Hope and Fail

Burning through 160,480 gallons of fuel to pop in at lackluster climate summit

President Obama made his second stop at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, bringing his total jet-fuel usage traveling to Scandinavia this month to 160,480 gallons.

In the name of being green. And the whole summit didn’t come up with much. All he said today was that the U.S. would cut its emissions to coincide with laws we’ve already passed domestically (and did you know the U.S. is half way to meeting the Kyoto goals without ever ratifying the treaty?).

The president was initially only scheduled to appear at the summit at the end, but changed the travel plans for his trip to Oslo, Noway, to pick up his Nobel Peace Prize to include an initial stop in Copenhagen.

We know from the reporting of CBS News on his Earth Day travels that Air Force One eats up 5 gallons of fuel per mile.

The distance between Washington, D.C., and Copenhagen is 3,979 miles. So for each eight hour flight across the Atlantic, Air Force One burns 19,895 gallons of fuel.

The president’s first trip took him from D.C. to Copenhagen to Oslo and back to D.C. Copenhagen is about 300 miles from Oslo, and Oslo is 3,811 miles from D.C. That’s a total trip distance of 8,090 miles. That’s 40,450 gallons of fuel converted into carbon emissions aboard Air Force One.

The second trip was 7,958 miles long — or 39,790 gallons of fuel.

And here’s the kicker. Obama doesn’t travel with one 747. When the president flies, a backup “Air Force One” goes along for the trip. So the fuel consumption doubles.

Trip one: 80,900 gallons of fuel. Trip two: 79,580 gallons of fuel. Total fuel the president spent traveling in the name of solving global warming: 160,480 gallons of fuel.

What’s more, the president was originally only supposed to be at the summit once, not twice. An argument could be made that the first trip was justified — he was already on his way to Norway. But why go to the Copenhagen summit twice — burning an additional 79,580 gallons of jet fuel — when nearly everyone knew beforehand that the meeting wouldn’t result in anything?

And that doesn’t include the fuel spent to cart the many other administration officials who were at the entire conference, or Hillary Clinton’s trip.

Update

Not to pile on, but the Bureau of Transportation Statistics most recent report on jet fuel prices puts the cost-per-gallon at about $2. So not only did the president’s trips contribute to carbon emissions, it cost $320,960 to buy the fuel!

Couldn’t the president have set an example and appeared at the summit via video, as he did for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall? Considering the cost, that would have been “sexy.”