The Unsuitablog

I was having a bit of a browse yesterday looking for useful environmental groups that might help out with a project I am doing and stumbled across the World Environmental Organization. They don’t do things by halves, these guys, clearly the domain name www.world.org didn’t come cheap, and to proudly proclaim yourself as the World Environmental Organization, i.e. an organization that represents the environment of the world, must mean you have a truly global presence.

WEO don’t exactly say a lot about themselves: they seem to have just the one office, which is in Washington DC, and a board of directors that includes Jeff Gold as Chair. Jeff made lots of money from selling internet domains, particularly go.com and q.com, and he currently holds solar.org which is “A project of the World Environmental Organization”, and is also a showcase for GE Energy products. Now I don’t need to tell you what GE have done for the planet, I’ll let Corporate Watch do it for me. I wouldn’t let GE, or any of the other energy behemoths anywhere near my work.

What really pisses me off, though, is the list of sponsors which WEO shows on its site:

Like WWF, which I featured a while back, it seems that for a small stipend, and despite any history that company may have, they can be associated with an “environmental” organization (the World Environmental Organization, no less) and thus an extra layer of slippery green oil can be applied to their filthy, polluting bodies for the cost of a big corporate lunch.

And if having a list of highly dubious sponsors wasn’t enough, WEO (or rather, Jeff Gold) has gone on to trademark everything on the site: the logo, the domain and even the name; despite World Environmental Organization being a widely discussed global concept that could potentially be vital for overseeing the activities of the greenwashers that blight this planet.

As it is, WEO is a small, very worthy, East Coast USA based setup that really should learn to be a little more modest, and careful with the people it decides to do business with.