The United Nations wants the world to shrink its carbon footprint, yet one Turkish runway is telling a very different story this week.
The 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP31, opened in Antalya, Turkey, and the private jets arrived right along with it. According to The Western Journal, citing a CNN report, at least 93 private jets have landed in Antalya since the summit got underway, roughly 22 times the private traffic the airport normally handles over the same stretch.
That total is also a sharp jump from last year's gathering. Only 66 private jet flights were recorded heading to COP30, which suggests the jet set has grown more comfortable with its double standard, not less.
Conservative strategist Steve Guest captured the reaction on X. "Rules for thee but not for me," he wrote, adding, "An estimated 93 private jets landed in Antalya, Turkey for COP31 in the past five days while the climate cult demands sacrifices from everyone else."
"That's at least 22 TIMES the number of jets that landed at the airport in the same time last year," Guest continued. "By comparison, just 66 private jet flights were recorded going to COP30so the elites are taking more private jets while they demand the rest of us cut back."
Notably, the numbers did not come from a right-leaning watchdog. They were compiled by Oxfam, the British progressive charity attending COP31 to push for "climate action rooted in justice, equity, and accountability," using data from the PolluterJet flight-tracking project.
By Oxfam's estimate, those flights released roughly 777 tons of carbon dioxide, according to Scotland's The National. The group's remedy, predictably, is a steep new tax on private jets, which it argued would "send a clear message" that "climate leadership does not stop at speeches and summits."
"While families mourn their loved ones killed by floods and suffer from scorching heat, the super-rich continue to fly in private jets, high above the devastating consequences," Oxfam international executive director Amitabh Behar said, as quoted by the German news agency DPA. "Governments must stop treating the super-rich's extraordinarily environmentally harmful luxury goods as an untouchable privilege. Taxing private jets is an obvious first step."
Yet the deeper problem on display in Antalya is not a shortage of taxes. It is that the people demanding ordinary families give up affordable energy, reliable cars and cheap flights rarely seem willing to give up anything themselves.
This is hardly the first time the pattern has surfaced. During COP30 in Brazil last year, a large swath of rainforest was cleared so that VIPs could reach the conference site without hassle, a detail that made the summit's real priorities difficult to miss.
For years, the international climate establishment wielded enormous unelected influence, pressing Western nations toward carbon credits, energy austerity and higher living costs. Meanwhile, the world's most prolific polluters, China chief among them, were held to practically no standards at all.
A string of election results eventually pushed that crowd toward the sidelines, though never so far that it stopped making calls. A few favorable results of late, however, appear to have put the globalist climate set back in the picture and living large once again.
Some questions remain open, since the tracker counts every business jet landing in Antalya and concedes it cannot confirm which passengers came for the summit. Later tracking cited by Oxfam pushed the tally to 94 jets and about 816 metric tons of carbon dioxide, and with private traffic running more than 20 times above normal, few will believe the timing is a coincidence.
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