Most of us would agree that we are in an existential crisis regarding the future of our planet. It is also clear that protecting our earth and reducing carbon emissions has a huge impact on ensuring equity, and even life, for many of the world’s more marginalized citizens.

Yet many (most?) celebrities, from the Kardashians to Jennifer Lopez to Leonardo DiCaprio, give lip service to this fact while living hugely polluting, lavish lifestyles, owning multiple mansions, flying frequently, both commercially and in private aircraft, and having an obscene over-abundance of clothes and products that are not sustainable, the manufacturing, shipping and disposal of which are hugely polluting.

The Global Citizen Live concerts were organized in part to raise awareness to “defend the planet and defeat poverty,” and to ask regular working folks to donate money to “plant trees to help save the planet.” The hypocrisy of many celebrities who performed, but who are blatantly flying private jets for day trips is, frankly, ludicrous, and a slap in the face to all of us “regular” citizens who worry about taking one commercial flight a year for a vacation or to visit family. For example, Jennifer Lopez performed, and she is consistently listed as a celebrity with a massive carbon footprint. For her and many of the other performers to have the audacity to ask regular working people to contribute money to save the environment while they continuously use private air travel, own many obscenely huge mansions, and live – and glamorize - hugely consumerist and polluting lifestyles is beyond insulting to those of us working daily to try to save the planet. Whoopie Goldberg has talked about using private air travel so as not to be bothered by fans. 

Many celebrities will talk about “carbon offsetting,” but in reality, this does not actually reduce carbon emissions, and in the long run does more harm than good by giving a false sense that one can continue to live a lavish lifestyle and pollute our earth and somehow pay to ‘erase’ the damage done (see here for a discussion of this). Imagine the good that could be done by stopping or drastically curtailing the polluting behaviors and still helping to plant trees and take other measures to clean up our environment.

The climate crisis is an existential threat that requires drastic action on many fronts. Celebrities must reduce their carbon footprint to at least that of an average American, and we must hold them accountable to this. They must understand that not only do their blatantly carbon-intense lifestyles themselves contribute to the earth’s destruction, but that, because of their celebrity status, they serve as examples to others, exponentially increasing their damage.

We cannot  continue to allow wealthy celebrities to somehow be above needing to reduce their impact on the planet, particularly when they have great power to really make a positive change, and not just talk about it.