Clean Energy Opponents Getting Even More Ridiculous

More and more people are coming to terms with the established fact that our activities are warming the planet. Rooftop solar is increasingly popular with regular folks, and running your house on the sun is getting cheaper than utility power in more places. More and more communities across the country are working to oppose the fossil fuel's burgeoning practice of hydraulic fracturing.

Renewable energy is winning the war for the hearts and minds of the American public, in other words, and fossil fuels are losing. That creates a dilemma. What can a high-paid D.C. PR rep for dirty energy industries do to stem this tide of climate realism and clean energy sanity?

One such group has hit on an answer: make fun of celebrities. This month, a series of billboards has appeared along the Pennsylvania Turnpike mocking a few prominent entertainers for their green-leaning sentiments. The implication is that because these celebrities recognize the reality of climate change, that climate change isn't happening. And the message comes with a serving of plain old sexism to boot.

One of the billboards (pictured above), for instance, features a portrait of one Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (a.k.a. Lady Gaga), a slab of beef inexpertly Photoshopped onto her head, with the caption "Would you take energy advice from a woman wearing a meat dress?"

Of the two other billboards, one features a black-fedoraed Yoko Ono with the caption "Would you take energy advice from the woman who broke up The Beatles?" The other shows Robert Redford with the caption "Demands green living. Flies on private jets."

All three billboards include the sentence "Find out more at biggreenradicals.com." Those readers who take the billboards up on that offer find themselves at a slickly produced website devoted to criticizing opponents of fracking, including other celebs such as Mark Ruffalo as well as big green groups like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and Food and Water Watch.

Big Green Radicals is a project of the recently formed Environmental Policy Alliance, so-named deliberately for the acronym, which itself is a creation of long-time corporate rights advocate Richard Berman.

Berman is best known for heading up the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), which has run aggressive PR campaigns on behalf of such noble causes as fighting bans on smoking in restaurants; keeping workers from unionizing; obscuring the links between fast food consumption and heart disease and diabetes; and protecting the rights of payday loan businesses to charge poor people exorbitant interest on small loans.

Berman isn't quite as well known for criticism of his relationship with the non-profit groups he starts, but that's just as interesting. In 2011, the nonprofit rating service Charity Navigator found that CCF paid $1.29 million of $2.12 million in total operating expenses to Berman's for-profit management company, Berman and Associates. "Affiliated nonprofits also have Donor Advisories," reported Charity Navigator, "including [the] American Beverage Institute, Enterprise Freedom Action Committee, Employment Policies Institute Foundation and the Center for Union Facts."

So Berman's turning his attention to the issue of fracking, and doing so by attacking those who've taken stands against the practice. Nothing surprising there. Of the three Big Green Radicals billboards now gracing the PA Turnpike, only one makes any kind of vaguely logical argument. That would be the billboard featuring Redford, which does actually make a reasonable charge about the lifestyles of high-profile green activists who spend a lot of time flying -- one of the fastest ways to drive your carbon footprint sky-high.

But the ads featuring Lady Gaga and Yoko Ono are essentially non-sequiturs.

I suppose you could make a case that livestock raising consumes more resources, and thus more energy than cotton growing, making wearing the meat dress Gaga wore once -- at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards -- less climate-friendly than a simple cotton one might have been, or perhaps something made out of recycled liter soda bottles.

And I have to admit that my gut reaction to the Yoko Ono billboard -- "Would you take energy advice from the woman who broke up The Beatles?" -- ran along the lines of "well, if I was was going to seek energy advice from someone who's not in the energy field, I might very well listen to someone who had the intelligence and force of spirit to sway a late husband away from his admitted serial spousal battering, not only persuading him to support the basic ideas of feminism but to leave an old boys club that was bringing him a lot of money in the process. Because even if I didn't agree with her she'd definitely be a person of substance."

That's too long for a billboard, though.

What Berman is trying to do with these billboards is to leverage the presumed prejudices of his intended Pennsylvania audience. In the case of the Redford billboard, that prejudice reflects something real: in my experience, a lot of affluent activists resort to the "do as I say not as I do" trope far too easily. I hasten to add that I don't know whether Redford himself deserves the criticism, but that attitude does definitely exist.

But in the case of Gaga and Ono, Berman's assuming his audience is susceptible to base, glib, Limbaughesque "humor." These straw-Pennsylvanians may not know much about leakage of fugitive methane from fracked well fields, or contamination of groundwater by acidizing fluids, or increased seismic activity sparked by injection wells, one can imagine Berman thinking, but they do know Lady Gaga "wore a meat dress," and they do know Yoko "split up The Beatles."

Redford at least gets sufficient respect granted to him that his billboard actually comes up with some alleged hypocrisy. The women? They're just cray. The net effect of the Gaga and Ono billboards is to cast environmental activism as the province of strange women who do unacceptably odd things. Which is completely true, but Berman and his groups intend to make that sound like a bad thing.

There is a subset of the American public, and a regrettably large one at that, that will find these billboards... well, not convincing, because they've already been convinced. "Agreeable," perhaps. But another kind of person is going to be driving past those billboards, too: young folks, especially women, who aren't swayed by middle-aged making fun of Stefani Germanotta's fashion choices. Some may even find Yoko an inspiring elder stateswoman on behalf of peace, kindness, and keeping the planet whole.

A campaign that asks those viewers to support fracking because here are two eccentric women who are eccentric is a campaign of desperation. Fracking is so unpopular, and under so much fire, that even a corporate PR powerhouse like Berman is forced to resort to frathouse sexism and bad Photoshop.

And that seems like good news to me.