Environmental Endgame

Among the Intellectualoids

By Matt Purple on 10.5.10 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org

I have an idea for a commercial. A teacher is speaking to a class of students about how the United States is in grave danger. She warns her young charges that spending is out of control, government has become too big, and bureaucrats have too much power. She lectures that the government has expanded far beyond its constraints which are laid out in the Constitution. She then asks the students if they will join the local Tea Party and fight to restore America to its founding principles. All the little tykes -- first or second graders -- raise their hands, except for two. The teacher reassures the dissenters that this is okay. "No pressure," she says. She then presses a red button on her desk. The two children explode in a red flash, splashing gore on the other horrified students. The apathetic teacher then starts assigning homework.

Political advertising at its finest, wouldn't you agree?

Actually, if I ever even suggested such a commercial for the Tea Party (let alone actually made one), I'd be rightly branded a sociopath. The media would devote wall-to-wall coverage to the commercial for six months. Think Progress would try to trace my funding back to the Koch brothers. The Southern Poverty Law Center would declare the Tea Party a hate group. Keith Olbermann would drive the point home by literally exploding on air.

But almost the exact same commercial was released by the 10:10 Global environmentalist group, murdered children and all. The only difference was that the homicidal teacher hit the detonate button after two children were reluctant to cut their carbon emissions. The four-minute piece went on to show several corporate workers, a soccer player, and a radio host played by Gillian Anderson (of X-Files fame) meeting the same grisly demise. The final shot refers viewers to 10:10's website while streaks of blood and Anderson's eyeballs gush down the screen.

It's perhaps the darkest, vilest, most disturbing political ad ever concocted. Incredibly, it was produced for 10:10 by Richard Curtis, the British comedy writer behind legendary shows like Blackadder and Mr. Bean. Curtis apparently believed that exploding children would be a real knee-slapper. The rest of the civilized world disagreed. Within hours of the video's release, frantic greenies were trying to yank it off YouTube as the conservative blogosphere reacted with disgust. Ed Morrissey called it "the dumbest most self-defeating campaign ad ever."

It's not like 10:10 Global is some fringe eco-terrorist group. They're a worldwide campaign funded by big-name donors like Sony and Kyocera. They've already extracted a promise from Britain's Conservative government to reduce its carbon output by 10% in one year. Hundreds of businesses, colleges, and schools have pledged to do the same. That makes 10:10 a big player on the environmentalist team.

And yet they managed to produce this splatterfilm dreck. It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall during that meeting. Say Frank, you know what would make people like us more? Let's blow up children who disagree with us and then laugh about it. All this time I've been worried that climate hysterics were a savvy and well-organized intellectual machine. Take heart, doubters! If this ad is any indication, our opponents make up the most dithering collection of socially maladjusted morons ever assembled on the very planet they're trying to save.

As The American Spectator reported on Friday, 10:10 reacted to the controversy by claiming they'd "missed the mark" in their attempt at humor. In an e-mail to Mark Morano, the group noted that the commercial "was intended for a British audience." We Americans lacked the perceptive wit needed to truly understand their message. Apparently the same British sense of humor that produced Monty Python, Keeping Up Appearances, and The Thick of It has now been reduced to belly-laughing at exploding youngsters.

Except, of course, the Brits condemned 10:10's macabre skit with the same ferocity as their across-the-pond neighbors, particularly Telegraph columnist James Delingpole who popularized the story.

It's a shame Dr. Michael Crichton isn't around to see all this. Crichton, the author of countless brilliant techno-thriller novels and a scientific genius in his own right, gave a groundbreaking speech in 2003 in which he claimed environmentalism was a fundamentalist religion. (Crichton is one of those recalcitrants who would have been blown to bits in the 10:10 ad.) For environmentalists, Crichton claimed, there is an impending apocalypse and sustainability is the only way to achieve salvation.

"Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary," Crichton said, "because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."

For true green believers, those who question anthropogenic global warming are "them" -- the apostates. Thanks to these doubters who refuse to shop with cloth bags, the environmental apocalypse draws ever closer. So why not detonate them in a gory mess? As Franny Armstrong, founder of 10:10, said, "We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure [the title of the commercial] -- a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change."

It's the same religious zeal that drives John Holdren, the most powerful environmentalist in the world and Barack Obama's climate advisor. Holdren co-authored a book with spectacularly discredited population hysteric Paul Ehrlich in which he called for the world to be depopulated. Among Holdren's solutions were forced abortions and compulsory sterilizations for women. Lives and liberties were both expendable to stop the coming apocalypse.

It's why progressives universally refer to those who question global warming as "climate deniers." We're not just offering a different opinion on a scientific issue. We're denying a fundamental truth, like the Holocaust or the resurrection.

It's why hacked e-mails from East Anglia University showed climate scientists trying to blackball those who questioned climate change. Dissenting thought is heretical and cannot be tolerated.

Now, thanks to the public relations imbeciles over at 10:10 Global, we have our greatest proof yet that radical environmentalism is a religion. The gory deaths in the commercial were only secondarily an attempt at humor. They were primarily a masturbatory fantasy for the acolytes of environmentalism. As 10:10 admitted (before the outrage), "It's a fairly simple and to-the-point premise, I'm sure you'll agree: we celebrate everybody who is actively tackling climate change… by blowing up those who aren't." Among the deniers, there would be great wailing and gnashing of teeth, no doubt.

Fortunately, there's a solution for we heathens. For October 10, 10:10 is planning a day of global climate action that will supposedly be held in 140 countries. Want to protest their evil ad? This Sunday, leave your car idling in the driveway. Crank your heat up before you leave the house. Grab a couple of aerosol cans and point them skywards.

Don't think of it as destroying Mother Earth. The earth will be just fine. Think of it as an act of protest against Mother Church.


Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.