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
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Diesel is very much more efficient (thermodynamically) than gasoline, and so does get much better fuel economy (~30% lower fuel consumption is a reasonable estimate), but the engine itself and down-stream systems to clean up the exhaust (remove particulates, NOx, etc) are quite expensive. I have driven often in Europe in diesel cars, and aside from a bit more noise, they seem OK. It’s probably not had to justify the higher price for the car if fuel is as expensive as it is in Europe (>100% tax rates!), but without substantial increases in fuel prices and/or plans to drive a huge number of miles, I doubt you could make a good economic case for a diesel car in the States.
Of course, you would be able to turn your nose up at all the non-green gasoline users!
Ben (21:38:20) :
This commercial scared the hell out of me. Coming from a German company it was a little scarier. Where were the armbands and swastikas? “…. excuse me, sir, we need to see your papers …. we seem to have a problem, these are not recycled, please come with me…. to the green re-education camp….”
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It’s satire. People without a sense of humor shouldn’t watch it.
This ad was way too close to what eco-tyranny would look like that should we ever be foolish enough to give them the chance.
Peter Plail (04:22:53) wrote: “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.”
Peter-
Your information is out-of-date. Modern diesels, like Mercedes, have various methods for trapping carbon emissions and meet California regs. IIRC, the Mercedes uses a filter to catch the carbon, which is periodically burned off into gaseous CO2.
You have to read the car magazines to keep up-to-date on developments, not the alarmist literature.
IanM
Here is a link to the story about the guy fined £100 + £100 costs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/19/greenpolitics.uknews
And another –
http://www.recycle.co.uk/news/869000.html
“Whitehaven resident Gareth Corkhill received a criminal conviction earlier this year when he refused to pay a £110-on-the-spot fine for leaving the lid of his wheelie bin open about four inches.”
“Corkhill isn’t alone. Over one 12 month period, approximately 44,000 were fined due to various infractions, including faileure to secure bin lids and putting bins out on the wrong day.”
Audi would be well advised not to run this in the UK, it would seem a very bad joke.
Clive (09:40:10) “They”(Google-Al Gore is a member of board-, Microsoft) already know what you think, everytime you google or everytime your Windows updates….
If you bought an apple or meat at the market this morning, “they” knew it.
And the law needed for them to knock at your door is already in place as a binding international agreement, it is called “habeas data”, the right to access your data.
It is a case comparable to the Tianamen’s square…will you stop the green tanks with your body?
Kinda scary!
Audi make the A8, which gets about the same mileage as some private jets. I think they know who their audience is.
The video is a preveiw of an America that is most likely in the planning pipeline. Certain agencies would love to be doing exactly what you see in the clip.
You have informants in the picture, willing and able to ‘turn in’ thier neighbor, friends, loved ones, etc.
If you choose freedom, you will have to rebel.
In the end, even the loyal policeman is subject to being accosted, which speaks of a coming chaos should these things come to pass.
It was truly a shocking video on par with the 1984 Apple athlete big-screen smashing scene. A lot of thought went into it.
OK! Who had the bright idea to use a UK documentary for advertising?
DaveE.
The sudden shift in the culture.
The greenie weenies have been proud and obnoxious. It also comes with a passion for laws and rules that are intrusive.
Only recently it is now fine to make fun of them. Laugh at the zealots.
People like myself and many on both sides of the CO2 issue have practiced conservation of a lot of resources in our own way.
Conservation is not new. The crumbling of the “science” and other claims will make for great comedy this year.
John Deere, Daimler, Audi, Bosch and others are far ahead of a lot of greenie weenie thinking when it comes to technology, aerosols, common rail diesels and performance. America has made tremendous improvements in reducing the amount of fuel consumed in bringing a ton of grain to market. But the greenie weenies want to attack trucks and tractor fuel consumers. Transportation has not done as well in efficiency improvements.
Well yesterday’s tailgate party seemed to be about 14 hours of totally boring inactivity, interspersed with about 20 minutes of actual football on the field.
It WAS a fun game though; but I got totally nauseated by all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over that Hurricane Katrina from years ago. It seems to me that they rebuilt Europe after WW-II in less time than it has taken to rebuild this underwater city. I’m not sure why they are even bothering. Same thing with that San Francisco area apartment building that is trying desperately to fall over the cliff into the ocean and be done with it. They already spent enough money to buy a luxury home for each of the residents in those apartments.
But back to the TV ads. Pretty much totally unmemorable as far as I can remember.
The Audi “Green Police” comedy routine may have seemed that way to most of the viewers; but not to those of us who live in Northern California. It was more in the nature of a 6 pM news bulletin to us; because we have exactly that setup now, in Northern California. So yes I give the Aurdi AD department top marks for making a news item seem like a comedy.
I believe Intel or maybe it was Apple had an ad; no idea what they were advertising but something about a robot that ran out of batteries or something.
The vast majority of the ads (and I did watch all of them), had one thing in common; the ad was all over, before I had any idea who the hell was advertising what. That is the sign of a lousy ad. If I don’t know in the first two seconds what is being sold, and by whom; I usually have tuned out, so I completely miss whatever came later. That’s how it was with that Intel or Apple ad; maybe it was Intel, because it said something at the end about an i3/i5/i7 processor. Never did catch the message, because those things have been out for eons, so no idea why they would be advertising them now. Never said a word about their new processor with 4096 cores or whatever number it is.
Basically a big waste of $2.7Meg per 30 sec in my view. The Bud Lite beer can house was a nice idea; but anybody who thinks that Bud Lite is actually beer; just isn’t with it.
I didn’t watch the half time show; I was put off by that Latifah Queen botch Job on “America”. I don’t take kindly to having any Patriotic Songs turned into some pop shrieking episode. Sorry; I’m funny that way; and I still believe in Chivalry too.
Good game though; and the better players won; but spare me the crocodile tears for New Orleans; the French Underwater City.
It burns hydrocarbons and is an upscale car – the extreme-greens HATE that. The ad’s a good poke in their eye, but still a warning of sorts for the rest of us.
Diesels still use sticky, dead dinorsaurs and ferns and stuff right? 🙂 I wan’t to get one of those obnoxious HYBRYD badges and put it on the back of my 1970 Trans Am that gets 5 mpg.
“democracy has failed and new forms of governance are required” and “a common enemy must be found, one either real or invented, to unite humanity.”
“in searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
http://www.green-agenda.com/turningpoint.html
As people have noted above, the irony of the ad’s message is distasteful.
It’d have been more funny if the Audi ran a couple of Segway’s off the road and these left skid tracks down the slopes of a steep Californian hill with a few smashed Smart cars here and there.
I agree this ad seems somewhat ambivalent at first glance. On the one hand Audi is clearly mocking the extremism of the eco-warrior mentality and on the other hand they want to sell us a product which is “certified green.” But really this ad is aimed at the moderates (I.e. most of us) who think it’s all well and good to be concerned about the environment but let’s not go overboard – sort of a pro-environment but anti-environmentalist mentality, if you will. Here‘s a car that conserves resources and saves you money but allows you to have fun while doing it. I think many of us might shy away from buying hybrids because we don’t want to be labeled as holier-than-thou environmentalist fascists. Diesels offer great mileage and decent performance and your friends won’t think you’re a card carrying Greenpeace militant if you drive one. Audi’s lesser cousin VW seems to take a similar approach in marketing it’s diesels – they even sponsor a whole race series exclusively devoted to Jetta TDI’s. Motor racing in itself is inherently anti-environmentalist in nature – the very idea that you can have fun while burning fossil fuels. Hybrids just seem to have a more stodgy, extremist, it’s-all-about-the-environment image. It’s difficult to imagine Toyota sponsoring an all Prius race series, for example.
OT Kind of…
Obama administration proposes new climate change agency
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is proposing a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.
Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planned to announce Monday that NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-02-08-obama-climate-agency_N.htm?csp=34&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+usatoday-NewsTopStories+%28News+-+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo
Lighten up, folks! To our Brit friends, the music is by the US band Cheap Trick, who are the Yank equivalent of Slade!! They are ANYTHING but serious, believe me!
The whole thing was a poke in the eye to the righteous Greens. However, based on the reactions I’m reading, it sounds like the Brits and others have quite a bit more government intrusion into their daily consumption habits than we do stateside.
And, after all, it WAS aimed at an American audience! If we have more of this type of humor and mockery, it will continue to erode the green agenda!!
@ur momisugly Steve Schaper (23:36:55) :
“It mocks the Greens (very Alinsky-esque) and at the same time portrays the Audi as a subversive means of beating the tyrannical greens.”
I’m sure that was part of the gag but, again, we know what the reality will be: it’s the cops who will be driving the ultra-speedy, clean, green dieselmachine, chasing denialist delinquents in their rusting, petrol-driven, heavily-taxed world-destroyers. Not noble rationalists, fleeing the new faith’s heretic hunts.The rest of us will be stopping every half-hour or so, looking for a place to charge up, at enormous expense. You can see I’m a pessimist, can’t you? 🙁
I appreciate the satire and the possible intents of the ad; if others are affected by it as was the daughter of the commenter above, who had her eureka moment as a result, that’s a huge bonus and a source of hope. I think the humour, though, doesn’t have quite the same impact if you live in a nation (and a EU) that has already instituted and applied many laws and regulations and directives of this nature, ferociously enforced as sources of additional local government finance – like the bin lid guy mentioned above. Far more ferociously, it sometimes seems, than the regular cops with regular crime. Some of these are probably a portion of the three (or is it three and a half?) thousand new laws we’ve got recently.
They warmists may be faltering and regrouping but they haven’t run yet. But every new piece of evidence on this blog helps to push them harder. Thanks, Anthony, and all the others who make this blog indispensable.
that ad is scary to me. I had one of those overpriced luxury Volkwagens once, it started to fall apart after 3 years. How many old ones do you see on the road? I think Audi actually takes the green bs seriously if you read any of their literature
Anyone try that shizzle with me and I’ll put them six feet under the green lawn.
You Americans can take it as a light-hearted joke but in Britain we REALLY do have nutters in local councils like that and it gets worse each year. Remember, we are the pioneers of the congestion charge zone which does nothing to reduce congestion or pollution at all.
Speaking of satire, if you’re a fan of Gilbert & Sullivan (and even if you’re not!) Prof. Phil Stott’s The Clamour Of The Times for Feb. 7 is definitely worth a click:
http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Clamour_Of_The_Times/Entries/2010/2/7_Who%E2%80%99s_for_the_Chop.html
And if that doesn’t work, try: http://tinyurl.com/y87hwnh
(Lots of other great essays on his site, too)
To make the ad truly mocking of outrageous Green fanaticism (and boost the diesel sales point) requires a minor change: all they advertisers need do is make the Green Policemen’s heads completely blow a fuse at the point where they find out the car is a *Diesel*. It would pinpoint the word Diesel in the customers mind.
In the realm of psychology – if Audi consistently use the word “Clean” and mock the word “Green” they could make killing in sales… The simple word change would subliminally put their car one up on all ‘Green’ cars and simultaneous plant the idea that all ‘Green’ cars are silly, white elephant fashion statements. They should go “Clean not Green” .
If anyone from Audi is reading this WUWT thread and you would like more helpful suggestions; I’m in need of a new car so I’m open to offers – JoeH :p