The Yes Men Have Done it Again!

As ~1,000 "Earthlings" participated in Oxfam's Human Countdown event yesterday (guided by "tcktcktck" sounds being made by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan), the New York Post was getting ready to release an entire issue on climate change.

Or was it? This morning, The Yes Men and 2,000 volunteers distributed a New York Post look-alike newspaper about climate change entitled "We're Screwed". The paper contains all true facts - except for one: that nyc.gov released a report about climate change. Actually, all the facts in this report are true, too - but nyc.gov didn't write the it. The Yes Men wrote both the New York Post and the NYC.gov pdf report. They're geniuses!

This type of stunt isn't new to The Yes Men. In fact, they've pulled similar stunts on big corporations many times before - and lived to tell about it. You may have seen or heard about their previous move called The Yes Men, but they've recently made a new movie, called The Yes Men Fix the World. Its US release date is October 7. I encourage you to go see it - it's thought-provoking and hilarious! (I saw a pre-screening of it.)



All of this is part of a giant campaign to raise awareness about climate change, occurring in hundreds of cities across the globe from Sept. 20-26, 2009. You can see Climate Week NYC events here.

More about the Human Countdown:
In the Human Countdown, we formed a gigantic Earth inside an hourglass and fell through it like grains of sand, to tell President Obama and the UN that time is running out for us to save our precious Earth from catastrophic climate change. The people in green who represented the land funneled down to form the words "tck tck tck" while those of us in blue (the ocean) became panels on the sides in the bottom of the hourglass. At the end of the 1 min. 11 sec. video made exclusively for this event, we all became clocks counting down from 12:07 to 12:18, to represent the climate change talks in Copenhagen that will occur from December 7 through 18, 2009.

Here's a video by the producers of the Human Countdown describing the purpose of the event.

Here's a cut version of the filming, with interviews.

Here's a photo of what it looked like from above.