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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I was with a group of Environmental Educators once. They were developing a program for kids. They showed four types of objects and asked children how long they think that it took that object to decay. They showed aluminum cans and Styrofoam. I think the other two things were paper and tin cans. The paper of course composts quickly, the tin can rusted and also deteriorated rather quickly, The aluminum lasted a bit longer but the Styrofoam, they said, lasted a million years or something like that. Their lesson being that Styrofoam was the biggest evil. Very dramatic but wrong. These were freshly graduated, education majors. Not chemists.
Styrofoam is inert. Its structure is something like wood. Termites will eat it. On the other hand aluminum, creates big environmental messes when it is extracted from the ground leaving behind great big pools of contaminated acid. If you do anything for the environment, it should be recycle aluminum. Styrofoam is nothing compared to aluminum. I noticed that they got this right in Washington State Parks, last time I was there they only recycled aluminum.
I’m pretty sure the ad is aimed at poking fun at Prius drivers/owners/lovers without mentioning the car or Toyota by name. Most people drive a Prius to eco-pose – that’s why the Prius (with it’s distinctive shape) outsells the drivetrain-similar hybrid Camry by a large margin, because of the pose factor.
The Germans (VW/Audi, BMW, MB etc) have been pushing diesel technology for decades, and are probably frustrated at the fixation in the USA over hybrids, when clean diesel technology is cheaper, as-clean and simpler than hybrid tech.
To me, the ad says ‘want a green car? Buy an Audi, and laugh at the self-righteous Prius loving types’.
You’ve got to remember that diesel acceptance in the USA is very, very low – they are trying to get cut-through on recognition that the diesel Audi is just as ‘green’ as a hybrid.
wayne (21:47:27) :
While they arrested the guy for the plastic bag they should have asked if he had Astroturfed his lawn yet. If not, got him on two counts!
This commercial really rankled me last night as too many of the scenarios seemed not that far off the mark. In Toronto, Garbage police – check! Not allowed to cut down trees on one’s own property, check! However, here in Toronto, Astroturf is deemed better than using herbicides to kill dandelions on the lawn. Most pesticides and herbicides were outlawed first by the Toronto municipal and later by the Ontario provincial government: the latter allows the use of Roundup but the former don’t – and that’s the only option allowed as a week-killer in Ontario, which of course is useless for lawns. Toronto citizens, fed up with the time involved in becoming weed-wallahs, have increasingly turned to astroturf as the solution. This seems to be fine with the city of Toronto, despite the fact that most wildlife probably benefits more from the occasional use of weed-killer on a natural lawn. What a wonderful Green world!
We’ve just seen a glimpse of a future…
To those who worry that some would like to see actual green police, they’re already here in some places, at least by name!
A few years back in Massachusetts we we gridlocked at the Sagamore Rotary next to a pickup truck with MA govt tags, whose side panel read “Massachusetts Environmental Police, Patrol Boat Maintenance Division”.
Less reassuring than that brave new scene for me was the fact that it was truck number 140-something.
To be fair, with the miles of coast, marsh and estuary in MA, I can see needing to monitor a lot of activity, but it did give me a turn to see “Environmental Police” on a government truck.
(paranoia on) Maybe that was a first effort, to get people used to the idea, and now these ads are the precursor to the force entering everyday life? (paranoia off–lol)
I liked the commercial. It was a great ad for Ford. The green police would have a hard time catching me in a new 412hp Mustang. 🙂
It´s time for us to see and hear once more to George Carlin´s genius:
When I first saw that commercial, I said to my friends who were also watching the game with me: “That isn’t too far from the truth.” They agreed with me. I thought it was clever. And at the same time show people the dystopia the eco-commies want us to live in.
What? no Brown Shorts on the Green Police?…
General Al should be corpse martialed…
h/t american Thinker.
Algore seems to building a loser profile for himself.
To UK skeptik–we have computer chipped wheelie bins too–but only for our recycleables. We get COUPONS sent to us based on how good we are at filling them!
So we are at the volume stage–not sorting yet. Getting us habituated.
And, no doubt, comparing what is logged about our recycling habits to what is purchased (via our store discount cards and barcode scanning at checkout) so that when that great day comes and the right people are in control, they’ll know exactly who to come for.
Not funny, I know. All the more reason to reduce our GOVERNMENT footprint at any and all costs. It has, at all levels, become a self-perpetuating runaway growth and control machine.
I am a big fan of satire. Jonathan Swift’s “A modest proposal” is a classic. Yet I also failed to laugh at Audi’s commercial. I have acquaintances (not friends) on the left that have in the past advocated using force to achieve their “just” ends. To me, the “Dream Police” commercial was too close to whistling pass the graveyard. Which come to think of it, is the mark of really good satire.
I checked what other people are saying on other blogs.
David Roberts says, “The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police — people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-roberts/audis-green-police-ad-isn_b_453064.html
Katherine Griwert writes, “The Green Police’s humorous delivery has a serious underlying message. “If everyone followed this rule [only one napkin], more than one billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year,” Pfiefer says. Audi’s Green Police campaign is geared to remind Americans that even simple eco-friendly practices can make a big difference in the nation’s conservation efforts.”
http://www.thedailytell.com/2010/02/audi-and-the-green-police-will-unleash-a-game-plan-for-environmentally-friendly-behavior-at-the-super-bowl/
Wii said, “I think that the idea is great. For too many years people like you have been allowed to poison others without a second thought. Soon that will stop. You can go the easy way, or the hard way. The hard way will *not* be quick and painless.”
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100207220917AAK9Ih5
I am less inclined than ever to buy an Audi.
Mike Ramsey
Scarlet Pumpernickel (01:09:04) :
How can you not see the irony? Lighten up!
He’s packing a bundle of horses under the hood and burning ‘green’ and the Green Police just pass him by!
They are not so much selling a green car, they are selling diesel as able to burn green and clean, you keep the performance. Bet that clinches the Addy Awards for that agency!
I use white vinegar to kill dandelions. Just pour a little vinegar in the center of the plant, in a few hours it wilts and then dies all the way down to the root. After it rains and washes away the acidity throw a pinch of grass seed in the space left.
Weed and Feed is the worst. It will collapse your lawn eventually. It kills all the bugs and worms that aerate the roots. My neighbor used it on his lawn and you can see the compacted dead dirt on his side and the lush green grass on my side.
High nitrogen fertilizer is even worse. It promoted a quick green top growth which the roots cannot support, it eventually collapses too.
I use cheep 10-10-10 spring and fall, mulch my clippings, seed any bare spots spring and fall, use vinegar on the dandelions quickly before they spread, and leave the rest of the little weeds and clover. My lawn looks better than anybody’s on my block!
vigilantfish (06:07:09) : BTW, I know that you in Canada have a huge mining residue pond at Thompson, Manitoba, filled with nickel, copper, palladium, which contains a 6 to 7% of arsenic metal. And I know it because I developed a process for extracting all metals from this residue (in a foreing country).
As you may suppose the metal values are high, however “green stupidity” prohibits to remove it and sell it because it´s forbidden to transport arsenic and, at the same time, people don´t want to have it there and even greenpeace has rallied many times to remove it. This is why I call those “green” policies “green-goes” silly policy. You can see clearly what the purposes of these policies are: They are not contradictory as it may seem, its goal is above that contradiction: To destroy any progess whatsoever wildly promoting poverty and the return to the supposed “green golden era” of hunting and recollection, in atonement with Gaia.
… but I buy and horde incandescent light bulbs.
A single compact florescent light bulb has enough mercury in it to contaminate 6000 gallons of drinking water. The ones I had that were supposed to last 10 years lasted one and a half.
Don’t they use crumbled Styrofoam in potting soil?
Re: Austin (05:06:08)
Thanks for posting that Apple Commercial from 1984, how apt for today.
without computers and the Internet ( that Al Gore invented ), The Global Warming movement would be running full speed ahead, with very little dissent, now Big Brother is having a tougher time.
Sponsored by James McDermott, HR1444 Sub section 4B6:
“Whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”
The legal descriptions of this “mandatory service requirement for all able young people” had to do with young volunteers updating buildings to be more ecologically sustainable, among other things.
this ad almost annoyed me – but the Cheap Trick remake won me over, I couldn’t help but like it even if, like Bubba, I did want to stockup on shotgun shells.
Would Pachauri qualify for diplomatic immunity?
I don’t think Styrofoam is bad but…
During two weeks in Budapest two years ago, I could not find a single place that had take-out coffee. Even the McDonald’s in Budapest had an espresso bar where you sat down with ceramic cups and saucers… even at the gas-station rest-stop on the high-way they had ceramic cups and saucers and a place to sit down!
Did I just commit thought-crime?
Heil vegan reich.
This ad clearly went over the heads of a lot of posters here. It’s a clever satire that exposes the basically fascist Greenie mind-set. Write a letter to Audi and tell them you loved it. I thought it was what we’ve been waiting for.