Artist Olafur Eliasson and geology professor Minik Thorleif Rosing just shipped 30 giant chunks of glacial ice all the way from Greenland to London for an “artistic exhibit” to show people that the Earth’s ice caps are melting thanks to man-made climate change.
Let me rephrase, in case the irony here wasn’t obvious: some people used gas-fueled transportation that contributes greatly to the so-called “carbon footprint” to strip dozens of ice chunks from an already-melting glacier, just to cart them all the way to England so people can watch them predictably melt, supposedly to protest the very problem they just contributed to.
The display is entitled “Ice Watch” and is backed by funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a non-profit activist organization founded by left-wing businessman and former NYC Mayor Michael Boomberg.
And these weren’t icicles that could be easily transported in a shoebox, either. KMBC reports that “Each block of ice weighs anywhere from more than 3,300 pounds to more than 13,000 pounds.”
Ironically, none of the laudatory reports praising this "exhibit" detail exactly how the group managed to get all this ice to London in the first place. But unless the equipment and transportation used to fish out and haul these massive blocks all ran on rainbows and unicorn farts, it's pretty safe to assume some big, bad carbon-emitting fuel was involved.
Bloomberg said in a statement that he “hope[s] Olafur Eliasson’s work of art will inspire bolder and more ambitious actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by governments, businesses, and communities.”
Apparently, those ambitious actions don’t include avoiding unnecessary air and sea travel to internationally ferry in chunks of frozen water to melt in a city’s streets.
It’s not the first time Eliasson and his go-green backers have wasted gas carting in ice blocks to try and make their point. They set up a similar displayusing eight 11-ton chunks of glacier in Paris ahead of the 2015 global climate change conference - a meeting that emitted an estimated 300,000 tons of CO2, by the way.
Despite their rather ridiculous efforts, not a single signer of the Paris Agreement has met their carbon-reduction pledges.