Groen PR-drama: 10:10-campagne verslikt zich in Al Qaida-humor

Businesses Pull Out Of Climate Campaign After Green PR Disaster

Businesses have begun to distance themselves from the carbon-cutting campaign 10:10 over a promotional film the organisation premiered last week that depicts schoolchildren, office workers and celebrities being blown up for not taking action on climate change. Sony UK and Kyocera Mita, two corporate partners of the 10:10 campaign, both condemned the short film 'No Pressure’, directed by Richard Curtis, today, for being "tasteless" and "shocking".

If the goal [of the film] had been to convince people that environmental campaigners have lost their minds and to provide red meat (literally) to shock radio hosts and pundits fighting curbs on greenhouse gases, it worked like a charm. Of course the goal might have been buzz more than efficacy. Too often these days, that’s the online norm. They succeeded on that front. I, among many others, am forced to write about it. Congratulations.

As often as 10:10 tried to pull the film off YouTube, their critics re-posted it. This, at least, proves what a cataclysmic misjudgement Curtis had made. When you try to satirise the critics of your campaign, and it turns out that those very critics embrace your film as demonstrating exactly what they find unbearable about the climate-obsessed eco-lobby, then you know that you have kicked the ball into your own net. Unfortunately, just as a star footballer who scores a spectacular own goal must now endure his foolishness being viewed endlessly on the internet, so Richard Curtis will have this hanging round his neck, like a stinking fish, for as long as he is successful enough to be worth mocking.

People who believe that humanity is heading towards destruction as a consequence of its misdeeds often take quiet pleasure in imagining the bloodshed to come. That, at least, is my explanation for Richard Curtis’s decision to make a short film for the 10:10 pressure group of climate change fanatics in which he depicted – with huge relish – children being blown to pieces. It’s important to grasp the quasi-religious nature of the 10:10 pressure group. Irrespective of where you stand on AGW, it’s clear that its pernickety commandments, most of them involving energy-saving lightbulbs, won’t make any difference to the fate of the planet. But they do have a sacred significance, as do the deaths in the Curtis snuff movie. There’s nothing like the prospect of the ritual slaughter of children to excite prophecy believers, in my experience.

The young don't need religion, as the environment gives them all the certainty they need. Greenery, as a secular religion, has come to dominate not just the curriculum, but the imagination. It's Blue Peter's recycled bottle tops on a grand scale: lessons on the dangers of global warming, projects on endangered species, litter-picking exercises. As any parent will testify, pester power is as often employed these days to guilt Dad into separating out the recyclables as to beg for the latest Transformer. Colleagues who have suffered their children's eco-scorn assure me that no member of the Inquisition was ever so ruthless, ever so certain of his faith, as their tiny Torquemadas.