Where does James Cameron buy the fuel for his private jet?

James Cameron gassing up for change

It is comforting to know that one of America’s leading industrialists is jetting in from Los Angeles, America’s smoggiest city, to lecture Canada about the environment.

Filmmaker James Cameron was born in Ontario, but moved to Hollywood as a teenager. He made it big there, with box office hits like Titanic, Aliens and The Terminator. Cameron is expected to personally net $350 million from Avatar alone.

As Esquire magazine points out, that’s almost as big as the GDP of the Caribbean country of Dominica, population 72,500.

But pay no attention to his lifestyle, or his extravagant projects with their vast energy consumption. Do not be distracted by his deeds. Listen to the man’s words. He is a prophet.

Ours “will be a dying world if we don’t make some fundamental changes about how we view ourselves and how we view wealth,” he said this year. “We’re going to have to live with less.”

The man is an artist, so he is entitled to use sophisticated techniques like irony and metaphor. So when he says “we” should live with less, he means “you” should. Cameron’s press tour to promote Avatar took him to 107 cities. Perhaps he’ll “live with less” for Avatar II, by flying to just 100 cities.

You know, set an example for the little people.

Oh, don’t make that face. What, aren’t you more grateful for his advice? Who are you to judge that a tycoon living in an 8,000-square-foot house, with an adjacent 6,000-square-foot house for staff, can’t also be an expert on modest living?

Cameron is coming here because he called Canada’s oilsands an environmental “black eye,” and now he wants to see them for himself. Ordinary people get the facts first, before denouncing something. But Cameron isn’t ordinary. He’s special.

There is a chance that Cameron will change his mind. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is going to meet with Cameron to make Canada’s case. But Cameron has a track record when it comes to people he disagrees with politically.

Last month, he called people who are skeptical of the theory of man-made global warming “swine.”

That’s an improvement from this spring, when he said he wants to “call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out” calling one skeptic a “f------ a------” and saying “I believe in ecoterrorism.”

Stelmach should prepare for his meeting with this deep thinker by listening to some gangsta rap.

In a brief moment of common courtesy and intellectual open-mindedness, Cameron once agreed to debate global-warming skeptics, including another filmmaker named Ann McElhinney. Cameron soon started demanding various changes to the terms — that it be switched from a debate to a roundtable discussion, that only Cameron be allowed to film it, that all media be kept out, etc.

McElhinney’s group accepted all the changes. But literally a day before the debate, Cameron cancelled. So much for wanting a shoot-out at high noon.

Canada should be open to anyone visiting our oilsands — it’s one of the differences between us and OPEC countries where political critics are routinely murdered. Our respect for human rights — including our protection of political dissent — is what makes us different from other oil producers.

There is a possibility, however small, that Cameron might be convinced. But I doubt it.

So once Stelmach is done answering Cameron’s questions, perhaps the premier might ask a few of his own. I’d start with an easy one: If Cameron swears off oilsand oil because it doesn’t meet his ethical standards, where does he buy his jet fuel from? What ethical standards meet the Cameron morality test? Terrorist Saudi Arabia? Nuke-building Iran? Toxic Nigeria?

Or is that one of the things he didn’t want the media to ask about at his cancelled debate?