American Idle

Adam Lisberg makes a good point in yesterday's NY Daily New about Bloomberg's blatant hypocrisy when it comes to carbon foot printing: "Until last week, anyone walking into City Hall could see Mayor Bloomberg's SUVs parked for hours with the engine running - anyone, that is, but the mayor."They don't idle when I'm in the car - they drive when I'm in the car," he explained. After The Associated Press revealed the open secret, the environmentalist mayor told the NYPD to obey his months-old edict: engines off when the SUVs are parked."

All this hoo ha does is to point out how much the mayor is pretty much only a, do what I say kinda guy; and how his own personal behavior contradicts the edicts he peremptorily gives to others. We have already shown how is gun control mania doesn't prevent Bloomberg from employing a security team for his personal safety-not to mention the armed NYPD security team.

And then there is Bloomberg's own Sasquatchian-like carbon footprint. As the NY Post reported: "America's greenest mayor generates enough greenhouse gas to choke the Lincoln Tunnel.
Mayor Bloomberg - who has advocated everything from ditching incandescent light bulbs to taxing Midtown commuters to clean the air - produces 364 tons of smog-inducing carbon dioxide a year, according to a Post analysis of the billionaire's trans-Atlantic real estate portfolio and travel style."

So, as he did with congestion pricing, the mayor advocates for others to be frugal with the environment while he traipses all across the globe spewing forth carbon emissions to a fare thee well. Which brings us to another liberal do what I say kinda guy-the NY Times' Tom Friedman. Talk about Sasquatchian!

While Tom lectures us about how the newly passed cap and trade bill will assure that new homes will be more energy efficient-"this bill’s goal of reducing U.S. carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 is nowhere near what science tells us we need to mitigate climate change. But it also contains significant provisions to prevent new buildings from becoming energy hogs, to make our appliances the most energy efficient in the world and to help preserve forests in places like the Amazon."-he lives in the kind of mansion that has the trees in the Amazon forest trembling with fear.

What this tells us, is that there is an entire class of rich environmentally conscious folks who-once they have gotten theirs-wants to restrict the kind of development that other may use to get wealthy: "Well, obviously, being a renowned expert, Thomas Friedman, like Al Gore and the Prince of Wales, needs a supersized carbon footprint. But you don't - you can get by beating your laundry on the rocks down by the river with the native women all day long. "Environmentalism" is a government restraint on economic advance and, therefore, social mobility. In other words, it's a way to ensure you'll never live like Tom Friedman."

Or, Mike Bloomberg, for that matter.