Billionaire Bill Gates, who has fashioned himself as some sort of climate warrior as well, has a “guilty pleasure” that goes completely against his espoused views on helping the climate.
While many people consider chocolate or a piece of cake a “guilty pleasure,” Gates’ is a bit more extreme. His private jets are his “little” indulgence, aviation news site Simple Flying reported.
“The Microsoft founder turned climate activist owns no less than four business jets, which he calls his ‘guilty pleasure’. His collection is worth close to $200 million and features not one but two Gulfstream G650s. What’s more, he has just invested billions of dollars in the world’s largest business jet service provider,” Simple Flying reported.
Yes, it’s ironic as it sounds. The man who wrote the book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” owns a small fleet of fuel-guzzling, carbon-emitting planes.
Gates has even confessed to his little guilty pleasure, but also defended it as a necessity for his work.
“Owning a plane is a guilty pleasure. Warren Buffett called his the Indefensible. I do get to a lot of places for Foundation work I wouldn’t be able to go to without it,” Gates answered in a Reddit Q&A, Cnet reported.
However, in his own book, Gates outlined that humans must stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
One of the main arguments in his book is that every person in the world will need to change their mindsets and behavior in order to stop relying on fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, Global Citizen reported in its review of Gates’ book.
So, everyone needs to change their lives, unless their name is Bill Gates.
Do you think that Gates is just using climate change as a publicity stunt to make himself look good?
He did try to defend his ownership and use of private jets saying that he was an “imperfect messenger” for climate change and that he uses clean aviation fuel, Newsweek reported.
“I am offsetting my carbon emissions by buying clean aviation fuel and funding carbon capture and funding low-cost housing projects to use electricity instead of natural gas and so I have been able to eliminate it and it was amazing to me how expensive that was, that cost to be green… we’ve got to drive that down,” Gates said.
That’s just ridiculous logic.
Gates justifying his private jet use with that kind of logic is like a murderer trying to say that he offsets killing people by cooking dinner for his family and helping old ladies across the street.
Give him a pat on the back for trying to do the right thing, but doing something right doesn’t somehow cancel out doing something wrong.
Besides, if Gates’ is trying to actually offset the damage he does to the environment by flying around private jets, he’s going to have to try a lot harder.
Gates owns two Gulf Stream G650s, according to Simple Flying.
The G650 can fit between 11 and 18 passengers. It burns about 450 gallons of fuel per hour.
The jet also holds the fastest and farthest record for a business jet. It has flown between Singapore and Tucson, Arizona, in 15 hours and 23 minutes in 2019, Simple Flying reported.
Gates could have opted for a more eco-friendly jet, like the ACJ220, which “is the quietest, cleanest and most eco-friendly aircraft in its category, featuring a 50 percent reduced noise footprint compared to previous generation aircraft, and up to 25 percent lower fuel burn,” Boat International Media reported.
But instead, Gates has hit records as a flying polluter.
Lund University calculated that just socialite Paris Hilton and Bill Gates “produce an astonishing 10,000 times more carbon emissions from flying than the average person.”
“I calculated that Bill Gates, for example, causes at least 1,600 tons of CO2 to be emitted into the atmosphere — and this is from flying alone,” Stefan Gössling of Lund University wrote.
If Gates really was the climate crusader that he brands himself to be, he should be horrified by this data.
So, Gates is either a complete hypocrite or is truly naive enough to think that he is doing enough for the climate that he can get by flying private jets.
