Many celebrities may spout green, but are they really cleaner than clean? Apparently not, according to an Irishman intent on exposing Hollywood superstars as 'eco-hypocrites'.
Robert Redford is the latest to have his green credentials flame-grilled by filmmaker Phelim McAleer. His new hostile, and to the point, short film, entitled Robert Redford : Hypocrite, accuses the Hollywood legend of failing to practise the environmentalism he so passionately preaches.
Released to coincide with the final days of Redford's Sundance Film Festival , McAleer's two-minute film took a hatchet to the actor who once featured on Time magazine's list of environmental superheroes.
Long before Bob Geldof tried to save the world and Sting preached about rainforests, Redford was seen as Hollywood's original eco-warrior.
"Every celebrity walks the green path these days, but Redford helped clear it," wrote Time's Belinda Luscombe when profiling the star for the magazine's "annual celebration of the most innovative and influential protectors of the planet" in 2007.
However, according to McAleer's film, Redford recently sold a dozen plots of land for $2m each on undeveloped wilderness near the Sundance ski resort in Utah to build luxury holiday homes.
Ironically, he is one of the main opponents of a plan to build a similar development close to his vineyard in the Napa Valley .
"It's the hypocrisy that gets me. He's taking a lovely virgin ridge and building McMansions on it. Granted, they're nice, lefty, eco-McMansions. But they're McMansions all the same. At the same time, he's trying to stop other people from building houses in a nice spot.
"I've been searching eco-hypocrites for a long time and there are a lot of them," says McAleer. "They tell us how to live and how to do certain things, as greens often do. Then I go and look at how they live and what their lifestyle is like. So I look at all of them and I thought Robert Redford's was pretty rich, pun intended."
The film also highlights how the 74-year-old Sundance Kid (whose publicist declined to comment for this article) did a voiceover for a United Airlines commercial proclaiming, "It's time to fly," even though he has frequently called on the world to reduce its carbon footprint.
"These people need to be exposed because there is a lot of anger," says McAleer. "There is a big recession going on and green policies I think were the folly of affluence. But now we are having a recession people are beginning to say, 'Hold on, can we afford this? Is this the right thing to be doing?'
"People want to know who are these people telling us where we can work, what car we can drive and what food we can eat.
"Who are these people and are they walking the walk? Are they walking the walk or are they flying in their private jet while telling us to walk?"
Redford is just McAleer's latest target. In another short film late last year he took a pop at James Cameron . The Avatar director talks about "living with less", it said -- while owning a helicopter, a fleet of submarines, three Harley Davidsons, four sports cars and a private yacht.
Aerial footage of the director's Malibu estate revealed several large houses and three heated swimming pools -- but no solar panels or wind turbines.
McAleer has a "hit list" of other stars he believes are hypocritical. He plans to release a new film on them every two to three months. "As a film-maker, this is the gift that keeps on giving," he says.
"We have a hit list, and as well as the usual Hollywood suspects, it has people like John McCain on it -- a man who has backed climate-change legislation, while being unable to remember how many homes he owns."
McAleer says his films pay for themselves. They're on YouTube and drive traffic to his website, where supporters can buy DVDs of Not Evil Just Wrong. The Cameron film clocked up 175,000 "views".
McAleer, the US-based 43-year-old native of Tyrone, has become something of a hate figure among liberal left environmentalists. It is not hard to see why. At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen he dressed as a polar bear and began shouting into a megaphone, " Phil Jones ? Has anyone seen Phil Jones ?"
It was Jones who wrote an email to a fellow climatologist about using a "trick" to "hide the decline" of data indicating global warming from the 1980s and onward.
That email and thousands of others were posted online and have since been used as evidence to claim global warming is a scam.
McAleer's feature-length documentary Not Evil Just Wrong, which he produced and directed with his wife Ann McElhinney, also attacked the validity of global-warming science and specifically the claims made by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.
But does McAleer believe the green movement is a complete con?
"Well, I am also a journalist," he says. "So, as a journalist, I have the luxury of not having to have an opinion, but having lots of questions. And I use these questions to expose hypocrisy and that will keep me busy for a long time. So my stance at the moment is we need more sceptical journalists concerning all these movements.
"Let's ask the same questions of big environment as we do of big business or big religion.
"If a priest comes out and says something, we all ask hard questions. If a businessman comes out and says something, we all ask hard questions. If a billionaire celebrity comes out and says something green, we all say, 'Wow that's fantastic.'"
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