”

So, let’s file this under the Orwellian heading: “All animals may be equal; but some animals—and ‘animal advocates’—are more equal than others.”

That same spring, ABC News reported on growing controversy in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, over a plan by a private company, Cape Wind Associates, to build an offshore windmill farm. Now, who would dare oppose this eco-friendly alternative to much-reviled fossil fuels? None other than the greener-than-thous Walter Cronkite, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and his infamous liberal uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy. It seems that those windmills might spoil the pristine ocean view from the Kennedy estate in Hyannisport, or force them to change course as they cavort about in their yachts.

As Kermit the Frog lamented, it’s not easy being green.

Such “epocrisy,” as I’ve labeled it, became an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign when, that April, the New York Post reported on candidate John Kerry’s automobile fetish. “Kerry reluctantly admitted, on Earth Day, that his family owns a gas-guzzling Chevrolet Suburban SUV but blamed it on his wife, saying: ‘The family has it. I don’t have it.’” However, two months earlier, when addressing voters in auto capital Detroit, Kerry had boasted about all the big American cars that his family owns. “We have some SUVs,” he said to the Detroit News. “We have a Jeep. We have a couple of Chrysler minivans. We have a PT Cruiser up in Boston. I have an old Dodge 600 that I keep in the Senate . . . We also have a Chevy, a big Suburban.” (Kerry neglected to mention to his unionized target audience that he also owned a pricey Audi import.)

Around that time, it also came out that the sanctimoniously labeled “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” had been killing off thousands of animals at its Norfolk, Virginia “animal shelter.” Between mid-1998 and the end of 2005, the rabid animal-rights lobby PETA put to death 14,419 animals while adopting out only 3,047. That’s a mortality rate of 80 percent of the animals it took in. But what else would you expect from the Nazis of the animal-rights movement?

Then came revelations about profligate fossil-fuel use by Hollywood’s biggest environmentalist organizer, producer Laurie David. In a 1994 Atlantic Monthly piece, liberal journalist Eric Alterman criticized David for flitting about the country on private Gulfstream jets. David “reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, yet gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable,” he complained. Gregg Easterbrook of The New Republic piled on, calculating that “one cross-country flight in a Gulfstream is the same, in terms of Persian-Gulf dependence and greenhouse-gas emissions, as if she drove a Hummer for an entire year.”

Hollywood hypocrisy on the environment has been garnering embarrassing media attention lately. In late 2006, a local NBC affiliate reported, “Although Hollywood seems environmentally conscious thanks to celebrities who lend their names to various causes, the industry created more pollution than individually produced by aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels and semiconductor manufacturing.” The station cited a study by UCLA’s Institute of the Environment, which released a “snapshot” of Hollywood pollution in late 2006. Mary Nichols, who heads the Institute, said the problem is that “we don’t think of them as an industry. We think of the creative side, the movie, the people, the actors—we don’t think of what it takes to produce the product.”

No, “we” don’t.

This summer, London’s Daily Mail published a scathing assessment of the epocrisy of celeb participants at nine massive “Live Earth” concerts. Regarding headliner Madonna, the article noted: “For her 2006 World Tour, she flew by private jet, transporting a team of up to 100 technicians and dancers around the globe. Waiting in the garage at home, she has a Mercedes Maybach, two Range Rovers, an Audi A8 and a Mini Cooper S. Indeed, Madonna’s carbon footprint is dwarfed only by her ego.”

The paper went on: “A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.” It cited estimates that the event’s superstars flew a collective 222,623.63 miles to the various concerts, their jets emitting thousands of tons of CO2 en route. In addition, the concert generated an estimated 1,025 tons of waste at its stadiums, most of which went into landfills.

Hollywood hypocrisy on the environment has been garnering embarrassing media attention.

Some celebrity hypocrisy is particularly egregious. Take John Travolta, who, at a movie premiere early this year, admonished his fans to tackle global warming. “Everyone can do their bit. But I don’t know if it’s not too late already. We have to think about alternative methods of fuel.” He added, however, “I’m probably not the best candidate to ask about global warming because I fly jets.” That understates things considerably. Travolta is a private pilot who owns and flies five private jets: a customized Boeing 707, three Gulfstreams, and a Lear. He keeps these pricey toys on his estate, at the end of his own private runway. His global jaunts to celebrity playgrounds and film openings belch tons of carbon dioxide—even while he chides us to “to our bit” to offset them.

With the 2008 elections looming, the media are now tracking the ginormus “carbon footprints” of presidential aspirants who pontificate about the environment.

In March, Democratic candidate John Edwards issued an “energy plan” that promoted caps on the amount of carbon dioxide industry can put into the environment. But Edwards bobbed and weaved when a CNN reporter asked him about the energy efficiency of his own $6 million, 28,000-square-foot North Carolina mansion—or how much its power bill costs each month. “It’s actually, it’s actually not bad,” he stammered.

Not bad for John, that is. According to the Carolina Journal, “The main house is 10,400 square feet and has two garages. The recreation building, a red, barn-like building containing 15,600 square feet . . . contains a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a bedroom, kitchen, bathrooms, swimming pool, a four-story tower, and a room designated ‘John’s Lounge.’”

We can only assume that Edwards will keep the place warm not with fossil fuels, but with the hot air that he spews about the environment.

But in a year when he’s garnered many awards for environmental activism, Al Gore surely deserves the grand prize as “World’s Biggest Epocrite.”

Last February, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research revealed the Inconvenient Truth that in 2006, the natural gas and electric bills for Gore’s twenty-room Nashville home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours—more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours. Gore paid $31,512 in gas and electric bills during 2005, and $29,268 in 2006.

Then, in early September, Fox News aired an equally Inconvenient video segment. It stated that on August 26, 2007, Gore and his wife flew 2,100 miles—from Nashville to an airport near Los Angeles, then on to San Francisco, in a privately chartered 1977 Gulfstream 2B. This old, inefficient jet releases twenty-one pounds of CO2 per gallon of fuel. By the TV show’s calculations, “Gulfstream” Gore’s cross-country, five-and-a-half-hour jaunt emitted roughly 55,000 pounds of CO2. Yet, that same day, there were 112 commercial flying options that would have taken the Gores from Nashville to San Francisco.

This behavior from the fossil-fuel fearmeister, who claims we face imminent planetary disaster due to man’s “arrogant” activities and greenhouse-gas emissions.

The moral here is not that we should live more consistently ascetic, abstemious lifestyles. The moral, instead, is that nobody can live that way—not even environmentalists. Nor should we try.

For billions of people on this planet to survive (let alone thrive and be happy) requires their use of technology to produce material necessities and values on a massive scale. And that productive effort requires the transformation of natural resources—our environment—into goods and services, also on a massive scale.

Gore’s twenty-room Nashville home and pool house devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

No, I do not begrudge celebrities the material rewards of their success. In most cases, they’ve earned it, through their talent and hard work. However, I do resent their preaching self-deprivation to the rest of us while luxuriating in all the creature comforts produced by our capitalist system. And I do call it hypocrisy and fraud when they claim to “offset” their high living by purchasing “carbon credits”—a gimmick reminiscent of the medieval religious practice of buying “indulgences” for one’s sins, which has been exposed by media investigators as economically (and environmentally) bogus.

But this leaves us with a question. If even the most prominent environmentalists can’t and don’t consistently practice what they preach, why then does environmentalism, as a creed, continue to have any intellectual and cultural credibility and influence?

A key reason—as I pointed out in my September article “Green Cathedrals” —is the widespread unwillingness of people to challenge the alleged ethical “ideal” of self-sacrifice.

The traditional equation of morality with sacrifice (rather than with self-realization) continues to push people (often reluctantly, yet dutifully) into altruistic causes, such as environmentalism. Billions continue to equate “doing good things” with “giving up stuff”—and not with producing stuff.

Moral hypocrisy is the only way most people can deal with never-ending demands for their “sacrifices.” They feel compelled to pay lip-service to and do penance on behalf of a nonsensical “ideal” that they won’t reject, but which they can’t practice consistently without wrecking their lives and happiness.

People will continue to endure such moral conflicts—and the ongoing spectacles of celebrity epocrisy—until they acquire the intellectual and moral self-confidence to answer anyone’s demand for their “sacrifices” with one little question:

“Why?”

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