Ecorazzi

We know The Yes Men are prone to incurring the wrath of organizations and corporations in response to their elaborate pranks, but a whole country?

Back during the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December, the pranksters teamed up with anonymous Canadian activists and used press releases and fake websites to announce that Canada would adopt science-based emission targets – reducing emissions by 40% over 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% by 2050. The news received enormous media attention across Canada and, according to The Greener Pages, caused at least two embarrassing media moments for Canadian high officials. In response, the government strong armed an ISP into taking down the two fake sites — and simultaneously knocking out 4500 others in the process. From the article,

“In a remarkable overstepping of bounds, [they] also asked the ISP to “make every effort to prevent any further attempts concerning other environment-related domains (enviro, ec-gc, etc.) originating from your servers. In response to Environment Canada’s request, Serverloft immediately turned off a whole block of IP addresses, knocking out more than 4500 websites that had nothing to do with the parody sites or the activists who created them. Serverloft was shown no warrant, and never called the web hosting company about the shutdown.”

Nice job, ass clowns.

“We are sorry to see that the Canadian government will not ‘take certain actions’ that could help stave off catastrophic climate change,” said Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men. “And we are also sorry to see that they don’t care so much for free speech.”

“Surely the Canadian government has better things to do than shut down thousands of websites, beg the US for photo ops, and berate NGOs for things they haven’t done,” said Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. “They could instead figure out reasonable ways of responding to their growing legion of critics.”

Canada, whose climate change policy has been woefully lacking, was awarded the “Colossal Fossil” prize by the Climate Action Network for worst behavior in the COP-15 negotiations.

via Treehugger