My story today on changing out my incandescent recessed lighting for high efficiency LED units couldn’t have come too soon. I don’t have to worry now.
This video below is one of the most talked about Superbowl commercials today. You have to watch it more than once to catch all the visual gags in it.
Watch the Audi commercial featuring Cheap Trick, the Green Police, and the Audi A3 TDI® clean diesel, Green Car Journals 2010 Green Car of the Year®.
Here’s another variant with a styrofoam sniffing anteater:
There’s a whole series of these which you can see at the “Green Police” channel on YouTube here
paullm (22:23:23) :
What am I missing? Audi skewering GREEN, but touting their “clean diesel”?
The ad works by making the Audi driver appear smart. He’s fooled the green cops and not only got away with it, but been waved past the queue. How?
Because he’s using ‘green’ diesel in a super efficient ‘vorsprung durch teknik’ engine, but the cops don’t realise it’s a relatively high performance car, so the smart Audi driver doesn’t just get to breeze past the queuing hoi polloi, but they get to taste his rubber too.
The subtext is that it’s smart to be green, but it’s even smarter to appear to be green while having fun burning up the tarmac using more fuel.
From a post i did on dec 16th….
********THE GREEN POLICE*********
Who says it couldn’t happen??
Check out this article by Justin the founder of I Love CO2.
http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/
Then come back here and sing this with me, a modified “Cheap Trick” song.
“The green police
They live inside of my head
The green police
They come to me in my bed
The green police
They’re coming to arrest me
Oh no
‘Cause they’re waiting for me
Looking for me
Every single night
They’re driving me insane
Those green men inside my brain”
I dunno whether to laugh or cry.
Sad days indeed.
Baa Humbug of Brisbane (Reply)
Wed 16 Dec 09 (01:07am)
Titter ye not! The green police are everywhere! Last week the council refuse collectors refused to take away my recycled plastics and metals because I PUT THEM OUT FOR COLLECTION IN A RED CRATE AND NOT A GREEN CRATE!
Weeks ago my green one blew away in a gale and I refuse to pay the exhorbitant cost of replacing it with an official plastic crate. Naturally, on phoning up and querying the claims of the taxpayer funded flunkeys, I demanded a copy of the council creed that states I must use the OFFICIAL crate only. There wasn’t one. Crate colour wasn’t mentioned either.
Taxpayers pay through the nose for council services and the contractors the council hires to provide some of these services are making up stupid rules to wriggle out of performing said services.
Oh and my main wheelie bin (trash can on wheels) has an electronic spy on board. Or at least it did.
Honestly, you couldn’t make this up…
Since when is DIESEL clean?? It produces the most POLLUTION and HEALTH problem and accounts for 80% of smog. The world is nuts!
LIke the other Brits say, this is no bloody joke to us, intended satire or no. We already have the green police and there’s no doubt they’ll become more powerful as the deluded green apparatchiks and politicians tighten their grasp on us. One man from my home town in Wales was prosecuted for putting a single envelope in the wrong recycling box and found guilty. This is, I repeat, no joke – it’s coming to a republic near you soon.
Perhaps seeing something like this will wake them up. As someone mentioned above, this could be a real wake up call to people who haven’t bothered to follow the debate.
A perfect example of the true lunacy of the whole issue is today’s article in The Australian quoting our “Climate Change” Minister, the ever robotic Penny Wong, as saying that the emissions of the million or so feral camels in Austalia don’t matter (something I totally agree with, by the way). However, what was her stated reason? That under Kyoto only the emissions of domestic animals count! Well really, what’s the point of worrying about something you can’t control and tax? If this doesn’t beat Village Idiot sketch it comes close!
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/feral-camels-clear-in-penny-wongs-carbon-count/story-e6frg6nf-1225827641354
Here’s a repaet from Niche Modeling blog of a year ago, re Top Gear:
“Did you see the Jeremy interview with two lovely looking BBC lady reporters? One of them did a fairly good time around the circuit in the average family car, but came more than half way down the board of times. Jeremy explained that it was wet weather when she did her drive, and had it been dry, she would have been higher up the board, about here. “Then why don’t you stick it right up there, right now?” was the question, the only one really, that I have seen leave Jeremy speechless.
Re Science, of course if you make a heavier car you lose efficiency. It’s a poor excuse to claim benefit from regenerative braking into the electricals, like Prius. Reason is, when your brakes wore out would you rather pay for a new set of disc pads or a whole new set of electro-mechanical components? I’d rather pay for one of those BBC lasses.”
Hilarious. The irony is doubly delicious with this ad for incandescent bulbs displayed right below the videos:-
100 Watt Light Bulbs UK
Buy From The UK Premier Bulb Supplier. Low Prices, Fast Delivery
TheLightBulb.co.uk
Think I’ll stock up before they get banned – can’t stand those feeble and toxic florescent replacements – much prefer the nice cosy glow of incandescent lights.
I think it’s a superbly clever advert on every level.
It’s humerous, It makes fun of econuts and it pointedly underlines people’s diminishing freedom to behave their own way and own what they want.
But then it does its job as an advert showing the cars as eco-friendly and eco-futureproof so as to be a legal ‘object of desire’ for both sides of the ‘debate’ .
Not as if the A3 TDi is particularly green. In Aus at least it scores a very average 3.5 stars on the Green Vehicle Guide. http://www.greenvehicleguide.gov.au
Now the petrol version is different – 5 stars.
Absolutely fantastic. What a piss-take. Great to see we are starting to laugh at these fools.
Cheers
Michael
Larry Huldén (22:14:49) :
(…)
REPLY: check the tag for this post “satire”. – Anthony
Satire – Have you been to the UK recently? When you hear about “green job” creation just remember this advert.
And you wouldn’t be alone.
It’s a very suggestive joke, they are selling a green car and Audi are Germans. It isn’t mocking green attitudes, just creating humour from exaggeration.
ecofascism
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/gw/greennazis.htm
Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.”
Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofascism
That commercial was, possibly, the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on television in the last 20 years.
This is VERY clever advertising.
I used to be an advertising planner (someone who attempts to get inside the heads of their customers to develop strategy). I would be extremely proud of this campaign – both professionally AND as an AGW skeptic.
Very few companies manage to read the zeitgist well enough to blend sophisticated satire with a sales message.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The REAL tipping point is when the comedians start making fun of AGW alarmism. This is now happening on mainstream BBC comedy shows (Mock the Week) and we see it here now in US advertising.
Some people seem to think that this advertising campaign may be a ‘softening up’ exercise for things to come (with comments like ‘This is already happening in the UK! etc).
I don’t believe that to be the case. I think the existing ‘Green Police’ in their various guises have overstepped the mark, and that we are slap bang in the middle of a popular culture tipping point.
Bring on more green satire I say!
Re: Michael In Sydney (Feb 8 02:23),
Exactly, Michael! The Germans, despite stereotyping, do have a sense of humour – besides which, this was probably done by an American ad agency.
Ad men tend to keep a very close watch on public opinion and, when they start making fun of something, you can be pretty sure that’s the way public opinion is headed. When something like greenism becomes an object of ridicule people find it very hard to take seriously.
As Spenc Canada posted above:
So, that’s one more person starting to think about it in terms of more than just “saving the planet” already. I suspect the possible “whip-lash effect” may well have been intentional.
I’m struggling to see how diesel engines are clean, certainly in the context of warming effects. I can see how efficient combustion may reduce gaseous emissions, but no matter how efficient there is still the problem of carbon particulates, and I refer you to a recent thread on WUWT attributing glacier melt to black carbon.
We Western Canadians love our turbo diesels and Audi bringing that stellar TDI power plant they’ve enjoyed for decades in Europe, Indochina and the rest of the intelligent civilized world is indeed a great thing. Excellent power, fantastic fuel mileage and a dirt cheap cost of ownership? If it helps just think of all those in the Canadian wilderness who do have a VW Jetta TDI to go along with that F350 King Farmer.
RichieP (01:26:16) :
‘LIke the other Brits say, this is no bloody joke to us, intended satire or no. We already have the green police and there’s no doubt they’ll become more powerful as the deluded green apparatchiks and politicians tighten their grasp on us. One man from my home town in Wales was prosecuted for putting a single envelope in the wrong recycling box and found guilty. This is, I repeat, no joke – it’s coming to a republic near you soon.’
Why do you keep electing the same type of politician. It sound like you could use your Tea Party Movement.
Yes, I didn’t read that as irony at all. Just a complete misread of where the American people are on the green issue. It’s perhaps the most brilliant piece of anti-green advertising ever – but as it was selling a green car on exactly that and only that merit, it certainly wasn’t intended as such.
You must recognize that this is and will be the “GREEN-goes” so awaited Armageddon. These adds will kill non-“greengoes” by the thousands just from laughing!!!
Just don´t worry buddies, the december 21th, 2012, it´s near, you are happily done!
“What am I missing? Audi skewering GREEN, but touting their “clean diesel”?
”
What I took away from it is a skewering of what the “green agenda” would love to do (and ARE in the process of, though at a lower scale) but basically saying, “We may not be able to stop it, but if it does come true here’s a car that they’d approve of that YOU’d approve of.”
But yes, pretty terrifying stuff.
Keywords: predictive programming, Edward Bernays – father of PR(ropaganda)…
Ranks right up there with the Apple 1984 commercial.
Geoff Sherrington (01:43:31) : Top Gear also did a “real world” comparison between a Prius and a 1.4TDI Volkswagen Lupo. This included some long hill climbs where the Toyota’s batteries quickly ran down, leaving it with no power assist. The diesel gave better mileage, and much better performance.
But I have to agree with other UK commenters – this is perilously close to reality…