On the hypocrisy of celebrity activists

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I love Emma Thompson’s acting. I wish somebody would tell her about Skype.

The great English actress is a climate-change activist, “activist” here meaning “a celebrity who cares about popular causes in public.” When she recently was accused of hypocrisy for jumping on a jet to attend a climate-change rally — international air travel is one of the most carbon-intensive things a person can do — she attempted to justify herself, saying: “For decades now we have been asking for clean energy, and this has been ignored.”

That is some grade-A magical thinking: The constraints involved in the problem of moving x …