The New Jet Set

Caroline Overington, writing in The Australian, takes a rather jaundiced view of the recent publicity stunt performed in Sydney by the true believers in global warming. She points out the blatant hypocrisy that many of the most vocal of the true believers engage in, quite routinely.

The idea was to get businesses in Sydney's central business district to turn off their lights for an hour. The organisers made it easy for them: they planned the event for last Saturday night, when most buildings were empty; and for March, when the weather was mild; and for 7.30pm, when shoppers had gone home.

The point, apparently, was to show how easy it might be to conserve some energy and to throw a metaphorical spotlight on the problem of climate change.

There was a great deal of excitement - a rival newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, gave up all semblance of unbiased analysis and printed itself on green paper the day before - but it fell quite flat: the great plunge into darkness never really happened. Street lights, security lights and other lights stayed on throughout Earth Hour; football was played under those giant, mosquito squatter-style mega-lights; concerts were held; cars stayed on the road; and so forth. Children could be heard complaining that their glow-sticks could barely be seen in what was gloom, as opposed to darkness.

Still, this newspaper decided to cover the event as if it were news, and on Sunday, when I came in to work, I was assigned to speak to WWF chief Greg Bourne about Earth Hour. Trouble is, try as I did all day, I couldn't find him. Why not? Because Bourne wasn't around. He was on an aeroplane.

Now, why should that matter? Well, Bourne knows this as well as anyone, but air travel is one of the worst things you can do if you believe you are trying to save the planet. On one calculation, about 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide a person are generated when flying return from Sydney to London. Another calculation is half that but, either way, it's a monstrous amount of the stuff, delivered right where the Earth is most vulnerable. Nicholas Stern - an economist from Britain who is the greens' pin-up boy - says flying by plane is the equivalent of beating the planet with a sledgehammer, or something like that.

Did that stop Bourne from boarding a long-haul flight to Singapore just hours after the great switch-off? Did it hell. He got on the plane because, apparently, it was urgently important to attend meetings in Asia with "international colleagues" who wanted to make Earth Hour a global event.

Jets for the leaders of the true believers, mud huts and caves in the dark for the rest of the population. I have pointed out that a lot of the truest of the true believers are going to get a rude, rude shock when they find out that the Al Gores of the world will treat them as little people if they get their way and impose draconian "solutions" on the populace. They won't be rich enough to afford the indulgences that the likes of the wealthy, well funded will have. And they'll be in the darkness of their mud huts like the rest of the people. While folks like Greg Bourne roar overhead in jets on their way to lecture the mud hutters on cutting back even further. So the elite can take more jet rides.