Happy Earth Day folks, or as we like to call it: Guilt Day. And, of all the people who are going to spend today hoping to shame you into remorse for being a dirty, rotten, polluter who is gradually destroying Mother Earth through your brazen use of automobiles and the reckless abandon with which you utilize incandescent light bulbs (aka: light bulbs that actually produce light), is anyone more annoyingly hypocritical than the denizens of Hollywood?
Oh sure, some celebs take a break from their jet-set lives to set a good example for us ignorant proles. Leo DiCaprio rides his bike around Manhattan and Cameron Diaz doesn’t “always flush” (way too much information) after visiting the powder room. Whew! The earth can breathe easy, knowing that Diaz isn’t going to complete her deposit until the stench gets so bad that the neighbors complain. Jessica Beal climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro to “raise awareness about global warming,” something she could presumably have done without flying halfway around the world and consuming God-only-knows how many resources in order to mount a self-serving expedition. And then there’s Gwyneth Paltrow who encourages people to buy “eco-friendly” clothes from designer Stella McCartney, which sounds like a fine idea until one considers the amount of green needed to purchase McCartney green designs.
The ultimate irony when it comes to Hollywood types preaching about saving the planet involves what the unwashed masses are supposed to do in order to achieve that goal. We are charged with the weighty responsibility of lowering our carbon footprints. How to do that? We need to consume less, stick to the essentials, and take care to purchase only the items we really need from companies that carefully manage their carbon footprints.
What would happen, do you think, if we applied that test to Hollywood itself, to the production and distribution of motion pictures? There’s nothing essential about going to see a flick. The energy needed to transport actors and crew to location, along with the resources consumed to produce, promote, and distribute films, to say nothing of all of the greenhouse gases emitted by movie-goers driving to theaters has to involve some staggering numbers.
As part of another insufferable environmental lecture, James Cameron told Politico: “Look at Avatar: It’s good for the environment and it’s good for the economy.” While I’m sure that Avatar was good for James Cameron’s personal economy, there’s not a lot of sense to be found in his self-serving declaration. If anyone ever measured Avatar’s carbon-footprint (and, come to think of it, I really wish I had the time to do just that), given the amount of time, effort, and energy it took to complete that film, one would, I suspect, grade Avatar pretty high on the list of the most carbon-intensive movies in history.
If “eco-friendly” celebs were reflective and honest, they wouldn’t wag their fingers at you – they would rush to shake your hand. In a mere forty years you have funded a stunning ecological clean up that is unprecedented in the history of the planet. You have paid the cost of environmental controls – in terms of the price of your vehicles and the gasoline that powers them, the bills from power plants that send you electricity, in our water bills and the costs buried within the price of a host of consumer products – that have turned the United States indelibly green.
Don’t let anyone, least of all Hollywood, make you feel guilty today, America. You’ve done your part to clean up this nation and then some. Leonardo DiCaprio may not acknowledge the price you have paid, but those of us at Big Blogs do. We live in a country that is far, far cleaner than it was when the environmentalists first “celebrated” Guilt Day forty years ago. You made that happen, and you should be damned proud that you did.
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