EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy is flying around the country in recognition of Earth Week asking Americans “to act on climate change through simple actions to reduce carbon pollution in their daily lives.” She should look in the mirror. Her and her entourage’s five day, five city tour will log around 2,600 miles and emit approximately 3 tons of carbon pollution, which will “far exceed,” in the words of Jeff Ruch, head of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), “any concrete climate action [achieved] from their travels.”

McCarthy appeared last night in New York on the Daily Show and then will travel to Boston today before rounding out the week with stops in Cleveland, Atlanta, and Memphis. Ironically, the tour aims to teach people how to “commute without polluting.” But McCarthy and her colleagues will travel between cities by plane rather than by other, more environmentally friendly forms of travel such as train or bus. (The train from New York to Boston, for example, only takes 3.5 hours.)

Her allies in the environmental movement are calling out her hypocrisy. “Frenetically jetting around the country appears to undercut EPA’s message to ordinary Americans that they should conserve, consume less and reduce transportation pollution,” said Jeff Ruch in a statement. “Hasn’t EPA heard of Skype?”

This travel pollution is nothing out of the ordinary for McCarthy, who emits a lot of pollution in her day-to-day life as well. She travels home to Boston from Washington D.C. almost every weekend to see her family – mostly by plane. This travel alone emits around 8.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year – almost the same amount that the average American emits per year from all sources. But clearly McCarthy holds herself to a different (lower) environmental standard than the rest of us.