According to news reports, a PR firm with close ties to oil companies has distributed a parody of "An Inconvenient Truth" on YouTube. In the corporate video, "Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming." This is sad for two reasons. For starters, it's always depressing when the oil companies spend their billions in profits brainwashing the public. Secondly, it's upsetting to watch YouTube become yet another lame corporate advertising tool. As the WSJ notes:
As its popularity has exploded, the public video-sharing site has drawn marketers looking to build buzz for new music releases and summer blockbusters. Now, it's being tapped by political operatives, public relations experts and ad agencies to sway opinions. Ogilvy & Mather, for example, says it plans to post amatuer-looking videos on Web sites to spark word-of-mouth buzz about Foster's beer.
P.S. The video itself is shockingly mediocre.
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Two months old. A rating of two out of five. Pretty lame.
I guess oil companies buy into the Phillip Morris approach to ethics. Who would have figured?
And how ironic was it for them to use Tux, a symbol of non-corporate innovation driving industry standards. These guys are pathetic.
They're not really winning me over with those lousy production values.
Like many of my ilk (atheistic environmental polyamorous anarchists) I tend to equate big oil with both neocons and fundies. Therefore I find it very amusing that they show people in the red states flocking to X-Men 3, the last in a series of movies that some of their brethren have compared to gay propaganda.
In USA Today there's an OpEd piece by Peter Schweizer accusing Gore of hypocrisy in his environmental advocacy.
You might ask, who is Peter Schweizer?