Tuesday, May 29, 2012

"Throw stuff off a cliff" - DOE

Satire?blog limps into and out of the month of May with the following embed and analysis. This is from the U.S. Department of Energy's new advertising campaign. They're trying to encourage energy efficiency. They do so by depicting a couple throwing energy-intensive manufactured goods off a cliff: a plasma TV, a bike, a gas grill. The explicit message is "when you don't save energy, you're throwing money away." And the subtext obvious point is mo' money, mo' stuff. I'm reminded of the words of Christopher Wallace, the street sage and hip hop artist known to the public as the Notorious BIG. The memorable hook to his 1995 verse on Get Money is "fuck bitches, get money," a timeless refrain also preserved in the memepheme (a blend of meme and morpheme I just invented [explainabrag]) here: I'm reminded because the DOE advertisement is so plainly saying "Fuck Energy. Get Toys." Are they unaware that the rebound effect of this suggested increased consumption would outmatch the energy conserved? Are we to take a plasma TV, constructed from minerals mined around the world, shipped together for manufacture in Asia, and sailed across the ocean to San Fransisco, as a reasonable exchange for equivalent dollar savings in turned off lightbulbs? Or should we take this as the sense of humor DOE is so well known for?