Sometimes you look at something that a large organization full of smart people does and are left only to stammer… “Really? Nobody in the whole damn place had the good sense to kibosh this?”

Such is the case with this new 2005 ad for GE clean coal featuring babelicious coal miners walking around underground pretending to pickax out some bituminous. These “model” miners are meant to represent, ahem, the fact that coal is going to save us from global warming. The spot is so incredibly stupid at so many levels that we feel inadequate to the task of unpacking that stupidity. But, like an aspiring actress pretending to mine coal, we will at least try to chip away at it. (more…)

A video showing cops in Copenhagen hugging cyclists and giving them free helmets has been making the rounds at some of our favorite sites, including TreeHugger and BoingBoing. It has generated incredibly entertaining comment threads with discussions of cycling culture, debates over the pros and cons of helmet laws, and observations about the cultural differences between the US and northern Europe.

But video of the hug-happy policemen was not real, alas. It was produced by some organization called the Danish Road Safety Council. The group’s website is entirely in Danish so we can’t say much about them or their motives, though this Copenhagen blog describes them as “car-centric”. The helmet maker Giro also might have been involved, as the company logo is visible in the film.

In any case, the clip is still much nicer than New York City’s version of the cop-and-cyclist viral video.

After yesterday’s celebration of how swimmingly everything is going with the stimulus bill, Fox News tried to stir up some controversy with Secretary LaHood over the fact that $57 million is being spent on unspecified “studies” in Ohio.

“I’m not trying to pick nits here, but there is $57 million in Ohio that’s going to studies of something — that’s not exactly fixing infrastructure now [...] is it?” asked host Stuart Varney.

LaHood stuck to his talking points. “There will be hundreds of thousands of people out working this summer, building infrastructure, rebuilding infrastructure,” he said, and offered a personal guarantee that the money will be spent right.

Thus far, it’s proven difficult to make the case that stimulus funds are not being well managed — and efforts to find examples that argue otherwise just seem to highlight the overall competence of the Obama administration in getting the money out quickly and carefully.

(Note: There seems to be a technical glitch in stopping the video — if you want to do so before you have enjoyed it in all its glory, right click on it and select “Rewind”.)

The fraternal duo that gave us Barton Fink and Fargo is now lending a hand to the effort to debunk “clean coal” technology. In this spot by Joel and Ethan Coen, a lovely family gets fooled by a slick-talking salesman into freshening the air in their idyllic home by spraying it with black coal dust. Take that, “clean” hucksters!

Apart from being vaguely amusing, it’s also generally accurate. Which is to say, coal should be actively shunned as part of our national energy strategy. As the world’s leading climate expert put it recently, coal-fired power plants are “death factories.”

Unfortunately, Obama is still on board with clean coal. Why? Coal’s a huge part of the energy pie and has so many interest groups behind it, that it would take a huge act of political courage to say what needs to be said on the subject. For a while there was even a $2 billion trial project in his home state that might have inclined him to believe the hype, although that seems to have been dropped.

The real answer is two-fold. First, to build out our renewable capacity, particularly wind and solar. And second, to become more like France by replacing coal with nuclear. As a nation, we seem to be engaged with the first challenge, but totally ignorant of the second. It would be interesting to see a major Hollywood director take on the latter, politically trickier issue.