Celebutard of the Week: Robert Redford

Robert Redford likes to play the nation’s Environmentalist in Chief, making the wildly earnest claim in last week’s Huffington Post that he was “too early on solar power.” He boasts, like a self-absorbed prophet, that he promoted clean energy way back in his filmmaking hey day of the 1970s. He even gave a shoutout to Barack “Special Olympics” Obama, who in his State of the Union address “noted that although America invented solar energy technology, we have fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it. He is right of course” Never mind that Redford, self-proclaimed savior of the earth, probably promotes the burning of more fossil fuel than virtually any other single American outside of Mobil. Or Al Gore, whose Nashville estate burned 20 times the national average in fuel. Obama, too.

This is why Robert Redford is my Celebutard of the Week, in keeping with my book – Celebutards: The Hollywood Hacks, Limousine Liberals and Pandering Politicians Who Are Destroying America (Kensington).

Redford founded a ski resort in Park City, Utah, a particularly environmentally unfriendly venture in which rich folks routinely travel from points afar – and they’re not riding in hot air balloons. He also started the environmentally ruinous Sundance Film Festival, an SUV-choked venture that annually pulls in countless Gulfstream jets full of busy film executives to the remote and pricey environs, where hot air is expelled, unharnessed, into the atmosphere.

As contrarian former columnist John Tierney noted in the New York Times, if Redford really cared about the environment he’d move his festival to New York City, which would “spare [movie makers] a trip, enrich our economy and save energy.”

Nonetheless, Redford urges Americans to do as he says, if not as he does. He wrote, “I remember when America was leading the pack on clean energy in the 1970s. We abdicated that leadership thanks to the influence of a fossil fuel industry with deep pockets and friends in the White House. But Obama reminded us of an important aspect of the American character: ingenuity. We are a nation of innovators, and we can harness that resourcefulness again to build a better future.”

This, of course, came after Obama winged it out of Washington while the economy burned like so many coal stoves. He took Air Force One – the large, Boeing 747 version — out to Long Beach, Calif., for his disastrous foray on the Tonight show that resulted in his personal apology to the head of the Special Olympics, after he compared his bowling skill to that of physically challenged athletes. Even George W. Bush, a global-warming skeptic, took the smaller, 757 version of Air Force One on his last trip to California.

Wrote Redford, “I saw that ingenuity emerge three decades ago, when the promise of renewable energy became clear to many of us. We were so eager to spread the word about solar power that we created ‘Sun Day,’ the solar equivalent of Earth Day. We had events from Maine to Chicago to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir even agreed to participate in one event. People were just starting to get excited about pollution-free power, but then Ronald Reagan became president and took the solar panels off the White House and the policies promoting renewable energy were stripped from the books.”

That’s right, Robert, blame a Republican. He fails to mention that President George W. Bush called on not just America, but China and India, two far worse polluters, to cut down emissions that folks like Redford and Co. blame for global warming. However, it’s become as fashionable as a hybrid Hummer to blame the United States for the world’s dirty air.

“I was too early in my efforts to promote solar power, but now is the time. We are getting a second chance–another American trait. If we don’t seize this moment, we will be too late to get the competitive advantage in a global marketplace, too late for the economic dividends, and too late to stave off the worst of global warming,” he wrote, probably from a hilltop in Utah.

I wonder how he got there? But that would be impolite to ask.