Hollywood's guru of global warming

Laurie David has become adept at using pop culture to promote a greener planet – on TV, the Web, and in the rock music world.

from the April 12, 2007 edition

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David's awakening as an environmentalist began a decade ago. Her focus on global warming is more recent. She read about how polluting her 15-mile-per-gallon SUV was and bought a Prius that got 50 miles to the gallon. Laughing, David says her friends, the few who still drive SUVs, will not park anywhere nearby when they meet her for dinner, for fear of being chastised.

David doesn't just blame conspicuous consumers. She has been a fierce critic of America's Big Three automakers for lobbying against carbon-cutting legislation and tougher fuel-economy standards. Frustration led David and Arianna Huffington, a political commentator, to found the controversial Detroit Project in 2003. The initiative created provocative TV commercials that equated driving large SUVs with aiding terrorists in oil-producing regions. The major networks refused to air them for fear of alienating advertisers.

The resistance caused David to reassess her strategy. If she couldn't engage the public through commercials, she would attempt to reach Americans in other ways. Besides convincing an initially reticent Gore to take his global-warming slide show into movie theaters., David made a hard-hitting film that appeared on HBO, went on Oprah, and recruited NASCAR drivers, Evangelicals, and country music fans. She pushed for global-warming plots to be folded into soap-opera scripts and enlisted comedians to tackle the subject. "The topic of global warming is so heavy that sometimes the only way you can open people's eyes is by greeting them with levity and self-deprecation first," says David, sipping an iced coffee.

When she first came up with the idea of a "virtual march," Mr. Kennedy, for one, was skeptical – "It sounded like nothing more than an Internet petition drive and seemed like a waste of time." But David has been able to get people across the country to sign up on the site, including many nonenvironmentalists. She's gotten signatures from Democrats running for the White House in 2008, Republicans such as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arizona Sen. John McCain, and others ranging from tycoons to sports stars.

Designed to raise awareness about global warming, the site (www.stopglobalwarming.org) acts as a clearinghouse for links to scientific data as well as a billboard for upcoming events. "I was wrong to ever underestimate her," says Kennedy. "Here she is with nearly three-quarters of a million citizens signed on, and she's using it as a platform to mobilize people in every walk of life."

By most accounts, David is a formidable personality. It hasn't hurt her campaign that she has two other things of importance in Hollywood: wealth and connections. Even she admits having money available from her husband, Larry, co-creator of the sitcom "Seinfeld," has helped immeasurably.

Yet David is relentless. Kennedy recounts how she kept pushing for a meeting with Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Fox News, which had given lots of airtime to climate change skeptics. Eventually, he says, she convinced Mr. Ailes to air a program about global warming.

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