Obama Czar Rattner Decries 'Climate-Change Deniers'—But Flies Big Private Jet

I hate to criticize a fellow pilot, but when one engages in such sky-high hypocrisy, well . . .

On Morning Joe today, former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, a very successful hedge fund manager, decried "climate-change denier[s]." This is the same Rattner who, at last report, owned a "15,000-square-foot mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, to which [he] flies regularly on a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet [see file photo] he pilots himself."  Rattner wrung his hands over the fact that we're "putting millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day." But just earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story entitled "Your Biggest Carbon Sin May Be Air Travel."  View the video after the jump.

Another example of rich liberals being all for the little people reducing their carbon footprint, while they continue to fly high in carbon-emitting style?


JOE SCARBOROUGH: Steve Rattner, this time yesterday we had Paul Krugman on the show, and you had actually sent in an e-mail talking about your concerns that Krugman suggests we don't have to worry about long-term debt so much. He said deficits, long-term debt, are number five, maybe number six on the list. You took exception to it and you said that denying the coming debt was like being a climate-change denier.

STEVE RATTNER: Yeah, I think actually Mika started that analogy and Paul Krugman basically said the opposite. And too me, being a debt-denier is the same thing as being a climate-change denier. We're putting millions of tons of carbon into our atmosphere every day that we're going to have to deal with and we're incurring billions of debt everyday that we're going to have to deal with. And sure, they're different problems, but I think it's the same issue: do you recognize the problems now and deal with them, or do you simply sit and let it fester until something really bad happens?

Mark Finkelstein
Mark Finkelstein is a contributing editor for NewsBusters.