In an Instagram video discussing an upcoming trip to Greenland, second lady Usha Vance was spotted sitting in front of a shelf that featured a decidedly non-conservative book about climate change.

As the Daily Beast notes, the video published to the official "SLOTUS" — that is, second lady of the United States — account contains a hilarious and seemingly accidental easter egg: a copy of former vice president Al Gore's 1992 book "Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit."

As Gore's first treatise on climate change, "Earth in the Balance" accurately predicted the catastrophic conditions we now find ourselves in more than 30 years later. Less popular than "An Inconvenient Truth," the book released in tandem with the former VP's documentary of the same name in 2006, Gore's first environmental manifesto is more of a deep cut for the climate crowd.

As such, it's wild to see it sitting there in plain view on the shelf behind a second lady whose husband — and his boss — are gutting environmental regulations willy-nilly and calling the entire concept of climate change a "hoax."

Ironically, the topic Vance discussed in her video — her forthcoming trip to Greenland, which has been significantly scaled back after officials in Denmark, the self-governing country's colonial power, said that she and her delegation hadn't actually been invited — is also salient to climate change matters.

The vast majority of Greenland consists of ice sheets that have, as celebrity scientist Bill Nye warned last year, been melting at alarming speeds. As those ice sheets thaw, the liquid water they release causes sea levels to rise. Methane and other climate change-causing greenhouse gases trapped within the permafrost are also released into the atmosphere as the ancient ice melts.

In short, Greenland is the canary in the coal mine of our planet's climate. Naturally, Vance — a former law clerk for jurists John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh before they were on the Supreme Court — mentioned none of that in her video, which saw her gushing about her since-dashed plans to attend the country's annual dogsled race, tour the world's largest island, and learn about its culture and traditions.

Though the Beast's Nell Scovell posited that the second lady may be a "secret climate change denier denier" and others online have suggested that she may be "trying to send us a message," the reality is likely far more mundane.

We can't be sure exactly where Vance filmed the video, but if we had to wager a guess, we'd say based on interior similarities that it was shot within the storied VP residence at the Naval Observatory, a stately manor near Washington's Embassy Row that's housed every vice presidential family since Walter Mondale.

While most of its residents are said to bring their own furniture, there's a non-zero chance that memorabilia from past VPs either populates its shelves intentionally or has remained there from prior administrations. Whatever the case may be, this single glimpse into the world of our country's second lady doesn't mean that she's a closet treehugger — if anything, it just proves that nobody seriously vetted the video before it went out.

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