How is Al Gore going to explain this one? Multi-platinum-selling rapper Kanye West, who infamously said during the Katrina telethon, "George Bush doesn't care about black people" has something else to explain. The AP reports that Kanye asked a restaurant in Cardiff, Wales to fly a chef and a meal across the Atlantic ocean to a Manhattan business meeting this Wednesday for about $4000 "plus travel and accomodation for the restaurant's head chef" and the addition of lots of Earth-killing greenhouse gases. OK, that seems typical for the music biz, after all, Bono did have a forgotten favorite hat flown first class that was flown from London to Italy for about $1700, but now people are now paying attention to celebrity hypocrisy more closely. Kanye is signed up for Al Gore's Live Earth, which is designed to raise money for and awareness of human-caused global climate change and is the latest giant concert that will save the world. (AP didn't connect the political dots.) When announcing the concert, Al Gore outlined its purpose and the goals:
“In order to solve the Climate Crisis, we have to reach billions of people. We are launching SOS and Live Earth to begin a process of communication that will mobilize people all over the world to take action,” Gore said. “The Climate Crisis will only be stopped by an unprecedented and sustained global movement.
Well, Gore got one thing right, it did "mobilize people all over the world." It's mobilizing at least one person to truck a meal over to a helipad, helicopter it to Heathrow, fly it to New York and deliver it to Manhatten just to make Kanye happy.
Since Kanye hasn't made a statement about this special delivery yet, I'm sure that the jet-setting Gore will explain the excuse celebrities use so they can continue to live the pampered celebrity life-style while ranting about man-made global climate change scheme known as carbon offsetting. Or maybe Kanye will just go gangsta and tell people to "step-off" and keep flying food around the world emitting choking clouds of deadly greenhouse gasses while promoting the danger of other people emitting choking clouds of deadly greenhouse gasses. I would certainly respect Kanye more if he says, "yes, I'm going to do it. I want the food, and I'll probably do it again" rather than issue an apology and claim he didn't understand the horrible damage it would cause Mother Earth. We'll see if he stays gangsta or if he emulates celebrities like Gore, Cameron Diaz and Laurie David, who pretend that carbon offsetting doesn't erase the stink of hypocrisy.
