VIDEO: Kennedy Smashes Tulane Professor On Climate Hypocrisy

Jesse M. Keenan is a Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning at the School of Architecture at Tulane University in New Orleans. He’s also a fairly rabid climate-change proponent who commonly makes scoldy statements about others over their “carbon footprints.” Keenan has, for example, upbraided Americans for  building and living in houses he thinks are too big, and he’s been a bit screamy over “fossil fuel interests,” demanding that elite universities refuse contributions to their endowments from ‘dirty” fossil fuel money.

He’s a pretty typical bow-tied academic, though Keenan has made himself something of a media personality thanks to legacy corporate media outlets who can’t get enough of topics like “climate gentrification” and “climate migration” on which he seems to be an authority.

He’s not alone in this, but the truth about Keenan is he’s fully invested in the climate change narrative. If it weren’t for the belief that human beings burning more carbon than we did 100 years ago and therefore increasing the amount of carbon dioxide, a trace gas in our atmosphere, is the cause of a future catastrophe as global temperature rises a few degrees – though very unlikely more than it’s been at various times in our past when the planet and humanity got along just fine, then he’d be just another architecture professor at a middling private university.

If there were no climate change narrative, there would be no Jesse Keenan. It’s just that simple. He exists to sell this narrative and to make as much bank off it as possible. So he gives speeches and consults on “sustainable” land use, something that is completely unnecessary in a society not convinced of the certainty of a climate apocalypse.

And when the Senate held a hearing on climate change yesterday, Keenan was called as one of the witnesses. Sen. John Kennedy, who sits on the Budget Committee which was holding the hearing, wanted to explore a little of the rectitude and consistency surrounding Keenan’s advocacy.

So he asked Keenan about his demands that universities refuse “fossil fuel” money in light of the $25 million donation a couple of Louisiana families in the oil business had made to Tulane, and Kennedy asked the professor about his scoldings of McMansion owners in Houston in light of the several very large buildings recently finished or under construction at Tulane.

As you can imagine, the answers to Kennedy’s questions were less than convincing. Keenan was exposed as a thorough hypocrite in just five minutes.

Of course, he’s hardly alone. At least – that we know of – Keenan isn’t flying around the world on private jets while he attempts to buffalo the rest of us into living in storage containers, riding bicycles and eating bugs to save the planet.