Past performance is no guarantee of future results:
● “Reducing Your Carbon Footprint.”
—Headline, New York Times, February 15, 2013.
● “Air-Conditioning Is an Environmental Quandary.”
—Headline, New York Times, August 18, 2012.
● “The Year Without Toilet Paper.”
—Headline, New York Times, March 22, 2007
● “The Biggest Carbon Sin: Air Travel.”
—Headline, New York Times, January 26, 2013.
● “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.”
—Headline, New York Times, March 19, 1989.
Flash-forward to today, the day after “Earth Day,” that most serious of faux-holidays for the committed eco-pagan, in which the New York Times cheerfully explains what went into “the Making of Our Walking New York Cover” for the New York Times Sunday magazine:
Aliyev’s picture was then printed on 62 strips of paper. On April 11, JR and his 20-person crew took these strips to Flatiron plaza and began affixing them to the ground at 4 a.m. The pasting took about three and a half hours and resulted in a 150-foot-tall image of Aliyev striding eastward. The sun came up. Pedestrians began to wander over Aliyev. Just as JR had predicted, they often walked right over him without even noticing.
To make out the image, you had to be high above. In the middle of the day, when the angles of shadow were favorable, JR went up in a helicopter and photographed the pasting, with all the cheerful and untidy street life of an early spring day in New York City happening on and around it.
You allowed a photographer to waste all that paper, and paid for him to hire a helicopter to photograph it for an result that looks like something any teenager with rudimentary Photoshop chops could have layered onto a stock overhead shot of the Flatiron building, just to sell a few extra newspapers? (Which itself consume plenty of dead trees.) And you bragged about it the day after “Earth Day,” after spending the last quarter century hectoring your readers that the world was about to come to an end unless the entire globe returned lockstep to a pre-industrial revolution agrarian lifestyle? Nice violation of Alinsky’s Rule Four, fellas.
As the Professor likes to say, I’ll believe global warming is a crisis “when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis” themselves, and…
…”I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about my carbon footprint,” especially from the Times, which just invalidated any environmental hectoring it might have ran yesterday.
Earlier: “Two Time-Warners in One” — with a special zero gravity appearance from Kate Upton!
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