Another Climate Week NYC, the annual global climate circus, where up to 85,000 virtue-signaling elites flock to Manhattan, overlaps with the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level schmooze-fest, drawing another 15,000 dignitaries.

They gather there to tell us regular people that we shouldn’t be eating meat or flying so often, that we should buy expensive electric cars, and subsidize wind and solar with our skyrocketing electricity prices. They even say the quiet part out loud: Your dog is bad for the climate because it eats.

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THE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE IS FAR FROM ‘SETTLED’

They will not tell you that you exhale 800 pounds of CO2 a year and are a carbon-based creature, as are all animals. They will not tell you that more CO2 is rapidly greening the Earth and dramatically increasing crop yields.

Think about it. Total travelers? A smug horde of 80,000–100,000, spewing 120,000 tons of CO2 just to get there. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of 20,000–50,000 average U.S. households or 200,000–500,000 gas cars (which they hate but use) driven for a year. All for a climate circus week, while they lecture us on an unprovable, distant, maybe-never doomsday of a too-warm planet.

How noble. How utterly hypocritical.

Picture the scene: Private jets whisking heads of state and corporate leaders from Davos-lite to the Yale Club, belching contrails across the Atlantic. Commercial flights from Tokyo and London dump 1–3 tons of CO2 per passenger round-trip, with 90% arriving by air — JFK and LGA swelling with carbon footprints the size of small islands.

Those who “go green” chug Amtrak from D.C. (a measly 0.05 tons/person), only to hop Ubers or subways powered by gas or fossil-fueled grids. Once there, they check into climate-controlled hotels like the Lotte New York Palace, where air conditioners guzzle electricity from coal and gas peakers.

Dinner? Steak flown from Argentina or New Zealand, avocados airlifted from Mexico, or cheese and champagne from France, served in emission-intensive restaurants where the carbon footprint rivals that of a small nation.

Don’t forget the souvenirs — fossil-fuel-made trinkets from China, shipped across oceans on diesel behemoths and trucked into NYC.

These are the same alarmists who’ve peddled failed prophecies for decades. Remember James Hansen’s 1988 doomsaying? Manhattan’s West Side Highway underwater by now? Nope — still dry as a bone. There has been no acceleration of sea level rise since 1895, per recent studies such as Voortman (2025) and MDPI (2024).

Ice-free Arctic summers by 2013–2018? Al Gore‘s hype fizzled; 2025’s minimum was 1.8 million square miles, just 5% below the 2005–2024 average, but worlds from zero.

Hurricanes? The 2025 season’s a dud — five named storms, no U.S. landfalls, the quietest since 2014. Tornadoes stable after Doppler tweaks (Weinkle 2018); droughts unchanged (McCabe 2020).

Floods? Mississippi’s 1973 monster dwarfs recent ones, with no uptick.

Global wildfires? NASA satellites show burned area down 24% since 1998. Even heatwaves: the 1930s Dust Bowl scorched hotter than now (Kunkel 2013), and rural data holds steady (Spencer 2025).

Yet these hypocrites demand trillions — $27 trillion annually for net-zero fantasies, per economic models — on windmills that need fossil backups, solar panels mined with diesel, batteries reliant on rare earths shipped globally, and transmission lines sprawling across landscapes.

The result? Skyrocketing energy prices: California’s gas at $4.65/gallon amid refinery closures for “green” goals; Europe’s €1.6 trillion green push has doubled electricity rates. Poor folks pay the bill — higher food costs from biofuel mandates, blackouts from unreliable renewables — all while elites jet in for virtue signaling, eating steak and lobster.

Trillions wasted on this alarmist theater harm economies, crush the vulnerable, and make the West weak while helping China grow strong. Communist China and India together emit more than 41% of CO2 emissions, and they are building more than 700 coal plants that will last 50+ years. There won’t be a peep about that from the NYC climate hypocrites.

Metrics show no crisis meriting such pain: stable weather extremes, growing islands (Maldives/Tuvalu accretion, Nature 2018), decreasing wildfires. It is time to call these climate hypocrites out.

It is all pain and no gain. How stupid.

THE CULTURE OF NIHILISM MUST BE DEFEATED

It’s time to ground these carbon-spewing saviors. Let them walk the talk — better yet, stay home and save the planet from their hypocrisy. I say to them: Live your low-carbon lifestyle and see how you like it. Give up your travel, your dogs, your pools, and, well, anything else that is fun.

The real threat? Their endless, failed prophecies draining our wallets for nothing.

Frank Lasee is the president of Truth in Energy and Climate and a former Wisconsin state senator.