Do Gooders Doing Good (?) in Copenhagen

It'd be amusing, if it weren't so sad (and infuriating):

So, how do you show that you really believe the words that are coming out of your mouth?

Not like this (courtesy of the Daily Telegraph):

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfill the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

“It’s too cold to walk from the hotel to the convention on global warming. Let’s take a limo!”

And then there’s the delicious cherry on top of the hypocrisy sundae:

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

Taking a private jet to a conference on stopping global warming is a bit like traveling in a sedan chair carried by indentured servants to a summit on stopping human trafficking.

(HT: Instapundit) It's a delicious analogy.

Of course, this sort of do as i say not as I do hypocrisy from the climate change crowd isn't new. Remember Al Gore's inconvenient truths?

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

I'm persuaded the world is getting warmer. I'm more or less persuaded that human conduct is contributing to some extent to that phenomenon.

But I'm also persuaded that the rich and powerful among the climate change crowd aren't going to notice any hardships -- or even inconvenience -- from climate change mitigation, while the poor and middle class are going to notice -- and suffer from -- higher costs, higher taxes, and a lower quality of life.

And I'm completely persuaded that the climate change crowd is engaged in a massive rent-seeking program to make sure that climate change mitigation in fact enriches them. From academics who'll get bigger grants to politicians who'll extort higher campaign contributions from affected interests to a handful of green business types who'll get government subsidies, regulatory protections from competition, tax breaks, and the rest.

What's really annoying about the climate change limo and private plane story is that the climate change crowd knows all this and, Climategate aside, can't even be bothered to hide it very well. To the contrary, they're thumbing their noses at the rest of us.