20 November 2010

Hey Green Europe, Meet Environmental Hypocrite Barack Obama and His Eight Tons of Diesel-Guzzling Detroit Iron

Global Warming allies left scratching their heads as 
Dear Leader arrives at summit in a 8mpg Panzer...


Most Americans are no longer surprised by Obama's do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do liberal duplicity on issues such as smoking, green lifestyles, or personal modesty/frugality.  And anyone who did actual DD on Obama's environmental platform back in '08 can tell you his last ride before arriving in DC to heal the earth was a 300hp Chrysler 300 Hemi.

But the starry-eyed European Left is still coming out of the hopenchange ether, so many of them were appalled that even as the EU's left-leaning leaders -Obama's best carbon-trading allies in the world- were arriving at summits in Portugal this week on bikes and in electric cars, diplomatic klutz Obama showed up with the standard monster... one that weighs over 3x as much as a normal Caddy:
While the Portuguese prime minister and the Portuguese president of the European Union’s executive commission are tooling around the NATO summit here in no-emission electric vehicles, Mr. Obama is fouling the Lisbon skies with his no-efficiency "Beast," the eight-ton, diesel-fueled behemoth of a limousine the president carts around the world with him. 

Obama is expected to discuss climate change and a common US-Europe approach to it when he takes part in a US-European Union (EU) summit after the NATO meeting on Saturday. But in the meantime, the Portuguese capital is being treated to a jarring dichotomy: the polluting "leader of the free world," on one hand, lumbering across town in the Beast with a phalanx of black Secret Service vehicles and Portuguese police motorcycles in tow; and the Europeans zipping around in smart electric vehicles, on the other. Oh, and to drive the point home, journalists attending the summit are being ferried to events in electric buses, as well. 

A “note to the media” left at every journalist’s work station in the summit press center says the use of electric vehicles is meant to raise awareness of Portugal’s “world pioneering leadership in electric mobility.” Portugal claims to derive 45 percent of its electricity consumption from “clean” energies. Its “Mobi.E” electric mobility network – with 100 charging stations in 25 municipalities around the country, set to rise to 1,300 charging points by mid-2011 – is considered a world leader. 

But the Portuguese press is more interested in the Beast. Pages in Lisbon newspapers have been dedicated to cutaway renderings of “Cadillac One,” with charts and boxes offering every detail of the vehicle that the Secret Service divulges: the Kevlar tires, the special foam in the gas tank to immediately extinguish any fire from a direct hit, the supply of presidential blood...