‘Mayor Pete’ Burns Carbon, Jetting Around the Nation Campaigning Against ‘Climate Change’

Surge Summary: Hypocrisy from Democratic presidential candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg: he pushes “climate change” extremism, but doesn’t want to be called to account on his extensive use of private flying.

“Rules for thee, but not for me.”

Was Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg the one to first coin that expression?

PJ Media’s Nicholas Ballasy reports,

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate, said he flies on private jets despite advocating for action on climate change because the U.S. is a “very big country.”

At CNN’s climate town hall on Wednesday, Chris Cuomo told Buttigieg,

“Your second-quarter filing says your campaign spent about $300,000 on private flying. You’re going to get the finger shaken at you that you should not be doing that if you’re going to be the green guy.”

Buttigieg responded in a revelatory manner:

“Look, I’m interested in decarbonizing the fuel that goes into air travel. I also don’t believe we’re going to abolish air travel. This is a big country and while I absolutely think we can do more to provide alternatives, like trains, I don’t think that we’re going to solve the question of how to get around the world without air travel. This is the sort of thing that I think we need to look at in a commonsense kind of way. … And the right loves to sink their teeth into anything we say that makes it seem like we’re being unreasonable when actually all we’re saying is there’s got to be a way to make it less carbon-intensive. …”

Sorry, Pete, but you’re leaving out the part about like-minded activists’ obsessively circulated and absurd predictions of looming environmental apocalypse and impossible energy-usage goal-setting. (No more fossil fuel use within two or three decades? All electric cars just around the corner? Bye-bye to hamburgers ASAP?)

Buttigieg conceded,

“I took the subway today. Sometimes I fly because this is a very big country and I’m running to be president of the whole country, but look, you know, it involves meeting voters everywhere.”

Sounds an awful lot like what lots of us have been declaring for a long time regarding enviro-concerns, doesn’t it?

In sum and in short, the South Bend, IN mayor is asserting: I’m all for avoiding the use of carbon-based fuels – unless I need to use them.

Which is kind of what millions and millions who take issue with the “climate change” orthodoxy say when they drive to work, heat their homes, fly across country to visit loves ones, eat meat to keep from starving to death, etc., etc.

And we’re regularly scorned for it. We don’t care about the environment. We are destroying the future for our children – those we don’t abort, that is. We’re “science-deniers”.

Buttigieg pressed for expanded American efforts to develop alternatives to air travel.

“I mean, think about the train system, right, in a country that views itself as the greatest, most modern, the most sophisticated in the world. How is it that we have such an inferior train system when trains are a lot easier to power on a green basis because they run on electricity?” he said.

Overlooked is the question of where does that electricity come from? How is it produced? Fossil fuels are often involved along the way.

“You know, think what it would mean for areas like the industrial Midwest, where I live if places from Indianapolis to Chicago to South Bend, Detroit, Minneapolis and so on, were just a few hours away from each other by train.”

He continued, “I’m not even asking for Japanese-level trains. Just give me like Italian-level trains and we would be way ahead of where we are right now, but that’s going to require policy choices and investment. And to anybody who says we shouldn’t subsidize trains, they’ve got to stand on their own two feet. Think about just how many ways we subsidize driving, which is among the most carbon-intensive things we could be doing.”

That doesn’t change the fact that mass-commuter train projects routinely fail – or unendingly teeter on bankrupting failure – here in the U.S. Subsidies, indeed! Gargantuan, tax-dollar devouring ones are what are nearly always resorted to.

Despite Hizzoner’s bland, reasonable-sounding mien – Buttigieg’s stock-in-trade, it seems – he can’t simply shrug off the apocalyptic shriekings of his climate-change fellow-travelers which typify the movement. His restrained rhetoric doesn’t erase any of the potential drawbacks generated by the modern, largely emotions-driven “global warming” crusading which assails us daily.

H/T: PJ Media’s Nicholas Ballasy

Image: Adapted from: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America – Pete Buttigieg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81721379