I live in West County under the flight path of the Sonoma County airport. Normally on average I notice about one or two flights coming or going low overhead into or out of the airport per day. Last week for a few days, however, it seemed for long stretches that there was a jet flying overhead every 10 or 15 minutes or so. I was wondering what was going on until I realized it was no doubt private jets coming in for the annual Bohemian Grove retreat that was happening.
It got me wondering — since the Bohemian Grove is located in Sonoma County, does all that carbon emission count against Sonoma County’s carbon emission goals?
According to a New York Times article, traveling by private jet can spew 130 times that of flying commercial. Doing some brief Google research I learned about the fuel consumption of several popular private jets. The Gulfstream 400, for instance, burns 800 gallons of fuel per hour and emits 8,785 pounds of carbon dioxide per hour. So a six hour flight from New York to Sonoma, then another six hours back, would burn, if these figures are in the ballpark, 9,600 gallons of fuel and spew 105,420 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere just so one Bohemian Club .1% sociopathic asshole doesn’t have to suffer the inconvenience of flying first class into SFO and then limopooling. Multiply that by 40 or so times (I don’t know the exact number of private jets for the retreat) and it adds up to an unbelievably obscene display of greed and shitting on the environment. It might be more than the total annual carbon emissions of one small African nation.
No amount of supposed “carbon offset”, if it is even done, could make up for this. And do these Bohemian Club pricks even care?
I think about how our community works hard to limit emissions and how so many people I know here are climate heroes and doing so much to lower their footprint, all erased in only one week by these consumption pigs. (Actually, that’s an insult to pigs who don’t f-up our atmosphere as these sociopaths do.)
Is this tolerable?
Scott