Green cream-pied

Back when dear Aunt Ruthie struggled with who to vote for—Clinton or Obama —she evaluated their positions on environmental issues and found them to be pretty much the same. John McCain , however, was in a league all his own. The senator managed to score a whopping zero out of 100 on the latest League of Conservation Voters National Environmental Scorecard, which rates officials for their votes in the most recent Congress. McCain started talking about climate change back in 2003, and even as recently as last month, he said global warming is undeniable when addressing a wind-turbine manufacturer in Portland, Ore. He’s called for carbon-emissions reductions and criticized the Bush administration’s handling of environmental issues. But out of 535 members of Congress, McCain was the only one who missed all 15 key environmental votes scored, said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, in a statement. Sen. Barack Obama scored 67 percent.

Ruthie admits she may be new to the green movement, but scaling a 52-story building to get a point across seems a little extreme. Fascinating, though, is that Alain Robert free-climbed The New York Times office building in Manhattan in the name of eco-awareness. The French “Spiderman,” as he’s known, ascended the skyscraper and unfurled a banner on the ninth floor stating that global warming claims more victims every week than 9/11. According to his Web site (http://thesolutionissimple.org), the stunt was to encourage people to pressure world leaders to commit to global emissions reductions. Thank you, Spiderman, for making World Environment Day so exciting!

All this talk about excitement has Ruth remembering when famed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was cream-pied by two “Greenwash Guerrillas” while giving an Earth Day lecture at Brown University in April. He was about to discuss how corporate environmentalism and green technology can restore the United States to its “natural place in the global order.” The guerrillas, a student named Margaree Little and a man calling himself Colonel Custard, dislike Friedman because of his support of nuclear power, coal power, industrial biofuels and carbon trading markets. According to a student-run blog, right before the pie attack, Little threw out pamphlets criticizing Friedman “for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged.” Video of the incident received about 70,000 views in 36 hours on YouTube before the site censored it. Colonel Custard remains at large.