Filmmaker Adam McKay, a DSA member and hardcore climate doomsayer, has finally addressed — indirectly, at least — the issue of his hypocritical campaign to kill the oil industry while jetting between homes in Los Angeles and Ireland.
Four years ago, Breitbart became the first news outlet to connect the dots between McKay’s frenzied climate warnings (e.g. the satirical Netflix film Don’t Look Up) and a flattering profile in Architectural Digest about his “quiet and relaxing” getaway home on 12 acres in Ireland. In the time since, the Anchorman director has ignored questions about why he won’t sacrifice the luxurious estate — and the 10,000-mile round trip that requires a considerable amount of jet fuel — while screaming at the world to “just stop oil.”
This week, however, McKay appears to have vented some of his frustrations about these “queries,” while massively downplaying the scale of his own carbon sins, in an essay for Current Affairs. The editorial, titled “The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate,” presents a grim thesis: “Thinking we have time left to address climate change… is driving us toward full social collapse.”
And his rage is not directed at fascist chuds who stubbornly believe there isn’t enough evidence to demonstrate that human industry is the one and only determinative variable in global climate variations. The filmmaker is shaming liberal social climbers — “the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations” — for believing that the government must only take action that’s palatable to voters, setting far-off targets like “Net Zero by 2050.”
McKay’s warning does highlight an inconsistency in these left-wing, respectability-politics yuppies: if they really think global warming is an existential threat, they’d better act like it:
[I]f our institutions, news and elected officials continue to feed and water the oil company-conceived mega-falsehood that climate breakdown is something just “our great-grandkids need to worry about,” human civilization as we know it will collapse and billions could die. And we’re not talking about the far distant future. We are talking about collapse within years, not centuries. For real. [emphasis added]
On this point, credit the man for consistency. It’s been 20 years since Al Gore’s 10-year countdown to an irreversible “tipping point” for the fate of the planet. It’s been seven since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 12-year countdown to the world’s end. The climate “crisis” looks more and more like a grift when the deadline for urgent action keeps getting pushed back.
Oh wait, never mind; McKay did the same thing.
And in true DSA fashion, he believes someone else needs to make the sacrifices necessary to save the world:
Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it. [emphasis added]
The filmmaker has clearly heard the question about his personal energy consumption many, many times, and it has gotten under his skin. Note how he frames the concerns as quibbling about “plastic straws” instead of the nearly 10 tons of carbon emissions required for his Ireland trips — nearly matching the typical annual “carbon footprint” of the average American if he only visits two times per year. He isn’t sinning, because someone else is sinning even more!
It’s like a plantation owner refusing to release his slaves just because slave traders have thousands of slaves. Or, to avoid analogies altogether, there’s the episode where McKay screamed at a Vanity Fair reporter noting the incongruity of his DSA shirt while cruising around in a Bentley luxury vehicle. “JUST BECAUSE I HAVE BELIEFS I CAN’T DRIVE A NICE CAR?!!” he reportedly shrieked (years after this embarrassing incident was publicized, he claims only to own EVs and “avoid driving as much as possible”).
Even if you buy his excuse that cleaning up his own act won’t affect the fate of the planet, McKay’s refusal to let go of his second-continent home exposes his disbelief in an imminent collapse.
“[B]illions will die well before ‘Net Zero by 2050’ or ‘our great grandkids’ future’ arrive,” he closes out his piece. “Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do.” If he’s already warning people to stockpile food and make an “evacuation plan” like a chudded-out doomsday prepper, does he really expect to make it across the Atlantic for some R&R in that situation?
Maybe McKay isn’t purely a cynical grifter shaming people into funding his film pitches and the NGOs and businesses of people he likes. Maybe he’s just inconsistent and hasn’t thought through his positions; he wouldn’t be the first leftist in history to do so. But whatever his motivations, the guy’s clearly a poser, and until he announces he’s sold the Ireland mansion and donated the proceeds, we’ll take every opportunity he gives us to remind the world about this inconvenient truth.