Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Branded Hypocrites For Flying Home In Private Jet After Platinum Jubilee

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have been slammed as "hypocrites" after returning home from the U.K. in a private jet following the Platinum Jubilee weekend, a report has claimed.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex quietly left England Sunday with their son Archie, 3, and daughter Lilibet, 1, skipping the Platinum Jubilee Pageant that officially closed the four-day celebration for Queen Elizabeth's 70-year reign. They flew back to California on a Bombardier Global 6000, The Times U.K. reported Tuesday.

The aircraft was described as an "ultra-long range" jet that can soar 6,000 miles without refueling and carry up to 13 passengers, according to the outlet. It features a "private stateroom," among other amenities.

According to Paramount Business Jets, a chartered flight provider, the family of four's 5,500-mile trip from Farnborough, England, to Santa Barbara is estimated to have emitted nearly 60 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Each person’s carbon budget should be no more than 2.1 tons per year, according to the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, which Prince Harry and Markle exceeded by roughly 15 times on just one journey, The Times reported.

"They pontificate about helping people and the planet, and then they take private jets," royal expert Tom Quinn, author of "Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle," told the newspaper. "They tell people to look after the environment, and then they don't look after the environment themselves. It's enormously hypocritical."

The biographer claimed that Prince Harry and Markle used a "Russian oligarch kind of jet" that is a natural fit for people who "just don't care."

"It's bad enough to get private jets, but to get one where the emissions are particular bad is almost like sticking two fingers up at the environmental lobby," Quinn added.

According to a climate consultancy cited by the Times, flying from Heathrow, England, to Los Angeles in an economy-class seat on a commercial airplane emits 1.4 tons of carbon dioxide.

Prince Harry and Markle are known advocates for climate change, with the Duke of Sussex dubbing it one of the "most pressing issues" facing mankind today.

"We need to do better about stopping or allowing the things that are causing so much harm to so many of us at the source, rather than being distracted by the symptom," Prince Harry told Oprah Winfrey in the couple's tell-all interview in March last year.

Prince Harry also previously faced backlash for reportedly taking a private jet to a four-day climate change event that Google hosted in Sicily, Italy, in 2019.

The Italian media reported at the time that 114 private jets flew into Palermo during the event.

"Climate change is a humanitarian issue, not a political one, and one where we've been far too slow in waking up to the issues and acting on the damaging impact our ways of living are having on the world," Prince Harry said in a speech for WE Day in the same year. "I know you don’t sit back and wait for solutions, you take action and create them."