Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Verge has written one of the most unintentionally hilarious descriptions ever of serial Climate Clown Leonardo DiCaprio’s desire to share his green angst with the proletariat.
… Celebrities are keen on adopting righteous causes, but few are as vocal as Leonardo DiCaprio about his quest to save the planet from ecological collapse. “I am consumed by this,” DiCaprio told Rolling Stone in a profile earlier this year. “There isn’t a couple of hours a day where I’m not thinking about it.”
With Before the Flood, DiCaprio is asking us to sample a fraction of his daily burden. Directed by Fisher Stevens, Before the Flood documents DiCaprio as he jet-sets from Greenland, to Indonesia, to Miami and beyond, speaking to world leaders and, per the film’s liner notes, “bearing witness to climate change on a scale that no one should deny.” In the vein of An Inconvenient Truth or DiCaprio’s own 2007 eco-doc The Eleventh Hour, Before the Flood is meant as a clarion call for viewers to stand up, take action, change the world, etc.
Global warming is an objectively urgent crisis facing our planet, so it’s a special achievement that DiCaprio’s film manages to evade that sense of urgency almost entirely. It certainly isn’t for lack of visual stimulation. If you like watching Leonardo DiCaprio do stuff, you’re in for a treat. Here’s just a partial list of stuff you can watch Leonardo DiCaprio do in this movie: tour the UN with Ban Ki-Moon, speak in front of the UN General Assembly (twice), ride in a snowmobile sled across a melting glacier in Greenland, listen to narwhals coo, push children on a swing on the Pacific Ocean island Palau, tour a washed-out onion field in India, fly over a smoldering Indonesian rainforest, chill with an elephant, gawk at robots inside Tesla’s Gigafactory with Elon Musk, awkwardly greet Secretary of State John Kerry, offer baby orangutans fruit, stroll the White House grounds with President Obama, and kiss the Pope’s hand and give him a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings. …
Are you sharing the angst? Do you feel you are feeling any of DiCaprio’s daily burden, as he jetsets about on the ultimate world tour, trying to convince the rest of us to avoid carbon intensive activities like air travel for the sake of the global climate?
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Evidence of rising sea levels
If only there were some way that Leonardo could communicate across vast distances, with others of like mind. He then wouldn’t have to consume precious vanishing energy resources. Oh. Wait.
I already shared his climate burden. My taxes subsidized his #@ur momisugly%&!*$ Tesla. I’m sure that eased his pain too.
He has no connection to the reality but he sure has a connection to millions of fans that think he walks on water. That’s the world we live in now.
He has a carbon footprint the size of Manhattan.
He meets world leaders but do not say a word. He isnt fighting, it is more a branding thing. He shows off. I am looking forward to seeing his documentary just to see what solutions and alternatives he proposes … none ?
If DiCrapio was serious about his desire to save the planet he would take a pay cut to around 1% of his current pay. Only by living a lifestyle at most equal to the average US citizen can he even consider preaching from anything but a point of total hypocrisy. Many would say he needs to drop to the average world lifestyle.
His one skill in life is to make people believe a fictional world even if only temporarily. Given this, what right has he got to pontificate on climate change? Has he personally done research on the real projection of future climate based on the cyclic nature of climate variation as certainly no climate scientist’s work I can find shows any understanding of this. Has he done any historical research on the patterns revealed by everyday accounts in diaries and letters of the times as one graduate here in the UK has done? Both these lines of research deviate totally from the conclusions of climate scientists and both are by experts in the fields concerned. Why should one set of experts with a despicably poor record outweigh the analysis of other experts who have a near perfect track record? Admittedly this is because the methods to analyse the patterns of climate data by non climate experts are used mainly in a situation where they can do a thousand test in a second instead of waiting 30 years with data fudges done on a daily basis to conceal faults.
Di Caprio’s climate work shows him using his skill at promoting fictional world as reality in the most contemptible way possible to damage the lives of those a thousand times less fortunate than himself.