Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye once extolled “clean coal” in a Disney World ride
Jamie Lee Curtis and the late Alex Trebek were also involved, we are sad to report
Aux Features DeGeneres
We find ourselves in quite the environmental pickle these days… that’s truly the nicest way we can phrase it for PG-13 internet search filters, but rest assured, it’s just a near-constant, internal stream of expletives and screaming going on over here. It’s often difficult to comprehend how we got here as a society, but then you stumble across historical footnotes like Ellen’s Energy Adventure.
As The Guardian reminded everyone earlier this week, once upon a time in the Magical Kingdom there was an indoor ride sponsored by Exxon-Mobil co-starring Ellen DeGeneres and Bill Nye the Science Guy that extolled the wonderful world of fossil fuels to countless children. It’s bad, and everyone involved should feel bad, including (sigh) Jamie Lee Curtis and the late Alex Trebek.
It would have been hard to overstate how terrifyingly bad this thing has aged, like, a decade ago… but Epcot Center only shut the damn thing down back in 2017, apparently. “1982, the year the ride opened, was the same year that Exxon’s own scientists predicted that a spike in carbon dioxide emissions would result in the warming of the planet,” adds The Guardian.
At one point, Nye (BILL NYE!) brushes away the idea of global warming by conceding that “it’s a hot topic with lots of questions,” before reassuring Ellen that “it’s one of the big reasons scientists are working on ways to burn fuels like coal more efficiently than ever.” Scientists did not, in fact, find ways to do this well enough.
With any luck, Ellen’s Energy Adventure will one day be considered as offensive as such shame-laden projects as Song of the South and, y’know, Walt Disney’s own views on Jews. If anyone is left around to be offended, of course.
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72 Comments
I don’t think it’s worth drumming on any of the actors involved by comparing their relatively distant part in shilling for a larger corporate interests to upholding racial stereotypes and Walt Disney’s own personal bigotry.You coulda done a better job, Internet.
Also, it is kind of a myth that Walt Disney was an anti-Semite. I think people are confusing him with Henry Ford (who definitely was). There are certainly things to criticize about Walt, but that was more that he was anti-labor and a sexist rather than anything about Jews.
He was a member of an organization that later expressed some anti-Semitic comments, but he had already distanced himself from it by then.I can’t even really blame him for being against the labor movement. The animator strike of 1941 almost bankrupted his studio, right at the time the overseas market collapsed because of the war.
You can and should absolutely blame him for being against the labor movement. I guess you can cut him some slack in the “everyone just plays a role in a system of exploitation, and he was doomed to be the exploiter” sense, but it’s a stretch.
Except he paid his animators well above the industry average at the time and offered generous incentive bonuses. Not everyone was happy with this system, because it definately benefitted some more than others, but that hardly made Disney an “exploiter”.
It’s bizarre how often I hear from people who assert that Disney was *actually* a Nazi. I mean there’s a lot of stuff about the man I personally dislike, and I get why anyone held to the standards his company (and many people) seem to hold him is rather gleefully acknowledged to actually not being all that great a person, but, y’know, he wasn’t Jack Warner…
I hear Ellie Kemper was involved in an organization that had racist tendencies at some point too.
AV Club should write an article about that.
He was – at the very least – anti-Semite adjacent. Did he ever disparage or express hatred towards Jewish people on record? No, although there are stories that he was very vocal about in private including a expressing a dislike of Jews because he believed all Jews were Communists and that it was Communists’ fault that he had so much trouble with labor unions while building Disneyland.
But actions speak louder than words and off the top of my head: Uncle Walt personally hosted Leni Riefenstahl and gave her a personal tour of his studios just weeks after Kristallnacht (which had led to other Hollywood studios rescinding their invitations), several of his Silly Symphony cartoons feature negative and hurtful portrayals of Jewish stereotypes (the most infamous being “The Three Little Pigs” where the Big Bad Wolf tricks one of the pigs by donning a Jewish peddler disguise – complete with a mask with a grotesquely oversized hooked nose – even Walt Disney Pictures, which has a history of just sort of ignoring the racist shit in its cartoons, went back and changed it for a 1948 reissue), and he was a Motion Picture Alliance founder and the MPA was notorious for its anti-Semitism.
“although there are stories that he was very vocal about in private”That sounds a lot like Trump’s constant use of “you know, people are saying…”
And clean oil! Don’t forget that the ride was funded by Exxon. Also, while the ride itself dates back to 1982, the Ellen/Nye version only dates to 1996. It wasn’t all bad — it also features Alex Trebek back when he looked like Alex Trebek — you know, with the Tom Selleck mustache.
Considering that this ride closed several years ago, and there’s a brutal war going on right now, we can’t even blame this on a slow news day. Why, exactly, is this coming up now?Yes, this attraction may have been skewed a little towards fossil fuels, but it pretty acurately reflected energy usage at the time it was made. Renewables represented a tiny fraction of energy production back then. The fact that renewables now represent a decent share of energy production kind of supports what the attraction predicted.
Because this is a site devoted to covering entertainment and popular culture and one way of covering entertainment and popular culture is just showing people some esoteric thing from a bygone era and reminding them that it existed.
If you’re looking for coverage of war and geopolitical conflicts maybe try a site like The New York Times or The Washington Post since that’s not really within the AV Club’s purview.
F that, I come to AV Club for in depth coverage of ever military exercise! I just wish they would review them on a A-F scale.
Man, that military exercise was brutal A-F!
Bay of Pigs, D-; they found it contrived, with flat performances, and the guy playing JFK sounded ridiculous.
“This battle was gentleman’s 6″
“reminding them that it existed.”How about “mocking the creators and forgetting that time is linear, and thing B cannot come before thing A”?Because that’s how people seem to think in the Twitter age.
Remember when Bill Cosby quit shilling for Coke claiming the “New Coke” debacle hurt his credibility?
So, you see, this site hates Ellen now (she’s on their Very Bad list this year, despite being a married LGBTQ person, which typically would mean she CANNOT be on that list, so it’s kinda already interesting) and LOVES harping on anti-progressive things to show their bones. The combo of anti-Ellen and anti-fossil fuels, combined with the ability to show how clever they are by making snarky jokes about the future and comparing this to awful racist tropes of the 1950’s (which, uh, sure, that makes sense somehow?) so the AV Club can feel vindicated somehow that THEY are not on the BAD LIST of BAD PEOPLE that, um, were mistaken on the time period’s scientific beliefs. Because, you know, those NEVER change, and I’m sure Ellen and Bill and Alex and Jamie Lee TRULY believed in fossil fuels and were speaking from the heart and should NEVER be forgiven this mistake/sin/horror again.
“May have been skewed a little towards fossil fuels”Hooker it was sponsored by Exxon-Mobil and has BILL NYE saying we’re finding ways to “burn fuel more efficiently than ever before.” That’s not just skewed, that’s literally sucking the dick of big energy.
It was produced….40 years ago. Stuff like solar power that we see nowadays ( in terms of power generation and cost ratios ) comes close to the edge of science fiction 40 years ago. It was in the middle of a decade where you actually had TV commercials telling you to turn off lights in room if there was no one there, and set your thermostats to 60 degrees at night ( while nowadays, we sell cars with with steering wheel and butt warmers).How is “finding new ways to be more fuel efficient” bad science. It’s seems like you might as well be screaming “where’s my flying car I was promised” at the same time.
because its what the blogger found surfing internet this morning, a few cuts & pastes later, and VIOLA: content!
Plus, we can’t just go cold-turkey on coal. We’re getting there, particularly as we retire old coal plants and retrofit existing plants with more efficient combustion processes, and we’re able to increasingly switch to renewables.You can’t make “clean coal.” You can make it less dirty, but you can’t make it clean. It’s a sooty rock that contains sulfur and heavy metals. It is what it is.
You can’t make “clean coal.” Our recent former president, though, frequently described how “they” take the coal out of the ground and clean it. He mimed a sort of scrubbing motion, so that you could understand what he meant.To sum up: I don’t understand why we still use the old, dirty coal – it’s apparently quite easy to fix it!
I thought that the “clean” part referred to recapturing CO2. No?
Not really; I used to work in the environmental field. It mostly is about combustion efficiency. If you’re thinking about a coal plant having a guy (or a machine) that throws coal in a furnace, that’s not really true. Combustion efficiency is directly related to surface area, so the coal that’s actually burnt is pulverized and then injected sort of like a powder into the combustion chamber. Combustion efficiency, sourcing lower-sulfur content coal, and reducing particulate emissions are typically what “clean coal” technology means.The problem is that, no matter how efficient the combustion is, you still have an emission issue, not just for CO2, but sulfur and particulate matter. Many coal plants use electrostatic precipitators to catch the PM; it basically works like a giant Dyson bladeless fan. CO2 recapture is hard with coal because the stack height has to be so high (typically hundreds of feet).
Thanks. Why does it come up so much in conversations about global warming? Not that acid rain is a treat.
Because we’ve had a tendency to use concerns about global warming and air pollution interchangeably. Part of the reason why US air regulations weren’t regulating CO2 is because it looked at CO2 emission as a positive. If you burn a hydrocarbon completely, in theory what you’ll have as reaction products are water and carbon dioxide, instead of things the Clean Air Act considers pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, which are considered products of incomplete combustion. So, the more CO2 you emitted, the more complete (or clean) the combustion was considered. Permits in the US didn’t even charge for CO2 emissions because of that.
Did you make multiple burners to say the same thing on each GMG site?This is a website dedicated to pop-culture and entertainment not war.
If you aren’t trolling, check out The Warzone on TheDrive.https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone
The A.V. Club’s coverage of the invasion of Ukraine has been distressingly weak. What even was the point of embedding Hughes in that sniper corps?
I definitely went on this as a kid. I mostly just remember finding it a bit duller than I would have expected from Bill Nye and Ellen.
Extol the coal?
MORE REASONS TO HATE THESE PEOPLE WE USED TO LOVE! MRAAAAWWWW! FEED US OUR RAGE. . . FEED US. . . FEED US. . .Also Jamie Lee Curtis, which is a shame. We don’t hate her yet. I don’t think. It’s hard to keep up.
I loved this ride. Absolutely adored it. I don’t think anyone was thinking about weird fossil fuel propaganda when they went on it, were they?I liked the jokes. I liked Ellen and Bill Nye (I’m not American, so basically didn’t know anything about Bill Nye in particular). I’ve always loved dinosaurs so they were always fun to look at. And in terms of where energy like fossil fuels come from, it was vaguely interesting. Those are the things I take away from it multiple years later – not some howlers about clean energy!It feels like a funny choice for a Great Job, Internet column, if I’m honest. Maybe I’m a bit skewed in my perspective, but the Ellen ride ran for 21 years in one of the most popular theme parks in the world – it’s hardly an obscure bit of trivia that needs highlighting, is it?
“I’m an electric car. I don’t go very fast or go very far.”
The funniest thing is the fact that Ellen is specifically playing her character from her sitcom, Jamie Lee Curtis is reprising her role from it as well.Also, Michael Richards had a cameo as a caveman.
still, at least they never took a gig lightly rewriting press releases for a Kinja site
Epcot is like if someone took the internationally themed buildings from Las Vegas and dumped it next to a bunch of attractions that didn’t make the cut for Tomorrowland.There, someone had to say it.
Boy, I’d hate to be Alex Trebek right now!
My father was an Exxon executive tangentially involved with the creation of this ride. Don’t @ me, the family divested our stock long ago and I drive an EV. The gossip I have is that Ellen was a last minute replacement for Tim Allen, who had originally been signed for the gig until Exxon got wind of his cocaine bust. Ellen was considered more family friendly. Exxon had NO CLUE she was a lesbian when they signed her. There was brief talk of getting rid of her, but they didn’t. Exxon and Disney did a lot of executive swaps and, believe it or not, both had forward thinking LGBT policy. A lot of Mary Cheney and Karl Rove types worked at Exxon.
Anyway, it was all very weird to hear about it from my dad as a teenager.
If you’ve been tapped to host the Exxon Energy Adventure Ride, you are immediately placed on a shortlist to play hilariously obtuse Pixar sidekicks.
Your family and dad are evil. Fuck you.
The actual audio-animatronic dinosaur stuff was (at the time) pretty fantastic. I don’t think many people paid much attention to the opening video at all—in whatever iteration of it they saw (and of course originally—pre-Ellen, it fit into the EPCOT “World’s Fair” concept of having corporate and nationally sponsored exhibits.) I dunno, I have a hard time faulting Disney for shilling for the greed-fueled destruction of our environment because of this attraction (and even before it finally closed, they spent many years trying to figure out what to do with it—I think in its final years it would only open up on days when the park had an influx of visitors and they were trying to raise the ride capacity.)
I always hated that this ride made me sit through TWO different presentations, one about the beginning of the Earth, and one about oil, before I got to see fricking dinosaurs. It was such a weird set up, I remember loving the dinos as a kid but hating that I had to wait and watch two boring ass short films before I got to see any frickin dinos.The oil stuff always struck me as heavy handed shilling, even as a kid. I just wanted to see the fricken monsters.
“With any luck, Ellen’s Energy Adventure will one day be considered as offensive as such shame-laden projects as Song of the South and, y’know, Walt Disney’s own views on Jews.”
Yah, there’s so so so much wrong with this statement (like basic facts, context, comparing racism to an attraction sponsored by a, at the time, well regarded corporation, etc, etc). Really stupid. Should we soon expect a similar article wanting to hold Hanna-Barbera to shame for the fact that The Flintstones were sponsored by Winston Cigarettes and that it’s as shameful as some of their racist stereotypes?
Hey apple, you’re no orange!
You’re hardly a true Scotsman either!
I think it’s this weird thing the internet does where like, all bad things are equally bad. A couple of actors taking a paid gig to shill for fossil fuels a few decades ago? Somehow equally as bad as overt racism and anti-semitism.
Why don’t those people from decades ago think the same way that we do now!?!?!-The Internet
Except we already knew how much harm fossil fuels would cause before this ride opened, and thanks to racism minorities often suffer the most from health problems caused by climate change.
Not to mention that if we had started transitioning to renewable energy sources–which were available before this ride opened–we wouldn’t need to buddy up to countries run by dictators for fuel.
Well don’t just GIVE them the headlines!
How dare these people with (checks Wikipedia) one semester of communication studies and a 1977 B.S. in Mechanical Engineering fail to stay abreast of the latest climate science developments before booking a gig?I’m seriously more scandalized by the reality that Bill Nye 1) didn’t study hard science and 2) doesn’t even have a Master’s than anything else in this article.
He worked for Boeing and invented a new hydraulic resonance suppressor for 747s while there. While working there, he started doing stand-up, and appeared on some local-access comedy shows before he got his own show that eventually became Bill Nye the Science Guy.
That’s what I read on Wikipedia, too!Good to know that the user experience is more or less consistent within languages if not across them.
don’t use 1982 as an excuse for this ride, it was revamped in 1996, which is when they added Bill Nye, Ellen, and others. it changed from the Universe of Energy to Ellen’s Energy Adventure.so yeah, 1996 is when Bill Nye and Ellen were talking about clean coal.
Oh no 🙄
Let’s note that the ride also made a very big deal about extolling the virtues of green energy and nuclear power as being the energy sources of the future, so it’s not like it was all fossil fuel propaganda.What’s actually impressive is how well the ride aged as far as the casting goes. Celebrities hosting a ride rarely ages well, but they were lucky enough to get pre-talk-show Ellen and Disney Channel era Bill Nye, both of whom were even more relevant and well known in 2017 than when the ride opened, which probably explains its longevity.
Yeah, they removed Martin Short from the Canada Pavilion movie a few years ago probably because they thought nobody cared about him anymore, but these days with Only Murders in the Building he’s on the radar again.
In fairness, O’Hara and Levy aren’t exactly nobodies.
I’m gonna go WAY out on a limb and speculate that most if not all of these people (well, not Alex Trebek) have different opinions on this topic now, given the new information we now have that they didn’t have back then when the video was made. I know the idea here is to turn molehills into Mt. Everest but to me the bigger culprit here is Disney for not taking the video down until 2017.
The information on fossil fuels causing climate change was absolutely available when the ride opened.
Maybe someone should just tell us what stuff from the past it’s alright to NOT be offended by?
Also, the Ellen version was WAY better than the version from the ‘80s, which was just some boring-ass voice over guy droning on and on until you got to the cool bit with the dinosaurs.
Whelp, good thing there’s nooooo statute of limitations on cancelation, amirite??Ellen- CANCELED!Jamie Lee- CANCELED!Bill Nye- CANCELED!Alex Trebek- CANC…..uh….
once upon a time in the Magical Kingdom
Ahem … *cough* Epcot *cough*. Different parks. *runs away*
Trust the science?
The most surprising thing for me is that the byline for this article of bad takes and misguided rage doesn’t read “Sam Barsanti”.
Oh no. Are trying to say that… people and information change??? NO. I am mad at these celebrities for things they did DECADES AGO. Those corporate shills!!!
I see a lot of commenters implying that we just didn’t know better way back in 1996 and…. uh…. yes we did. Fossil fuel companies funded propaganda and worked against sustainable energy for decades. People were talking about electric cars, solar cars, hybrids, global warming, etc, etc. back then. It wasn’t the dark ages. Gas was cheap so people bought hummers anyways but if you didn’t know better it was because you didn’t want to know.Bill Nye is an entertaining guy, but absolutely a credulous doofus in a lot of ways and it totally makes sense that he has a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
Also a long time ago Ellen didn’t hang out with “friend of the gay community George W. Bush” and treat her staff like shit and pretend she had no idea they were mistreated. Times change. Though I’m sure Ellen doesn’t give two shits about the environment.
People get too high off of nostalgia. Bill Nye has always been a shill, not some paragon of scientific integrity. Alex Trebek was a game show host who was a spokesman for som e shady companies that targeted the elderly . He was not a suave intellectual. DeGeneres is, well we all know who she is.The kind of person who would buddy up with the guy who used demonizing gay people and gay marriage to win a 2nd term
I guess it would have been nice if there was a way to burn coal more efficiently, no?
To read the Guardian article you’d think that Bill and Ellen got involved with this in 1982. Which felt… odd. Turns out the whole thing was made-over in 1996 with those fresh faces of theirs. Which does make it worse.