Just a while ago I posted about some people I’d heard of who were complaining about how forest fires in Greece were spoiling their European vacation. Well, don’t worry about them because they’ve already returned and I guess they had a better time. And made the world a little hotter in the process.

But for people like them I don’t think climate change matters very much. They have lots of money and they just want to burn through it before they die. And if they burn the planet at the same time, so what? They’re going to be dead soon anyway, they have no kids, and they’ve never claimed to be environmentalists.

But I was recently reading Jeff Goodell’s book on the effects of climate change, The Heat Will Kill You First, and Goodell is an environmentalist and he writes about two trips he took to the Great Barrier Reef in 2011 and 2018. A time when it was common knowledge that the Reef was suffering terribly from the effects of climate change and that tourism wasn’t helping things. This, in turn, reminded me of a moment of cognitive dissonance I encountered when attending a talk by Naomi Klein back in 2017. What I said then:

The only point where I had some reservations was when Klein talked about taking her child to see the part of the Great Barrier Reef that is still alive. Isn’t such tourism (eco- or otherwise) a big part of the problem? I think we should all be traveling a lot less. I’m all for setting up more sanctuaries where visitors aren’t even allowed and that can only be viewed by webcams.

Now there are arguments that have been made for “sustainable tourism,” but most of what I’ve read about the subject sounds disingenuous. Basically the claim is that it puts money in the pockets of people who want to do good, and that it creates an incentive to maintain the health of endangered sites like the Great Barrier Reef because without them the tourism economy would collapse. But this all seems rather self-serving, not to mention grounded in the same economic imperative that has led to the crisis.

In any event, I’d be holding a fierce double standard if I called out the couple who were upset about Greece being in flames and didn’t challenge writers like Klein and Goodell for raising the alarm about climate change while jetting around the world (literally, flying from North America to Australia) to look at vanishing natural landmarks. As I’ve said before, the vice of today’s political right is a heedless selfishness, while that of the left is hypocrisy. If you’re going to sound the alarm about issues like this you need to set a better personal example.