If global warming is truly an existential threat, then the nation’s elites are a threat and should be dealt with accordingly.

Of all the varieties of hypocrites, carbon hypocrites are among the worse, because they harm poor people the most.

You’ve heard about the two-faced archetypes: Uber-wealthy and powerful, they say that global warming is an existential threat while they own multiple mansions, fly around the world in private jets, and drive electric cars that go from zero to 60 in four seconds, powered by massive battery packs full of mined materials and recharged with carbon-generated electricity. The vehicles are green only if they come in that color. 

As will be discussed shortly, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the carbon hypocrites.

He and his ilk display their hyper-hypocrisy while looking down on the proles, bitter clingers, deplorables, Walmart shoppers, and clodhoppers. Then, even with their prep school and Ivy League pedigrees, they can’t figure out why the hoi polloi are attracted to Donald Trump.

Many of the hypocrites live in New York City, where Trump became a national name because the city’s sophisticates enabled him by bending zoning regulations for him, by living in Trump Tower along with Arab and Russian petro plutocrats and giving him constant publicity, including his own TV show.

I lived in metro New York for ten years and knew more of them than I wanted to know, as a result of heading an influential environmental group in the metro area. I told my board of directors and members to stick with facts and not engage in hyperbole, misinformation, or disinformation—although it would have been easy to get the media, politicians, and the public to swallow such baloney, given that environmentalism is one of those issues that plays more to emotions than to reason. (Other issues in this vein are poverty, inequality, equity, and racism.)

New Yorkers tend to believe that the city is an energy miser because it is densely populated, has extensive mass transit, has short commutes for city dwellers, has tiny apartments that don’t use much energy for heating and cooling, and has a corresponding lifestyle that makes it possible to get by without owning a car. Left out of the energy calculus, however, is the city’s “offshoring” of carbon burning to New Jersey, to other parts of the US, and to the world. 

Refineries, factories, warehouses, and fleets of trucks that service Manhattan line miles and miles of the New Jersey Turnpike. Commuters travel to and from the city not only on the turnpike but also on I-78 and I-80, including from as far away as Pennsylvania. Others commute from suburbs in Long Island and Connecticut. Tens of thousands of cars and trucks sit in massive traffic jams during rush hours. Thousands of trucks descend on Manhattan during the night to deliver food and goods, with their diesel engines running as they double-park to unload. Much of the food served in five-star restaurants is grown in the heartland with fertilizer produced from fossil fuels. Trash is either incinerated or put on trains and trucks to be shipped to landfills in other states. Squadrons of private jets fly in and out of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and commercial jets en route to LaGuardia, JFK and Newark airports circle for a half-hour or more in bad weather, burning petro and spewing pollution and noise over large swaths of the metro area.

On weekends and holidays, many of the city’s movers and shakers escape to their mansions on the north shore of Long Island and elsewhere. Of course, the mansions are heated and cooled when they aren’t there. No doubt, many of them are heated with oil, which is delivered by truck.

It’s lunacy to think that all of this carbon use can be converted to so-called clean energy in a couple of decades, that industrialized nations can survive without fossil fuels, that poor countries can end poverty without fossil fuels, that less burning of fossil fuels in one nation won’t result in more burning in other nations, and that global warming is existential and not just another serious problem that will be overcome. On the other hand, it is not lunacy to believe that wealthy elites, unlike common folks, have the money and political power to survive and prosper under draconian reductions in fossil fuels.   

This brings the discussion back to Michael Bloomberg.

The billionaire has launched a campaign called Beyond Petrochemicals to end the production of petrochemicals. The initial funding of $85 million will be spent on stopping 120 planned petrochemical projects in the US. 

It is not known if any of his targets are petrochemical plants that produce ammonia for fertilizer for feeding the world. But Bloomberg probably thinks that a little starvation would be good for humanity.  After all, when he was mayor, he wanted to lower the consumption of soda through higher taxes on the product, ostensibly to reduce obesity.

It’s telling that he went after soda but not Starbucks, even though the chain sells high-calorie milkshakes masquerading as coffee. Soda tends to be the drink of choice of those wearing blue collars while Starbucks tends to be the drink of choice of those wearing white collars.

I’d like to throw a Big Gulp in Bloomberg’s smug face, given his environmental hypocrisy. If memory serves, he owns several mansions, including a house in Bermuda. Does he travel there by rowboat or sail there with Greta Thunberg?

And how about the Bloomberg publishing industry and thousands of Bloomberg computer terminals? How are they powered?

If Bloomberg really believes that the world is going to end from global warming, then it is a moral imperative that he reduce his carbon footprint by selling his mansions and living in an efficiency apartment.

Speaking of mansions, the real estate section of the Wall Street Journal is geared to Bloomberg’s social class and fellow hypocrites. Below are excerpted descriptions of six homes recently featured in the section. I’ve edited the descriptions for brevity. They’ll give you a sense of the carbon lifestyles of the rich, famous and hypocritical.   

I’ve never been one to have class envy or begrudge the wealthy, but the hypocrisy of the nation’s elites makes me want to overthrow them, or at least force them to live like they want everyone else to live.

* * *

Excerpt One:  A 17-foot-long pool is a cherry on top of a $39.995 million Manhattan townhouse. The brick-and-limestone Tribeca home is about 23½ feet wide and approximately 10,600 square feet. The sellers are commercial real-estate investor Lucky Bhalla and his wife, Laura Bhalla, who purchased the property for $1.5 million in 2003, property records show. Mr. Bhalla founded the Manhattan investment firm Ascot Properties NYC.

Excerpt Two: A London-based businessman paid $50 million cash for a Gilded Age mansion in New York.  The buyer, who plans to use it as a pied-à-terre, never stepped foot in the building before buying it. Everything was done through his representatives.

Excerpt Three: An 18-Acre waterfront compound on Cape Cod is listed for $15.995 million. The property on Red Brook Harbor includes two houses, a boat house, a tennis court, a 20-foot-long dock, and a private sandy beach. A husband and wife named Bisson own the compound.  They enjoyed using the property for boating to locations such as Bassetts Island and Martha’s Vineyard. Mr. Bisson is currently a commercial real estate investor, and the Bissons own a restaurant called Wicked Craft in Boston.

Excerpt Four: An Aspen mansion has sold for $69 million in one of Aspen’s priciest-ever deals. Known as Silver Lining Ranch, the estate has a roughly 18,000-square-foot, three-story house with 10 bedrooms, according to Meriwether. The sellers were John and Elizabeth Burgess, records show. Mr. Burgess is a co-founder of BC Partners, a British private-equity firm.

Excerpt Five:  A Manhattan apartment long owned by the late pharmaceutical executive Martin Howard Solomon is coming to market for $55 million. Mr. Solomon and his wife, Sarah Billinghurst Solomon, paid $25 million for the Upper East Side home in 2004, according to property records. The neo-Italian Renaissance-style building, a co-op on the edge of Central Park, was designed by prominent architect J.E.R. Carpenter around 1920. The boutique building has drawn power players such as the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The five-bedroom apartment has views over Central Park and the city, said Serena Boardman of Sotheby’s International Realty, one of the listing agents. With 11 rooms, it has large entertaining spaces, multiple wood-burning fireplaces, and a dining room that can seat close to 30 people, she said. Ms. Boardman declined to specify the unit’s square footage.

Excerpt Six: In 2016, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paid $23 million for two side-by-side historic mansions in Washington, D.C. The sprawling early-1900s houses had been a museum, but Mr. Bezos converted them into a massive home, where he has since thrown glittering parties attended by the likes of Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump. Now another one of the city’s grand historic mansions is hoping to follow suit. Jewett House, a circa-1905 Georgian Revival mansion that has been used for decades as the headquarters of the progressive Bauman Foundation, is listing for $14.5 million. Spanning about 16,500 square feet, the property is the most expensive home on the market in the city. “This house would be a perfect one for Bezos,” said John Landrum Bryant, vice president of the Bauman Foundation. Or, since Mr. Bezos already has a residence in D.C., an ideal buyer would be the mogul’s ex-wife, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, he said. Mr. Bryant knows a thing or two about the housing preferences of the elite. Aside from being married to real-estate heiress Patricia Bauman, whose father launched the Bauman Foundation, he carries the title of prince of Monteagudo, a town in Spain, and goes by Prince John.