(LifeSiteNews) – Microsoft co-founder and left-wing financier Bill Gates denied that his use of a fuel-heavy private jet to travel around the world meaningfully contributes to anthropogenic global warming when weighed against all the money he spends on climate activism, rejecting the suggestion of hypocrisy in a recent interview with the BBC.

The Daily Wire notes that the tech billionaire “flew more than 213,000 miles on 59 private jet flights in 2017, according to a study from Linnaeus University economics professor Stefan Gössling. The flight activity created some 1,760 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is nearly 109 times higher than the emissions per capita in the United States, according to data from the World Bank.”

Speaking to reporter Amol Rajan while in Kenya, Gates addressed the apparent discrepancy by asking, “should I stay at home and not come to Kenya and learn about farming and malaria? I’m comfortable with the idea that not only am I not part of the problem by paying for the offsets, but also through the billions that my Breakthrough Energy Group is spending, that I’m part of the solution.”

Gates’s answer alludes to the practice of “carbon credits,’’ by which individuals may theoretically cancel out own “carbon footprint”’ by donating an amount of money to “carbon reduction” causes that allegedly have equal or greater impact in the opposite direction. Critics have long alleged that carbon credits are little more than a pretext for climate activists to raise money while exempting the wealthiest among them from having to practice the lifestyle changes they demand the rest of the world adopt.

Activists claim there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)—the view that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate—but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.

Further, contrary to claims that people are dying due to “climate change,” data from the International Disasters Database show that “climate related deaths” (i.e., deaths due to floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures) have dramatically and steadily declined since the 1920s.

AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings.

In March 2019, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore called AGW alarmism a “complete hoax and scam,” a “kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology” that is “as bad a thing that has happened to science in the history of science.”

Gates, a vocal proponent of sweeping policy changes to combat AGW, is also an advocate for abortion-on-demand, population control, and the COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the subject of troubling speculation about his relationship with deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

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