In the 2005 film “Stranger than Fiction,” British actress Emma Thompson plays an author who controls a man’s fate and saves him from tragedy.
But some suggest the movie title could also apply to Thompson’s real life as a climate change alarmist, who has no issue with taking a gas guzzling jet thousands of miles to join protestors demanding strict limits on air travel.
‘Hypocrite’ Emma Thompson flew 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to join London eco-warrior protest https://t.co/tT722HKWH4 pic.twitter.com/ruKtk9dxdq
— The Sun (@TheSun) April 19, 2019
“’Hypocrite’ Emma Thompson flew 5,400 miles from Los Angeles to join London eco-warrior protest,” The Sun posted to Twitter.
The UK news site detailed the Oscar-winning actress’ 5,456-mile trans-Atlantic flight Wednesday from Los Angeles to London’s Heathrow Airport, where the climate activist group “Extinction Rebellion” attempted to shut down travel the next day over concerns about the environmental impact.
The group’s leader, Robin Boardman-Pattison, told Gaia Fawkes the protest to ruin the Easter weekend for 800,000 people was “totally necessary given the emergency we’re in.”
The move was part of a larger city-wide rebellion that’s lasted for days. Over the last week, climate change activists have shut down numerous bridges, public landmarks and other areas of the city in the name of saving the planet.
Among other demands, Extinction Rebellion wants the government to impose limits on air travel for emergencies only to reduce greenhouse gasses and the impact on the environment, the Sun reports.
Thompson joined the massive protest in Marble Arch on Thursday afternoon, posing in black overalls with an Extinction Rebellion patch on the front. Her flight to join her compadres generated 1.67 tonnes of CO2, according to the Daily Mail.
“I am so proud and thrilled to be part of Extinction Rebellion, a new movement that has come behind all the old ones that I’ve been part of since I was 16 years old,” she said. “A movement that’s telling it like it is and saying to government ‘look, there’s no more time. You can’t lie and you can’t stall any longer.’”
“And we will occupy until you take action because that is the only way we are going to save our planet,” Thompson preached. “It’s hard, it’s inconvenient sometimes but it’s much more inconvenient to leave a plant that’s so completely destroyed that our grandchildren will be up against things that we cannot even imagine.”
Thompson’s spokesman didn’t see the irony in the actress jetting across the world to complain about global warming.
“She had to fly home at any rate, it was just earlier than she thought she could have,” the spokesman told the Daily mail. “At the moment, that is our only available and practical means of trans-global travel.”
The actress also defended the trip, alleging it’s the government that’s the real problem.
“Our governments have signed up to accords that have agreed to try to clean up our energy use up and have completely ignored them. Who in fact is the hypocrite?“
Actress Emma Thompson joins the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations as youth activists take the protests to Heathrow. pic.twitter.com/SfBWW0PftZ
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) April 20, 2019
It’s all about the bigger picture, Extinction Rebellion explained.
“If Emma Thompson wants to come and help out, that’s great, she’s using her platform which is incredibly valuable to anyone,” a spokesman said. “IF she has to fly around the world like a climate lawyer might have to fly around the world, it seems counter-productive in the short term but we are looking at the bigger picture.”
Thompson, of course, is only one of countless oblivious celebrities who regularly fly around the world to climate change conferences and fancy fundraisers. Leonardo DiCaprio is another with a massively large carbon footprint who is often complains about the human impact on the environment.
The Sun points out that Boardman-Pattison, the privately educated leader of Extinction Rebellion, also enjoys lavish overseas vacation at Italian ski resorts and other exotic locales.
“I think that in this day and age, when we are facing a collapse of society, it’s not about people’s individual decisions, it’s about how this government deals with that collapse,” he said when confronted about the hypocrisy by Gaia Fawkes. “Building an expansion of Heathrow – that’s going to kill people.”
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