Vanity Fair’s Environmental Silliness

From the Department of Silliness: A magazine dedicated to clothes and makeup and the dissolute prancings of the Manhattan and L.A. elite decides to focus on climate change by selecting a group of celebrity party-attendees and praising their meaningless, often PR-driven quasi-activist meanderings.

With photos by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, of course.

The celebrity’s credo: If something occurs without a photograph, did it really happen?

Breathless tidbits from Vanity Fair’s intrepid reporters, taken from the magazine’s press release hyping the issue:

Actress Julia Roberts, who thinks the planet will “implode,” fights this by drinking coffee from a metal cup

Zac Goldsmith and his unnamed wife and children are “are easily the eco-movement’s most glamorous family” (breathtaking news to those of us who equate “climate change” with “glamour”)

Ali Hewson, married to a rock star, “bridg[es] the worlds of fashion, environmentalism, and human rights by using organic products, paying workers a fair wage, and making sure workers are treated humanely”

George Clooney, master of the mixed metaphor, “walks the walk” on environmental issues by driving an $84,000 electric car to his photo shoot with Leibovitz (silence on the politically-incorrect energy sources he exploits when he flies to his Italian villa to ride his motorcycles)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, age 58, is part of a “passionately pro-environment new generation” (Hummers and private planes and being decidedly middle-aged notwithstanding)

Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia, offers a fun benefit to employees: break the law protesting nonviolently on an environmental issue and he’ll post your bail (how 1960s!)

A bunch of actors and actresses (their names in bold, of course) went to a website (or had their publicist do it for them) and determined their personal “carbon footprints” (mixed metaphors again!) and then had trees planted (by someone else) to offset their CO2 usage (so now they can use private planes guilt-free). Trees, of course, emit methane, but as methane is a colorless, odorless gas — like carbon dioxide! — its presence does not affect photo shoots.

There’s a lot more silliness in the Vanity Fair press release (did you know that Al Gore, age 59, was the “unlikely ‘It boy’ of this year’s Sundance Film Festival”?), but I’ve devoted enough time to this tripe.

Hat tip: Ken Shepherd of the Media Research Center’s Free Market Project.

P.S. Not everyone is as cynical as I. Progressives for Al Gore says of this issue of Vanity Fair: George Clooney and Al Gore in the same picture… be still my beating heart. Really. It says that.

Addendum: I made fun of the Vanity Fair’s loopy pretensions, but Nick Schultz at TCSDaily is seeing red at the magazine’s “green” issue: It may have libeled distinguished scientist Dr. Frederick Seitz.

Addendum II: James D. Hudnall quips:

Vanity Fair just came out with a “Green Issue.” It has the following people on the cover telling us that Global Warming is real and we should listen to them: Julia Roberts, Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr, George Clooney. It says they call for a new American Revolution.

I don’t know about you, but I hardly call that a brain trust.

Ah, but they aren’t paid for brains.



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