Meet the wealthy, famous polluters

The wealthiest people on the planet earn more and pollute more. Isn’t it tempting to believe millionaires when they tell you they, more than anyone else, care about the environment? Isn’t impossible to not believe their claims about saving the planet when they donate so much money to ‘favour the poor’? In practice, all of that sounds noble, but when posing a magnifying glass over these and other claims, it is clear that they sacrifice nothing in their comfortable lives to help the planet or save the environment. As it turns out, many of these super-rich people pollute the environment thousands of times more than you do. How many celebrities have you heard saying that flying has become a shameful way of traveling? Celebrities claim that such a shame is a consequence of developing a more ecological awareness, as is clear from movements such as the Swedish flygskam, which shows the supposed damage caused by airplanes to the environment. According to that claim, means of transport generate around 8% of the total emissions of greenhouse gases in the world, according to research published in the Journal Nature Climate Change. Environmentalism is a dirty business Also from Sweden comes a new study in which certain celebrities are targeted for abusing this way of moving. According to the work of Lund University, celebrities pollute 10,000 times more than an average person. To reach this conclusion, the author of the investigation, Stefan Gössling selected 10 public personalities from different fields, from singers to footballers, through actresses and entrepreneurs, and monitored their lives on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. From there he got the clues about where they were throughout 2017 and how they got there. “To narrow the investigation, we only recorded air travel, although they also cover distances by car. The publications on social networks are analyzed from the start point of the trip until the arrival at the destination, taking into account the type of plane and the distances traveled. “Thus, we calculate the amount of fuel used and the emissions they produce,” explains Gössling in an article published in The Conversation. The celebrities chosen were Bill Gates, Emma Watson, André Schürrle, Feliz von der Laden, Jennifer Lopez, Karl Lagerfeld, Mark Zuckerberg, Meg Whitman, Oprah Winfrey and Paris Hilton. All of them have busy agendas that make them move around the world in a matter of days: football matches, fashion weeks, movie premieres, philanthropic projects, club openings and so on. We do not know if these dozen celebrities are the most polluting of all the celebrities in the world or not. In addition, the number of emissions is an estimated result, since, as explained in the study methodology, not all of their trips have been monitored, nor can the possible stops they have been able to make or if the flights have been commercial or private However, the objective of this investigation is not to point Bill Gates or Paris Hilton as the big culprits of the climatic emergency we are experiencing, but to focus on the influence that this type of people has on the rest of the population. And these people are indeed influential in their areas of expertise or businesses, which is so important to understand the difference between what they say and what they do. Most of them are virtue-signaling liberals who like to tell people what they should stop doing while they continue their lives of comfort until they die. The celebrities chosen serve Gössling as a representation of specific sectors of society, political, economic and cultural elites, who tend to make greater air travel than the rest of the population. To this small list, one could add vociferous influences such as Leonardo Di Caprio, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, David Attenborough, and more others. The author of the study exemplifies, 5% of the French population is responsible for 50% of the emissions of this country and, in the United Kingdom, 10% of those who travel more frequently issued 43% of the total transport-related gases. Certainly, the masses of people in most countries are not the largest polluters. They are in fact the ones affected for the pollution and mismanagement of natural resources that these small samples of wealthy politicians, celebrities and sportspeople carry out every day. In contrast, the Lund University professor quotes the Fridays for Future movement, whose most visible head is the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Among other things, the millions of people who participate in it in the world are calling for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to keep the global warming at 2ºC while Thunberg refuses to travel by air because she finds it environmentally unfriendly, while her entourage does it have a problem doing so. Read the rest below at the source link