As Noel Sheppard reported last night on Newsbusters, CBS's Sharyl Attkisson revealed Monday (see Noel's post for video) that "101 Congress-related" people flew to the Copenhagen climate summit last month, at tremendous cost to taxpayers.
But although Attkisson ended the piece with a brief nod to the environmental impact of the huge Nancy Pelosi-approved delegation, her otherwise excellent report told only part of the story. That is, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi approved a Congressional delegation to Copenhagen almost a quarter of the size of the entire Congress, she approved an enormous carbon footprint -- and she did it just a few months after twisting arms (brutally) to get Congress to pass the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.
Using a calculator and some information available to anyone with internet access, my husband David worked out some quick facts regarding the carbon footprint of Nancy Pelosi's delegation. According to David:
- Pelosi's delegation expended the same amount of carbon as 1,300 people combined in Bangladesh expend in an entire year;
- the Pelosi delegation expended at least 378 metric tons of CO2 and probably considerably more;
- Americans presently expend nearly 20 tons of carbon per capita, per year. Each member of the Pelosi delegation, on average, expended 19 percent of that annual per capita amount -- but in just two days.
I'm not critical of Attkisson's report. It is important to cover the way politicians misspend our money. But much of the mainstream press professes concern about CO2 emissions leading to dangerous global warming, so I have just one question: Why aren't reporters covering this part of the story?
