Energy

DiCaprio’s Recent Flight From France To NY Burned Enough Carbon To Power 20 Homes For A Year

(REUTERS/Toby Melville)

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Chris White Tech Reporter
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Leonardo DiCaprio burned the equivalent of about 90 tons of coal when he took a private jet on an 8,000-mile round-trip flight from France to New York City on his way to pick up an environmental award, according to calculations by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The longtime environmental activist expanded his carbon footprint when he flew 8,000 miles from Cannes to New York City to secure an award by a clean-water advocacy group at the Riverkeeper Fishermen’s Ball. DiCaprio then flew back to France a day later to attend an AIDS benefit gala.

“The Revenant” actor burned more than 17,000 gallons of jet fuel during the trip, which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator, equals approximately 169,400 lbs. of coal burned, or about 90 tons of coal.

The DCNF’s calculations – which were based on the Gulfstream IV, a jet that DiCaprio often uses when gallivanting across the world – do not fully account for weather, the weight of the aircraft during flight, or the exact speed of DiCaprio’s jet. But they do give a basic understanding of the sheer amount of carbon emissions the high-flying, oil gulping activist spews into the air each time he flies around the world.

His 8,000-mile trip used more total greenhouse gas emission than 33 passenger vehicles over a one-year period of time, as well as that of 57 tons of waste sent to a landfill. The total trip also burned more carbon emissions than 20 U.S. homes’ electricity use over one year. DiCaprio did all of this in just one back and forth trip.

DiCaprio’s environmental foundation, which he named after himself, pledged $15 million in grants to help protect the environment at the World Economic Forum in July 2015.

While excepting another honor from the World Economic Forum in January, he etched out time in his acceptance speech to lambaste coal companies for supposedly destroying the environment, all in an effort to make a quick buck.

“We simply cannot afford to allow the corporate greed of the coal, oil and gas industries to determine the future of humanity. Those entities with a financial interest in preserving this destructive system have denied and even covered-up the evidence of our changing climate,” the actor said at the time.

Robert Rapier, a Forbes writer and renewable energy insider, took exception to DiCaprio’s Oscar award acceptance speech in March, in which the actor went of on a screed against “big polluters.”

“The problem is that DiCaprio himself is one of those ‘big polluters,’ which diminishes his moral authority to lecture others on reducing their own carbon emissions,” Rapier wrote.

He continued: “While DiCaprio has donated a lot of his time, money, and effort into raising awareness on the issue — as he did in his Oscar speech — he unnecessarily hands ammunition to his opponents with his own wasteful consumption.”

DiCaprio’s high-flying ways are well documented, especially after hacked Sony documents in 2015 appeared to show the actor chartered private jets and flew back and forth from New York to Los Angeles six times in six weeks.

Of course “The Wolf Of Wall Street” actor is not the only Hollywood actor turned climate justice warrior to get caught emitting embarrassing amounts of emissions via private jets. Environmentalist and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for one, burned his fair share of jet fuel when he was governor of California in the mid-2000s.

Calculations show Schwarzenegger used around 1,132,356 gallons, or 10,837 tons, of jet fuel to get to and from the California governor’s mansion. Another calculation from online publication Hopes and Fears showed that one person could have flown round-trip from New York to Japan 3,408 times with the amount of fuel Schwarzenegger used as governor.

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