After flying back to California from the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in a ‘Russian oligarch-style’ private plane, Harry and Meghan have been accused of ‘enormous hypocrisy.’
On a gas-spewing Bombardier Global 6000, the eco-preaching Duke and Duchess of Sussex returned to their £11 million Montecito estate with their children Archie and Lilibet before the Jubilee pageant’s grand finale began on Sunday.
Bombardier is a 13-passenger ‘ultra long range’ private jet with its own ‘private cabin’ with a flatbed that can go over 6,000 miles without stopping.
Experts estimate that the £160,000 trip emitted ten times as much carbon as if the Sussexes had flown a commercial flight. According to leased jet firm Paramount Business Jets, the royal couple’s flight from Farnborough to Santa Barbara generated roughly 60 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the sky.
Each person’s carbon budget should be no more than 2.1 tonnes per year, according to the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, which Harry and Meghan exceeded by roughly 15 times on just one journey.
Because Harry and Meghan travelled into Britain on a private jet, and assuming it was the same plane, their total return trip would have been about 30 times the annual limit. According to climate firm Cube6, going from Heathrow to LA in an economy-class seat on a commercial airplane emits 1.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
‘We need to do better about stopping or allowing the things that are causing so much harm to so many of us at the source, rather than being distracted by the symptom,’ the Duke of Sussex previously said of climate change, calling it one of the’most pressing issues we are facing.’ During the couple’s bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey last year, he said: ‘We need to do better about stopping or allowing the things that are causing so much harm to so many
Tom Quinn, a royal expert, has now accused the Sussexes of “enormous hypocrisy.” ‘They lecture about helping people and the world and then they use private jets,’ the author of Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle told The Times. They tell people to take care of the environment, yet they don’t take care of it themselves. It’s a colossal act of hypocrisy.’
He described the Bombardier 6000 as a “Russian oligarch kind of plane” for those who “don’t give a damn,” adding that it’s “almost like throwing two thumbs up at the environmental lobby.”
Several Russian businessmen, including Roman Abramovich and Farkhad Akhmedov, have been linked to the jet type in the past.