We’re all going on a summer holiday,
No more working for a week or two,
Fun and laughter on a summer holiday,
It’s free of carbon, so don’t be blue,
Can it really be true?

Oh, gosh! Leafing through the Travel supplement in this week’s Saturday Guardian, my wife saw something so bizarrely stupid it hardly qualifies as greenwash. “Unsuitablog!” she shouted out, as the supplement landed in my lap. And so it was – beginning with the words, “Make your sand footprint the only one that matters with these trips”.

Well, I really must check what kind of holiday (we’re talking about vacations here, not seasonal breaks) has no carbon footprint…

Ponta D’Ouro, Mozambique

Ponta D’Ouro has been earmarked by the government “to receive utmost priority for new developments”. Luckily, some want to protect rather than profit from this precious ecosystem, already under serious threat from tourism. Stay in beach huts and join marine zoologist Dr Almeida Guissamulo on a volunteering holiday, monitoring dolphins, turtles and coral reef degradation. This is hands-on conservation, not just an excuse for a diving holiday.

· People and Places (08700 460 479, travel-peopleandplaces.co.uk), £1,695 for four weeks, including accommodation and food. Kenya Airways flies from Heathrow to Maputo (kenya-airways.com). From £630 rtn.

So you can spend over $3000 on a month’s conservation work (someone has lots of time and money on their hands), and don’t mention the odd 5 or 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent getting their and back. It’s ok, because you’re doing conservation work.

Here’s another one…

La Cienaga Coral Lagoon, Venezuela

The last leg of the journey to this turquoise lagoon is 15 minutes by boat to a wooden eco-lodge right on its shores. Tucked between the mountains of Henri Pittier’s National Park, the lodge and the community’s eco policy is to combat coral degradation, reduction of fish stocks and waste. They have installed noticeboards providing environmental information, arranged with local boatmen to retrieve rubbish and are monitoring illegal fishing. All you have to do to support these efforts is walk from your beach cabin to the reef, dive in and see the beauties they are trying to protect.

· Responsibletravel.com (00 44 1273 600030). From $135 pp for two days in the eco-lodge. Air France flies from London to Caracas (0870 142 4343, airfrance.co.uk) from £390 return.

Just two days in the eco-lodge, so that means you’re going to be doing lots of other hard-core conservation work for the rest of the time to make your long-haul flight worthwhile, aren’t you…but read it again: “All you have to do to support these efforts is walk from your beach cabin to the reef, dive in and see the beauties they are trying to protect.”

Exactly how is living in the lap of bounteous luxury on a tropical reef an “eco holiday”? The other three are just as bad — long-haul flights, superficial conservation work or none at all.

I am willing to bet that the holiday / flight companies mentioned all paid for a nice slot in a popular weekend supplement — how else could they get such good advertising. Why else would The Guardian be promoting such carbon soaked vacations?

Here’s an idea for an “eco” holiday: go for a walk, take the bike out, do some gardening, enjoy the area around you. Don’t fly.

It’s no surprise that India is becoming a hotbead of greenwashing, with the market-friendly government and some of the richest people on Earth starting to understand the power and wealth that can be gained by brainwashing a population of a billion people into the way of industrial civilization.

For alerting me to the blatant Astroturf that is the CSCCC I have Manu Sharma to thank:

Two days ago (Apr 1, 2008) Hindustan Times carried an article titled Climate change not as big a problem: report. Lest anyone should think it as an April Fool’s joke, it was a completely serious piece based on real events. Today (Apr 3, 2008), the same correspondent published a report titled: ‘Sun too causes global warming.’

Both articles are highly misleading, contain factual inaccuracies and at the very least deliberately hide widely known facts that counter its argument to paint a biased picture. In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to highlight the key issues raised by each of the stories.

Climate change not as big a problem: report [1]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 14, HT New Delhi, Apr 1, 2008 | 353 words

Opening excerpt:

“An international civil society report has debunked the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying there is no evidence available to show loss of human life directly due to climate change.
The report of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [CSCCC], to be released in India on Tuesday, says there is no evidence to suggest climate change has caused an increase in diseases.”

Highly Misleading

By pitting CSCCC directly against IPCC, the article creates the impression that both organisations are of similar stature. Nothing could be further from the truth. IPCC is a Noble prize winning United Nations body made up of hundreds of scientists and governmental representatives while CSCCC is merely a coalition of so-called global “think tanks” - corporate lobbyists funded by big oil corporations, the likes of ExxonMobil, to further their interests.

The HT article makes no mention of the background of CSCCC - who comprises the coalition and how are they funded. Unlike IPCC, which was formed two decades ago, CSCCC was only organised a little more than an year back [4] by International Policy Network (IPN) which is a well known recipient of Exxon funding. IPN has received $390,000 from Exxon. Several other members of the coalition have also been a beneficiary.

Paul Reiter, the expert cited in the article, for example, sits on the “Scientific and Economic Advisory Council” of an organization called the “Annapolis Centre.” What is Annapolis Centre? It’s a US based “think tank” that has pocketed $793,575 from ExxonMobil and has been very active in playing down the human contribution to global warming.

Reiter doesn’t have anything too substantiative in his research papers published in scientific peer reviewed journals to back his claims of lack of relationship between disease and climate change. It’s unclear how many other claims of CSCCC report are backed by research in peer reviewed journals.

Yet, here’s a newspaper that reaches out to a country of one billion, publishing unsubstantiated “research” of corporate lobbyists that have a direct financial interest in sensationalising their so-called findings; and pits them against a neutral, highly conservative group of scientists and government representatives whose work is completely based on pure scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals…

I strongly recommend you read the rest of this well-researched article here.

Astroturfs are not new, of course, and they are such powerful tools of business that I have a separate category for them on The Unsuitablog. The CSCC is notable, though, for purporting to be a truly international body, representative of “46 member organisations from 35 countries”. When you did down a little you find that these “46 member organisations” are also astroturfs or even more obvious corporate lobby bodies, making the CSCCC a Super Astroturf.

There’s a fun game you can play, trying to find out why they are members of CSCCC — it’s called “follow the links“.

I picked the very first body on the list, the Alabama Policy Institute.

Go to http://www.alabamapolicy.org/ for the main site, then click on “About Us“. Nothing particularly exciting, except some stuff about wanting to bring religion into politics. Click on “Press and Media” instead, to find out that their President is Gary Palmer. Click on his biography and you find:

“Gary co-founded the Alabama Policy Institute, formerly known as the Alabama Family Alliance, in 1989. Gary was previously employed by Rust International in cost analysis, and prior to that with Combustion Engineering in the environmental systems division.”

A man of business clearly, and also someone who is very fond of religious censorship. But Gary isn’t our main man, it is Vice President Michael Ciamarra :

“a widely published columnist and a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s National Task Force on Tax Policy and The Heritage Foundation Resource Bank. He is an advisor to the National Center for Health Transformation.”

Let’s go to the American Legislative Exchange Council at http://www.alec.org. Here you will find, under ALEC Initiative > Internation Relations :

“Free trade is central to ALEC’s vision of the way nation states should relate to each other. In order to fully realize a broad and deep free market that reaches across the Atlantic, we need to mobilize strong leadership from legislators on both sides, as well as our business communities. Now, more than ever, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic need to continue their challenge to over-taxing, over-borrowing and over-governing.”

Hmmm, wonder why preventing climate change would be a worry to ALEC then? What about the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank?

With a little digging around…bingo! Here’s a brilliant (well, crap) piece of straw man thinking:

http://theheritagefoundry.org/2008/05/19/the-polar-bears-are-coming/

And there are many more: have a look at this lot.

And finally, the National Center for Health Transformation. Take a look at their members! Clearly it’s the public whose concern is foremost in CHT’s mind — surely nothing to do with ensuring the market economy is vibrant and all powerful.

It’s a great game that all the family can play, and I think I’ll be playing it a lot more in the future.

This month at your local news stand, and in supermarkets up and down the Western world, you will find National Geographic Magazine devoting an entire issue to the realities of climate change. It’s their “Changing Climate” edition. It’s not the first time National Geographic has featured on The Unsuitablog: last time they were filling their regular editions with car adverts, showing that their primary motivation is to make money.

But, a whole edition on climate change, surely they wouldn’t stoop so low as to place unsuitable adverts, would they? I didn’t need to read the text to know that it would contain the usual superficial sycophantic articles about issues that need to be given the acid rather than the warm flannel treatment — we are talking about global catastrophe here, guys! I also didn’t need to read the Solutions section to know that the only solutions presented would be straight out of Ikea and Walmart, and nothing to do with actually changing the way humans live.

I didn’t have to read the text, but I did — and I was right on both counts. But one thing that struck me was the apparent absence of adverts throughout the magazine; a pleasant surprise, I may add, considering the normal consumer rush that readers are subjected to each month.

And then I looked inside the front cover:

ConocoPhillips. A full page advert telling us that they are funding university courses, brainwashing the minds of tomorrow into the ways of the oilman. Yes, ConocoPhillips, major stakeholder in the Syncrude partnership, extracting millions of barrels of thick, carbon-intensive oil from the tar sands of Canada. ConocoPhillips, major supporter of the hopelessly polluting coal to ethanol technology, and all round destroyer of ecosystems across the globe.

As I put the magazine back on the shelf, I glanced at the back cover. There, staring at me, bathed in the verdant, lush glow of a forest canopy, proudly sitting on a rough dirt track, was a Chevy Tahoe Hybrid. “Green Vehicle Of The Year” despite notching up a piss-poor 21 MPG fuel economy. Chevy, makers of a sizable chunk of the most polluting cars in the USA and recent stars of The Unsuitablog.

Thank you for this eye-opener, National Geographic Magazine: three great greenwashers all coming together in a symphony of shit. I bet you are so proud of yourselves!

Before someone decides to prevent me ever writing for any newspaper ever again (and by God, I’ve burnt a few bridges already!) I will say that I actually like The Independent. Of all the national newspapers in the UK it is by far the best for giving environmental issues a high profile, and saying what it thinks.

The paper recently ran an excellent article on the Open Skies Agreement, which will ensure the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by transatlantic aircraft goes well over what the smug naysayers in the air industry are claiming. This was backed up a Leader, which stated:

As this newspaper has long argued, the best way to do this is to start taxing the aviation industry fairly and properly. It is time that the price of air travel corresponded more closely with its environmental costs. The fact that airlines, by international convention, have never been subject to fuel tax or VAT has amounted to a vast hidden subsidy to this method of transport and one that urgently needs to be removed.

So why, in all that is sacred, are they running adverts that make them look like hypocrites? The picture above is a perfect example. A decent article about the dangers of air transport expansion nicely juxtaposed with an advert for long-haul flight behemoths, Emirates. And not just any old advert: one with interactive features to allow you to see the luxury inside one of their specially fitted-out Boeing or Airbus aircraft. Way to go, web designers!

In case the editors were wondering how bad Emirates is, according to their annual report for 2006-2007, the average Emirates passenger flew 4,400km, which produces about 0.62 tonnes of carbon dioxide. They carried 17.5 million passengers, which means that, in 2006/7, Emirates Airlines emitted around 10.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide: about the same as the whole of Jamaica emitted in the same year.

Not the best company to give space to in your Climate Change section.

Those guys at Treehugger.com, what a bunch of great guys! They love a joke, don’t they?

“In spite of all the bad news about first-generation biofuels, it’s still a thrill to hear that Virgin Atlantic announced yesterday a 747 flown on a mixture of about 20 percent biofuel and the rest kerosene will lift off for a test flight in February, many months earlier than planned.

“The passengerless Virgin flight from London to Amsterdam will be a Boeing 747-400 and will fly the approximately 1.5-hour flight on the alternative fuel, which Virgin spokesman Paul Charles wouldn’t identify but said is from a “sustainable” source that doesn’t compete with food or freshwater supplies.”

Anyone would think they are really supporting flying - good thing it’s just some crazy April Fools joke. What? It’s not a joke?! My source tells me that they really did write an article that said it was “a thrill” to hear about a 20% biofuel plane.

A Thrill?!

Do they really think that making any form of flying more respectable will do anything to make this planet a greener place? 20% biofuels, so that means 80% kerosene, so let’s just suppose that it’s a 20% cut in fossil fuel emissions. Now let’s look at the source of the biofuel.

A “sustainable” source would mean no net transport emissions, no use of fertilisers, no loss of habitat, no reduction in photosythesis…are you getting this?

And let’s just suppose (we’re really stretching the imagination now) that this “sustainable” source is better than kerosene in terms of overall emissions. How many people will stop flying now if they think that it is ok to carry on doing it because their flights are now a little bit greener? How many people who previously refused to fly because of the horrific greenhouse gas growth will now think again, and maybe take the odd Virgin flight?

If flying was truly sustainable then I would be on the first plane to New Zealand to see the glaciers before they all melted away; but it never will be sustainable, and I’m not going. Treehugger, you really have sold out on this one.

I just don’t understand it. National Geographic Magazine has some fantastic environmental articles, and its environmental credentials as regards to editorial objectiveness and openness are second to none. It’s just a shame that no one at NG told the advertising department this.

Open any edition of National Geographic and you will find a host of advertisements promoting big cars, big trucks, airlines and long-haul holidays. This is a magazine that pushes carbon consumption harder that any other.

And then you go to their web site and find this:

 ”From saving forest canopies to forging elephant corridors, the [National Geographic] Conservation Trust is dedicated to preservation around the globe.”

Very good. And this is just one of their many initiatives. They have many more initiatives on the advertising side, proudly boasting in their Sales Kit:

“National Geographic magazine enjoys an intensely loyal readership with some of the most influential consumers in the world. As opinion leaders, they are affluent, well educated, and professional - and have discretionary income to purchase quality products and services.” (my emphasis)

So, National Geographic readers, you are loyal, you are powerful and you are rich, and that’s why you will put up with and respond to hoards of adverts for products that are destroying the Earth. Well, here’s one former reader who won’t be buying National Geographic again. Good riddance.

So I’m browsing the Guardian web site, looking for this and that, and I come across this little nugget. Someone (I’m not sure they have really as it’s really an advert) has asked those nice people at British Gas how to save energy. “Of course!” BG cry, “We can save you money!”

“But that’s not what I wanted,” says imaginary Stewert Hancock, “I wanted to save energy.

“Look at all the money you can save, Mr Hancock. Money, money, money! Doesn’t that sound nice?”

“I only wanted to make my children happy.”

How typical of British Gas (and foolish of The Guardian’s Editors) to turn something that should be an altruistic activity into ways of saving money. This is an absolute rock-solid indication of how BG would never dent its bottom line by allowing people to question the system that ensures their shareholders are kept in profit.

If British Gas were serious about saving the planet then their bottom line would be that such energy saving actions should be carried out because the planet is being killed by our activities; but it all comes down to money. Money that ensures that, if British Gas can continue to look good enough then they can continue trading rather than having their motives questioned deeply by the public who have been made blind to the greenwash being thrown over them by energy companies.