McCartney…is nothing new. Think Al Gore for a prime example, or Sheryl Crow. Now Paul McCartney is being accused of hypocrisy:

“The former Beatle has long been an outspoken advocate of environmental causes and animal rights. He is a vegetarian who won’t even wear leather shoes. But now he’s being criticized for having a [Lexus hybrid] car flown to him in Britain rather than having it sent by ship.”

The jet engines used to fly the car to him dumped more carbon into the atmosphere than McCartney would save if he drove only this oh-so-environmentally-friendly car for the next 45.7 billion years. (Okay, I’m not certain about that figure.) But isn’t there a bigger point to be made here?

The most pertinent fact that nobody seems to be pointing out is that the reason McCartney was the recipient of this car in the first place is because Lexus was the sponsor of his 2005 tour of the United States. A tour.

So this “outspoken advocate of environmental causes” along with his entourage, stage, crew, and equipment traveled from Miami to Tampa to Atlanta to Philadelphia to Boston to New York to Washington DC to Toronto to Detroit to Chicago to Columbus to Milwaukee to St. Paul to Des Moines to Omaha to Denver to Seattle to Portland to San Jose to Anaheim to Sacramento to Houston to Dallas to Phoenix to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, and nobody expects us to call him a hypocrite?

Frankly, the sheer weight of the monstrous torrent of carbon emitted by McCartney’s 2005 tour makes concerns over this single plane trip look like a chokingly disastrous attempt at humour.