Tucker Carlson: Pete Buttigieg's sin against the climate revealed
Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls out hypocrisy of climate change activists taking private jets on Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
We're coming up on the two-year anniversary of the Biden administration, if you can even believe it. It seems like a day. Pete Buttigieg has been there almost the whole time. He was sworn in, in early February of 2021. And when he was, he had high hopes. We looked at the tape today. Though he had no previous experience with transportation, or for that matter, with secretarial work, Buttigieg held up his right hand and swore an oath to Kamala Harris to be the best darn Secretary of Transportation he could be. And he seemed to mean it, but not for long. Sadly, history soon intervened.
Just weeks into the job, Buttigieg discovered that some of the roads he was supposed to be overseeing, the roads he was now secretary of, were in fact racist and not just "low grade, got drunk and wrote insensitive Facebook post ten years ago" racist. Not that kind of racism. No. These were hardcore, David Duke-level, nasty old segregationist roads. These were roads that refused to respond to reason and clearly had no intention of changing. And during the 21st century. Some of these roads literally had white stripes painted on them. White stripes. Jim Crow stuff.
Buttigieg seemed shocked by the whole thing. They don't have roads like that back in South Bend, Indiana. So for Pete Buttigieg, it was a pivot point. It was one of those moments of profound disillusionment so common to high-minded, young newcomers to Washington, where everything changes in an instant. All your preconceptions washed away. Here he'd sworn an oath to take care of the roads, but learned the hard way that some roads are beyond repair. They are too racist to fix. So Pete Buttigieg embarked on another path. He became one of America's foremost religious leaders.
As an Episcopalian, it was not an easy transition. Traditionally, members of the clergy believe in God. But Buttigieg had a characteristically clever solution, an approach he had learned during his years as a McKinsey consultant. In place of the concept of an omnipotent, loving God who brings justice to the world, Buttigieg simply substituted the word "climate." Thanks be to climate. "Our climate who weren't in heaven" – that kind of thing. And it sounded pretty good. Here's one of his sermons:
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ALI VELSHI: You talk very openly about being a person of faith. And I want to understand how you connect that to this issue of climate change and our custodianship of the Earth and our moral responsibilities.
PETE BUTTIGIEG: Climate is a moral issue, and this is about stewardship. It is about justice. There's a moment here where we should invite those who are motivated by religious, moral considerations to know that those are some of the things that are at stake in what we're doing to this planet.
So this was really a milestone in modern Christian theology. Climate, declared Father Buttigieg, is a moral issue. Not a meteorological matter, not even a policy topic. It's a moral issue. Climate is a question that bears directly on the fate of your immortal soul. When you mistreat the climate, you risk damnation. In so much as you have done to the least of these, you have done it to the climate. Big change. You thought it was about the science? Actually, it's about morality.
Okay, Reverend Pete. So you set the terms here. So how's your climate record? That seems like a fair question, given that you've just told us that we will go to hell for our carbon emissions. So let's see how you're doing.
Fox News Digital just got a hold of the Reverend Pete's travel schedule, a list of trips he's taken since getting the job at the Transportation Department. And it turns out that Reverend Pete is the Jimmy Swaggart of climate clergy. He was commanding you not to do it the same time he was doing it himself in a very big way, way more than you ever thought of doing it.
Reverend Pete has sinned. Oh boy, has he in a dark and very naughty way. In less than two years, Buttigieg has flown private, at taxpayer expense, nearly 20 times. He's jetted to Ohio and Florida and New Hampshire, among other places. In September, Buttigieg took an FAA jet to a Canadian gay rights ceremony to accept an award for his LGBTQ+ advocacy. Something else he's been doing since he gave up on the roads.
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All this has been extremely expensive for you and every other taxpayer. You may recall that Donald Trump's HHS secretary, Tom Price, lost his job for doing exactly the same thing. An outrage – Politico.com drove him out of office.
So it's expensive. But that's not the real crime. The real crime here is against the climate. It's a sin. It's a moral transgression because none of these planes that Pete Buttigieg was jetting around on were solar-powered. Not a single one ran on a windmill or recycled French fry oil. They were all fossil fueled. All of them. And there is likely no mode of transportation in the history of machines that emits more carbon than private air travel. That would include long trips across India on coal-fired locomotives.
Private jet travel stands alone. Private jets emit an average of two tons of carbon dioxide in an hour. Per hour. For perspective, that's 14 times more carbon emissions per passenger than the JetBlue flight you're on, or any other commercial flight. So you might as well start a tire fire to heat your house. That would be better for the atmosphere than what Pete Buttigieg is doing.
Traveling by private jet is literally the last thing that Father Pete should ever do. But we shouldn't be surprised that he's doing it. You may remember that last year, when Pete Buttigieg was busted commuting in a carbon belching SUV, one of the vehicles that destroys the climate, then unloading a bicycle from the back seat for a short, widely photographed ride to the White House. You're seeing that footage on your screen now. Now, that should have been the very first tip that Reverend Pete's sermons and the self-described climate activists who applauded those sermons are all entirely fraudulent.
And in fact, they are fraudulent. Roughly half of all emission created by airplanes are emitted by the richest 1% of the population flying private. The great majority of these, Biden voters and big fans of, you guessed it, the Reverend Pete Buttigieg. This year alone, to pick but one among many examples, Steven Spielberg, who said he's "terrified" of climate change, emitted over 4400 metric tons of carbon from private jets. How much is that? That's 600 times more emissions than the average person emits in a year. Another climate activist, Taylor Swift, nearly doubled Steven Spielberg's total. 8000 metric tons of CO2 in a year, all of them destroying the planet, rising the seas on a fence against Mother Earth. Now, Taylor Swift justified it by saying, "Oh, I loan out jet sometimes. Oh, it's okay." But it's not okay. Not if you claim to believe in climate change.
A 50-minute flight on a private jet can emit as much carbon as the average person's car does over an entire year. 50 minutes. So imagine what a flight from D.C. to L.A.X. does, or more likely from Hamptons to Aspen. And then imagine thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, of these flights, all carrying people who claim they believe that climate change is, quote, "existential." It's not a mistake. It's intentional. It's a statement and it's quite a statement if you think about it.
If you're yapping about carbon emissions and climate and then flying private, what you're really doing is hoisting a screaming middle finger to the country, to the plebs below in their SUVs, which you say you plan to ban.
And not just in this country. We've got it easy. The economies of entire nations around the world are being destroyed right now in the name of fighting climate change, at the behest of people who fly private. So people are going hungry and freezing to death around the world so that Pete Buttigieg and his friends won't have to walk through the magnetometer at the TSA checkpoint. I don't mean to single out the Reverend Pete. Though he is certainly the most self-righteous of the group. They're all doing it.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaks at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) (Associated Press)
Is there a single high level climate activist who doesn't fly private? At the recent climate summit, more than 400 attendees flew in privately, not on JetBlue, in their own planes. Jeff Bezos is one of them. He flew in his private jet. So did Boris Johnson. John Kerry was famously busted flying to a climate summit in Iceland on his personal Gulfstream. But don't worry, he had no choice. He's too important. Watch.
JOHN KERRY: It's the only choice for somebody like me, who is traveling the world, to win this battle. I believe the time it takes me to get somewhere -- I can't sail across the ocean, I have to fly -- to meet with people and get things done.
Oh, someone like me. You never heard of Zoom, pal? You should be in jail by your own standards. You're a climate criminal. You're a climate criminal. You should be in prison by your own standards. Not just him. Virtually every recognizable person in American politics and entertainment flies private. Nancy Pelosi flies private. Barack Obama flies private. Leonardo DiCaprio flies private. You know who flies private a lot? Al Gore flies private. Michael Bloomberg. Boy, does he fly private. In a four-year period, the U.N. climate envoy, Mr. Bloomberg, took more than 1700 private flights, burning more than 10,000 metric tons of CO2.
You could never do that. If you filled your yard with diesel engines and never turned them off, you would not do that. Your car emits less than five metric tons of CO2 a year. So this is meaningful. This is an actual offense against Mother Earth and the climate.
So you have to wonder what the defenders of climate think of this. What about the climate warriors at Greenpeace and the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund? Have they noticed this? Not really. Have they scolded their donors for undermining their core message? No, of course not. Katherine Clark, the incoming Democratic Party House Whip, doesn't complain either. She should be because her own child has nightmares about climate change.
KATHERINE CLARK: Let me tell you what it means to me, coming in as a different generation. I remember my middle child waking up with nightmares over concern around climate change.
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Okay, so you terrorized your own children. You scared the crap out of little kids about climate. So you must be very upset about what Pete Buttigieg is doing to climate by flying private, which is the most destructive thing you can do to climate other than signing off on the sabotage of a Russian natural gas pipeline, which I guess they also did. But who's noticing? But she's not worried about it. Katherine Clark doesn't care and neither do her donors, including the environmental activists who send her all that money. Meanwhile, a lot of young people are very upset about climate. They believe Pete Buttigieg. And you know what they're doing? They're destroying some of the greatest artwork in Western civilization because they want you to know how important the climate is.
PROTESTER: It shows the destructive nature of our addiction to oil. During these times of catastrophic climate, change is needed now more than ever.
PROTESTER 2: What is worth more, art or life? We cannot afford new oil and gas. It is going to take everything we know and love.
So, groups like that, those thugs, those monsters, the Stalinist mobs, didn't appear out of nowhere. It's not organic, of course. They were whipped into a frenzy by John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi and Pete Buttigieg. Those were their inspiration. But what's interesting is they're destroying the things that are most valuable in our society. Our art, the legacy of our civilization. But you know what they haven't done? They haven't said a single word about Al Gore's personal Gulfstream or John Kerry's or Pete Buttigieg. Well, that's weird, isn't it? They're attacking our civilization's art, but they're not saying anything about the people who are actually destroying the climate.
And, you know who else isn't? BlackRock. The ESG score that you keep hearing about? Your flights on private planes have no effect on an ESG score. Really? The "E" is for environment, but BlackRock doesn't say a word. Could it be that the climate movement isn't really about the climate or about the environment? Could it be that the climate movement is really about creating a permanent caste system where the people at the top of society, the Brahmins, can do literally whatever they want? Can violate with impunity the standards they impose on others, while endlessly lecturing and oppressing the population that supposedly runs the country, but of course, actually doesn't. Could it be? Oh, it's possible.
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We called Pete Buttigieg's office today and asked how you can justify flying private as the Earth warms and the seas rise. How are you not a climate criminal? Speak slowly so we can understand. Of course, they didn't explain. But the rest of us should impose this as a litmus test going forward. No one who seeks to impose carbon rationing on another human being should ever be allowed to step within 100 yards of a private aircraft. Period. Anyone who claims to be serious about fighting climate change should demand tomorrow morning a federal law against private air travel. Make it illegal. It's that simple. Then, go ahead and fly commercial with everyone else or stay home. What's the argument against that? Well, here's what you do know. Anyone who lectures you about climate and opposes banning private air travel is a total fraud and should be ignored.