Actions verses words

From the September 5 OpinionJournal comes the following story and comments (link above is to original story):

Brendan O'Neill of the online magazine Spiked calls our attention to an astonishing report that appeared last week in London's Times. You thought this "carbon offset" business was a scam? It turns out it's even worse, as O'Neill explains:

In [the Times article] it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.

Welcome to the era of eco-enslavement.

The details of this carbon-offsetting scheme are disturbing. Cameron offsets his flights by donating to Climate Care. The latest wheeze of this carbon-offsetting company is to provide "treadle pumps" to poor rural families in India so that they can get water on to their land without having to use polluting diesel power. Made from bamboo, plastic and steel, the treadle pumps work like "step machines in a gym," according to some reports, where poor family members step on the pedals for hours in order to draw up groundwater which is used to irrigate farmland. These pumps were abolished in British prisons a century ago. It seems that what was considered an unacceptable form of punishment for British criminals in the past is looked upon as a positive eco-alternative to machinery for Indian peasants today.

What might once have been referred to as "back-breaking labour" is now spun as "human energy."

What's more, this is all done so that Cameron can avoid making changes in his own lifestyle, which we are supposed to believe is destroying the planet. Global-warmism is not just some harmless enthusiasm; it can be despicable and inhuman.

This is the sort of hypocritical behavior of the high-profile, media darling tree-huggers that keeps me and others unconvinced about "man made" global warming and about how much the "true believers" really do believe. When all of these media darling global warming alarmists like Al Gore, Barbara Streisand, John Edwards and David Cameron care enough about this cause to actually change their life styles in support of it, I might start taking it more seriously. When they all start flying commercial instead of in private jets, sell their SUVs and drive nothing but hybrid or electric cars and move out of their mansions and into environmentally neutral dwellings, I promise that I will start to care. These folks have the money and influence to make a real difference with this cause, if they really believe in it. Their actions say no. You don’t make a difference by buying carbon off-sets. You make a difference by using your money to build a 100% environmentally neutral house and driving electric cars. They can certainly afford it, if they really wanted to and their actions say they don’t.