Pelosi Spends $533K On Copenhagen Climate Change Summit

By Richard West on February 3, 2010, 8:03 am

It took Nancy Pelosi three planes to fly to Copenhagen. She only flew on one of them. The cost: $168,000. Guess who picked up the bill? You did. True, a delegation of House members traveled with the Speaker, but how much legroom do fifteen Democrats, six Republicans and their staffers really need? Not enough to fill up three military airplanes. Many of the other Congressional staffers, flying commercial, paid “government fares” as much as $10,038. This for a round trip that can be booked online for as little as $1,600.

When all the hotel rooms, meals, transportation and mini-bar tabs had been calculated, the total cost to taxpayers – not including the military planes – came to $553,564. Think of it as a dozen jobs for wage earners in middle-class families or half a dozen homes saved from foreclosure.

Why Were House Members Even There

While House members will review, modify and propose climate change legislation at home, the membership did not participate in direct global warming negotiations at the UN summit in Denmark. It was, however, an opportunity for the Obama administration to suggest to the world that American politicians are concerned about carbon emissions.

Speaker Pelosi has long styled herself an environmental champion, enjoying throughout her political career wide support from the Sierra Club and other watchdog groups. Perhaps the Speaker and her delegation could have created a supportive video and put it up on Youtube. It would have been a lot cheaper. Particularly since well in advance of the summit all indications were that no meaningful agreement would be reached between the major players in the climate change debate.

The Copenhagen Meltdown

In the year’s long run-up to the UN’s Copenhagen summit much was made of the necessity to bring meaningful legislation to the table at home and abroad, prior to autumn 2009. In the United States, while the debate over proposed carbon taxes and new regulation was embraced by the Obama administration, most Americans did not feel it a priority in a period of economic distress and uncertainty. Nor did many other nations in the world. The summit itself produced no meaningful agreement. In fact, many analysts believe the summit widened the rift between developing nations and manufacturing nations over the issue of future international standards.

 

Part of the problem, perhaps, is the seeming inability of the Obama administration to stay on message. They sent a whole lot of people to Copenhagen on a trip that to all indications was a meaningless gesture, polluting in the process. They then purchased carbon “offsets” with taxpayer money, effectively cleaning up a mess they never had to make in the first place.

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