It’s one thing to warn that man’s industrial excesses and conspicuous consumption of natural resources are destroying the planet. It is another thing entirely to deliver this warning from the confines of a private jet.
For this delightful slice of irony, I give you New York Times columnist and North Korean propagandist Nick Kristof, who is currently headlining a New York Times-sponsored tour of the world.
“I came to Easter Island while leading a tour for The New York Times Company, and those of us in the group were staggered by the statues — but also by the reminder of the risks when a people damages the environment that sustains it,” he wrote in an op-ed titled, A Parable of Self-Destruction.
He added, “That brings us to climate change, to the chemical processes we are now triggering whose outcomes we can’t fully predict. The consequences may be a transformed planet with rising waters and hotter weather, dying coral reefs and more acidic oceans. We fear for the ocean food chain and worry about feedback loops that will irreversibly accelerate this process, yet still we act like Easter Islanders hacking down their trees.”
Maybe we’ll figure something out in time, he posits, and maybe we won’t. Good analysis.
“I can’t help imagining the farmer here on Easter Island who cut down the last palm tree. … when the last tree toppled, his people were doomed,” Kristof writes. “I hope that some day far in the future, tourists don’t swim through Midtown Manhattan and similarly reflect on the hubris and recklessness of early-21st-century Americans.”
Perhaps when his head clears of the fumes from the “exclusively chartered Boeing 757 with first-class, fully lie-flat seats,” he’ll recognize the humor in the timing of his climate change article.
Kristof’s concerns about the environment are not disqualified merely because he writes while globetrotting in a private jet, nor even just because he gets the story of Easter Island completely wrong, as Easter Island probably never suffered the ecological collapse he talks about. Kristof may be correct in warning that our excesses are going to be our downfall. He may be correct when he suggests it may be too late to turn back.
It’s that it’s difficult to take these warnings seriously when they come in the form of, “Do as I say, not as I do.” It would be like if Barney Gumble from the Simpsons scolded the other bar patrons for their lack of self-control and moderation.
Oh, by the way, the fee to accompany Kristof and his New York Times colleagues is $135,000 per person. Perhaps that money would be better spent developing techniques and technology to combat the effects of climate change. But what do I know?
(h/t “Jimmy Princeton”)
