Google’s carbon-spewing climate change conference at an Italian resort has been widely slammed as a tone-deaf party for the elite A-listers who jetted there.
“Is there anything more hypocritical than a bunch of rich people flying their private jets across the world to sit on yachts and discuss the future of our planet?” said Twitter user @asilia1981, reflecting the general reaction online to this week’s Google Camp event in Sicily.
As the party drew to a close on Thursday, newspaper columns and social media were awash with criticism for the three-day, billionaire-packed event — which saw more than 200 of the world’s richest and most famous names take private jets to the Italian island and stay on mega yachts while also talking about stopping climate change.
BBC presenter Andrew Neil repeatedly lampooned the event on Twitter.
“Scores of celebrities and the rich have arrived in Sicily for a Google conference. They came in 114 private jets and a flotilla of super yachts,” Neil wrote to his nearly 1 million Twitter followers. “The conference is on global warming.
“Well, what is conference going to achieve, other than a glamorous [party] for the rich?”
In an opinion piece in The Times, Stuart Heritage sneered: “If the best name that Google could think of to save the world is Harry Styles, we’re all screwed.”
The billionaire creators of Google each year invite a who’s who of A-listers to the event, which is meant to be a conference where influential people discuss how to make the world a better place.
But photos of celebrities tooling around the island on Maseratis and arriving on diesel-spewing mega yachts worth up to $400 million infuriated everyone watching from home.
