Bill Maher calls out ‘hypocrite’ environmentalists

“Real Time” host Bill Maher came clean on Friday night about his environmental sin while addressing the urgent need to combat climate change. 

During his closing monologue, Maher told his viewers that “asking people to be good” when it comes to going green hasn’t worked, so he took a different approach. 

“My name is Bill, and I fly private,” Maher turned to the camera. “And so does every other person who calls themselves an ‘environmentalist’ who can!”

He then aired a photo collage of countless celebrities being spotted boarding or leaving their private jets which included Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, Bono, Mark Zuckerberg, Beyoncé Knowles Carter, and Jay-Z, and even prominent Democrats like former President Bill Clinton as well as Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.  and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

“If you don’t see a celebrity’s picture here, it’s because we weren’t allowed to use it,” Maher said. “But all the environmentalists of Hollywood and Washington do it. Their position on climate change is ‘We must do more to stop pouring carbon into the air, except for me when I wanted to go somewhere and then I take a private jet.’ It turns out there is one thing in this world that is completely impossible to resist. And this is it. It’s like heroin, if you do it once, you’ll never stop.”

The HBO star told his audience there are only two kinds of people in the world; “those who fly private and those who would if they could,” adding that the category of “those who could but do not” does not exist with the exceptions of actor Ed Begley and child activist Greta Thunberg. 

“Everyone else is full of s— and I’m done being full of s—,”  Maher said. “I can take being a bad environmentalist because almost all of us are, but I can’t take being a hypocrite. Now I always justified renting a plane because I only used it for work and literally could not get to most of my standup gigs on time any other way. How do you think I did it all those years I said good night here at 8 pm and was onstage in Vegas at 10? But I don’t need to do stand-up, like tomorrow night in Albuquerque. And outside of heads of state, almost everyone else could fly commercial. Why don’t they? Ask anyone who tried to get home for Christmas last year.”

Maher went on to call out the Biden administration’s climate czar John Kerry for his infamous use of private jets, saying “it’s like if the Secretary of Homeland Security smuggled drugs in his butt.” 

“People take jets to environmental conferences! If you could run TED Talks on hypocrisy, you wouldn’t need coal,” Maher quipped. Look, sorry not sorry. I tried to do my part to the environment. I never had kids, the one thing worse for the planet than private jets… I had the first generation Prius in 2001. It looked like a Tylenol gel cap. I was always handing my keys to valets that were driving a better car than me. I had the first Tesla in 2010 And honestly, both these cars sucked… But both times, I said to myself, ‘Okay, I’ll take one for the team because I have a platform so I’ll do the right thing. And then everybody will follow.’… Nobody followed.”

He later concluded, “So yes, it’s fun to laugh at powerful people. That’s how I can afford to fly private, but we need to get serious. Really. More nuclear, moving way more money into research and development, I don’t know but something serious because the real technological problem is the way people are wired. I know it’s easier just to blame Taylor Swift’s plane but honestly, do you want to be stuck on Southwest with a pissed-off Taylor Swift?”