The $46,616.47 Oil Change and Size-22 Carbon Footprint

Of all the absurdly wealthy men in the Middle East, at least one has far more money than sense and proved it when he had his Lamborghini flown from Qatar to Britain for an oil change.

According the The Sun, the owner -- which the paper surmises is a sheik -- had Qatar Airways ship the Murcielago LP640 about 6,500 miles round trip at a cost of about 39 grand and God-knows-how-much greenhouse gas just to service the car (cost: $7,030.47). "This car doesn't have a carbon footprint," an unnamed airport worker told The Sun. "More like a crater."

Environmentalists are all but demanding the unidentified owner's head, the UK Lambo club can't see what all the fuss is about and Lamborghini has found itself in a bit of a sticky wicket.

"With rising fuel costs and concern about climate change, most people are likely to find this type of wasteful and damaging activity outrageous," Tony Bosworth of Friends of the Earth told the BBC. "The pollution from driving a Lamborghini is bad enough, but flying one thousands of miles for a service is taking climate-wrecking behavior to new heights."

For the record, the LP640 has a 6.5-liter V-12 that produces 640 horsepower. It gets about a dozen mpg and emits 495 grams/kilometer of carbon dioxide. That's about four times greater than the 130 g/km limit the European Union wants to place on autos.

David Price of Lamborghini Club UK essentially told the environmentalists to bugger off. He told the BBC that Bosworth's argument isn't "relevant to anything" and The Sun quoted him saying, “If an owner wants to service his car in that way, it is his choice. I'm not surprised. Thankfully an age of excess in some areas continues."

As for Lamborghini, it appears to be dancing like Fred Astaire. Lamborghini UK spokeswoman Juliet Jarvis told the BBC that the car was not serviced by any of Lamborghini's authorized dealers in the UK. But she told The Sun there could be “kudos” for the guy having his car serviced in London. She noted that most cars are serviced in the same country they're purchased -- imagine that! -- but, “This sort of thing is not unheard of.”

Yes, because we all know how hard it is to find oil in the Middle East.

Photo by Lamborghini. To see a pic of the car in question at Heathrow,