Extinction Rebellion and the hypocrisy of the new eco-elite

Do you ever get the feeling that the elites are just taking the mick? That behind our backs they’re high-fiving each other and saying, ‘I can’t believe we’re still getting away with this?’ I do. Especially on the climate-change issue. The gall of an establishment that lives it up in carbon-fuelled luxury while telling the rest of us to stop being so eco-destructive really has become too much to take.

Eco-hypocrisy abounds. Take John Kerry. He is Joe Biden’s climate-change envoy, which basically means his job is to wag his finger at the entire world for being so dirty and polluting. And yet there he was a few weeks ago landing in Martha’s Vineyard in his private jet for Barack Obama’s lavish 60th birthday party. It’s the 16th flight Kerry’s private jet has taken this year.

Most of us haven’t been anywhere near an airplane for the best part of 18 months. Yet we’re expected to take lectures from a man who jumps in his private jet whenever there’s a birthday bash or virtue-signalling shindig to attend? Private jets are 14 times more polluting per passenger than commercial flights. So if your only sinful carbon indulgence is taking a flight to Malaga once a year, knock yourself out – it will take you 14 years to fart out as much CO2 as Kerry’s jaunt to Obama’s birthday did.

Then there’s Prince Harry. He and Meghan love nothing more than bigging up their green credentials. Who can forget when they used Vogue magazine as a pulpit from which to declare their intention to shrink their eco-footprint, and to encourage the rest of us to do likewise.

But what’s this? Harry taking a private jet from a polo event in Aspen back to his luxurious pad in California? Read that sentence again. It drips with privilege. Polo, Aspen, private jets. That these kinds of people think they have any right whatsoever to tell hard-working folk to think about the impact they’re having on Mother Earth is genuinely jaw-dropping.

Let’s not forget Sadiq Khan. The other week he was saying ‘time is running out’ to stop the ‘climate catastrophe’. And one of the problems, he said, is that cities like London are ‘clogged by cars’. A few days later, guess what London’s brave eco-warrior was doing? He was clogging London’s roads with cars.

Sadiq was taken in a three-car convoy to Battersea park so that he could walk his dog. Apparently his local park, Tooting Common, wasn’t good enough. Most of the people I know who drive in London do so for good reasons. They deliver things, or go to building sites, or drop their kids off at school. The idea that they should listen to green hectoring from a bloke who needs three cars to walk his dog is preposterous.

Luvvies are at it too, naturally. Stephen Fry offered his support to the latest Extinction Rebellion protests in an earnest Twitter vid. He claimed, rather wildly, that the industry-loathing hairshirts of XR will ‘revolutionise’ politics. Fry, according to his Twitter bio, is based in London and Los Angeles. Does he walk between these parts of the world? Cycle, perhaps? Less lip from these media dahlings who live supremely comfortable lives would be much appreciated.

My favourite was Emma Thompson. Sometimes I have to Google just to check it’s definitely true that she once flew from LA to London to attend an XR protest. It is. An interviewer asked her if she at least flies economy, to have a smaller eco-footprint. ‘I bloody don’t, no!’, she said. Dame Emma sitting with the plebs? What a frightful prospect. Don’t you know she must be fresh and glowing for her busy life of eco-moaning?

Speaking of Extinction Rebellion, even many of the devotees of XR’s eco-apocalypse live nice, modern lives. One of XR’s founders, Gail Bradbrook, has been exposed as the driver of a diesel car. So much for Net Zero. If even extreme greens can’t reduce their diesel use, why on earth should the rest of us?

An XR volunteer defended Bradbrook by saying: ‘We’re all hypocrites.’ I’m sure we are, but it seems pretty clear that hypocrisy is more rife in the world of eco-activism than it is almost anywhere else.

And here’s the thing: such hypocrisy is not a bug in the environmentalist system. It is not a glitch. No, it is a key and natural feature of a political movement that is singularly devoted to looking down its nose at mass society and the dim, consumption-obsessed pollutants — that’s you and me — who inhabit it.

This is the important point about eco-hypocrisy. It is not actually a failing on the part of green activists. Rather, it reveals what their movement is all about. Environmentalism is the disguise elitism wears in the 21st century. It is a means for often quite well-off people to wring their hands over the noxious antics of the masses. Whether it’s cheap flights to Spain or a Maccy D’s dinner or shopping in Primark, it is invariably the pastimes of the less well-off that horrify our green betters. Snobs used to view us as morally corrupted. Now they say we’re eco-unfriendly. It’s just a PC version of the same thing.

Of course these people are going to carry on living it up while boring the rest of us rigid with warnings of the apocalypse that will befall the planet if we don’t stop driving to Morrisons or drinking from plastic straws. It is mass society they detest, and that is a mere hop, skip and a jump away from detesting the masses themselves. They’re the new feudalists, living fine lives while expecting the little people to go without.