Leonardo DiCaprio faced a mob of fans and fellow environmentalists as he arrived for Monday’s opening of the COP26 climate summit, and was praised for being one of the summit’s few VIPs to not jet into Glasgow, Scotland on a luxury private plane.
DiCaprio, who describes himself on social media as an “actor and environmentalist,” was swept into Glasgow’s SEC Centre by police and bodyguards, after proving some of his eco bona fides by arriving by commercial plane, according to the Daily Mail.
DiCaprio hasn’t always been so environmentally sensitive when it comes to his travel choices. Several years ago, he was called out for being an “eco-hypocrite” for his extensive use of diesel-burning private planes and yachts to travel around the world for business and pleasure.
DiCaprio’s choice of transport for this pivotal climate summit certainly departed from how other “green” VIPs made their way to Glasgow. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Prince Charles, Prince Albert of Monaco and others angered environmentalists by using private planes to travel to Scotland, Insider and Page Six reported.
A fleet of some 400 private planes, led by Bezos’s $65 million Gulf Stream, descended on Scotland over the weekend and created what one local news outlet described as “an extraordinary traffic jam (that) forced empty planes to fly 30 miles to find space to park,” Page Six reported.
The private jets were expected to shuttle some 1,000 world leaders, CEOs and their staff around to various events for the summit, which was organized to “bring together world leaders to commit to urgent global climate action,” Insider said.
During Monday’s opening, some of those world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden and UN Secretary General António Guterres, delivered apocalyptic warnings about the earth’s future, the New York Times reported. They described how there was scarce time left to avert catastrophic global warming unless governments and businesses aggressively commit to cutting greenhouse emissions.
A-list attendees seemed fine with excusing themselves from this message when it came to their personal travel convenience. The European advocacy group Transport and Environment said in a May report that private planes were five to 14 times as polluting as commercial planes on a per passenger basis, and 50 times as polluting as trains, Insider reported.
Matt Finch, the UK policy manager for the Transport and Environment group, despaired of the contradictory message sent by VIP attendees. Their private jet travel was expected to produce more global warming gas than 1,600 Scots burn through in a year, according to Scotland’s Sunday Mail.
Finch told the Sunday Mail: “The average private jet, and we are not talking Air Force One, emits 2 tons of CO2 for every hour in flight.
“It can’t be stressed enough how bad private jets are for the environment, it is the worst way to travel by miles,” Finch said. “Our research has found that most journeys could easily be completed on scheduled flights.”
Speaking of Air Force One, Joe Biden also faced criticism for using his official plane to travel to Scotland, though it’s hard to imagine how else an American president would safely travel. Meanwhile, leaders from Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel and Japan likewise used their own aircraft, the Insider added.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson planned to return to London from Scotland on a private jet, though his spokesperson insisted it ran on sustainable fuel, The Guardian reported. His spokesperson said: “It is important that the prime minister is able to move round the country, and obviously we face significant time constraints.”
Prince Charles’ spokesperson also justified the royal’s use of a private jet to travel to Glasgow from the G20 summit in Rome by saying the flight used “sustainable aviation fuel,” the Daily Mail reported.
Similarly, a spokesperson for Bezos Earth Fund told this news organization that Bezos “uses sustainable aviation fuel, and offsets all carbon emissions from his flights.” However, the spokesperson declined to answer a follow-up question about the argument that carbon offsetting doesn’t really cancel out the emissions to which they are linked.
This outrage over A-listers’ private jet use for the COP26 summit echoes the controversy that erupted in 2019 when the world’s rich and famous flew to the Italian coast to attend a Google-hosted conference on global warming. Italian press reports said that these attendees arrived in more than 100 private jets. The attendees included Barack Obama, Prince Harry, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom and Harry Styles. Some, including billionaire David Geffen, sailed into the so-called “Google Camp” via their massive private yachts.
DiCaprio also attended the Google conference, although it’s not clear if he arrived by commercial or private plane, but the megastar hasn’t always been so heroic when it comes to eschewing the luxuries of private jet travel.
The “Wolf of Wall Street” star once famously rented the world’s fifth largest yacht, owned by a UAE oil tycoon, to watch the World Cup in Brazil, according energy expert Robert Rapier, writing in a 2016 Forbes column. Such personal lifestyle choices have long threatened DiCaprio’s moral authority, even as his eponymous Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has reportedly donated millions of dollars to support projects that protect wildlife and the environment, Rapier said.
In 2016, DiCaprio used his Oscar acceptance speech to call climate change “real” and “the greatest threat to our species.”
“We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this,” DiCaprio said.
Several months after that speech, DiCaprio was labeled one of those “big polluters” and an “eco-hypocrite” when it was learned he flew 8,000 miles on private plane from France to New York to pick up an environmental award, Quartz reported. Just 24 hours later, DiCaprio further expanded his carbon footprint by flying on a private plane back to France to attend an AIDS benefit gala, Quartz added.
With DiCaprio’s commercial jet trip to Glasgow, it appears that he has learned an important lesson about walking the talk for environmentally friendly travel. Or, the actor has become smarter about letting the media know when he makes the right choices.
At the COP26 summit, DiCaprio is expected to deliver a speech and to meet up with Greta Thunberg. In 2019, DiCaprio called the teen climate change activist the “leader of our time” and revealed they had “made a commitment to support one another, in hopes of securing a brighter future for our planet.”
This story has been updated.