One advertisement that infuriated me more than almost any other in the last year (and there are SO many to choose from), was that for the Lexus RX Hybrid. At the time I first saw it, green was not the colour in my mind — more a sort of splashy, angry red — and I decided to write about it.

Now, with the advert having been unceremoniously banned for — quite frankly — lying, Lexus have turned to Saatchi & Saatchi, the ailing but global ad agency, who have decided that a world without “h” is a terrible world. Obviously this needs explaining, so here’s the official guff:

“The TV commercial presents a glimpse into a world without h.  The h is missing from key landmarks, computer keyboards and the alphabet in schools.  The viewer begins to wonder where the h has gone.  Then they see, it has moved to a better place, a world with the Lexus hybrid—a place that looks forward and believes in change.  There is no better place for an h to be than on the rear badging of a Lexus hybrid vehicle.”

Run that past me again. Lexus have stolen all the “h”s, screwing the world’s keyboards and schools because they want to look good. Talk about honesty in advertising!

Perhaps this isn’t quite what they meant to get over, but hey, that’s what you get for trying to be clever.

At the same time Lexus have launched something called Lexus Living which is, quite frankly, hilarious. They have a big list of tips to make you a more hybridized greener person. Some of them just have to be listed (with a comment or two):

– Install a tankless hot water heater, and you’ll never run out of hot water (great, we can burn gas forever)

– Set your sprinklers to water at night. This saves water because there is less evaporation (or maybe, not use sprinklers)

– Keep a canvas bag in your car so you’ll have it handy when you go grocery shopping (making sure you always drive to the shops)

– Dimmer switches use less electricity, and the light is often more flattering (no they don’t. Dimmer switches are transformers, and they prevent the use of low energy lightbulbs)

etc…

What they are really saying is that rich people can carry on their rich lifestyle (they suggest you tell your gardener to use a broom rather than a hose : what, to stick up his arse and do a dance for you?) and still feel good while they are screwing the planet.

Lexus, The Unsuitablog salutes your utter load of b******s!

Can we really put the blame on UPS for having it’s own airport terminals, having a fleet of jumbo jets, and using air as the standard method of transporting packages around the world? Don’t decide yet; wait until the end of this little article.

Ok, here’s a quote from the UPS web site:

“Our comprehensive hub-and-spoke network provides you with access to key transportation centers across the U.S. and beyond. Our all-points international air hub is located in Louisville, KY, with other regional hubs located in strategic cities across the U.S. We cover the rest of the world, as well, by operating international air hubs in Miami, Hamilton, Cologne, Taipei, and the Philippines.”

And here’s another:

“On Monday, February 1, 1988, UPS operated the first two flights under its own aircraft operating certificate. Now, every hour of the day, 365 days a year, a UPS aircraft is flying somewhere in the world – moving packages and freight.”

Surely this is just part of the way things are. Watching Tom Hanks being the perfect courier, taking pride in his company’s performance in the movie “Castaway” (ok, so FedEx sponsored it, but you get the picture) warms the cockles of even the most cold-hearted sceptic. This is what UPS do, and have been doing at a faster and faster rate for 101 years.

Here are the hard facts:

1) UPS claim to be an environmentally responsible company. They have their own Sustainability pages and say:

“We conduct our business and operations with consideration for their environmental impact. Our responsibility for the environment ranges from the construction, maintenance, and operation of our facilities, to the maintenance and operation of our vehicles and aircraft, to the conservation of resources.”

2) UPS operate the world’s 9th (or possibly 8th) largest airline, comprising 268 owned aircraft and another 311 chartered, ranging from Boeing 727s to 747s in size.

3) In 2006 UPS’s USA freight emissions produced (according to UPS) 7.37 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (includes other greenhouse gases). This is about the same as the entire annual emissions for Honduras.

4) UPS do not publish their global aircraft emissions figures, instead they show the carbon intensity (the figure that companies and governments use when their overall emissions are going up). It is currently 0.81 kg of some kind of emissions – it doesn’t say what, but we have to assume it’s carbon dioxide – per tonne of cargo.

5) Extrapolating the figures from UPS’s own Worldwide Facts list; if you take the 1.8 million parcels and documents per day, average the weight at 500g (I’m being very conservative here), multiply by 365, you get 330,000 tonnes of air freight. This means that UPS produce an extra…hang on! This doesn’t make sense!

Dig a bit deeper, and you find that the carbon intensity figure is a complete fudge.

“UPS’s (U.S.) absolute CO2 emissions increased by 1% from 2003 to 2004.
However, UPS’s CO2 efficiency improved 2.8 percent. We produced .06 metric tonnes (60 kilograms)less CO2 emissions per 1,000 packages delivered than we did in 2003.” (http://www.cdproject.net/download.asp?file=CDP3_UPS_AQ_3453.pdf)

This means that, assuming the UPS figures are correct, 0.81 on their chart actually means 2.4 tonnes per 1000 packages. We can now use that figure to show that the 657 million international packages per year produces another 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Quite why UPS are so cagey about this figure I have no idea, but it suggests they are not quite so comfortable about their emissions as their environmental pages suggest. But, can we pin the blame on UPS for producing all these emissions?

Not quite. Businesses and increasingly individuals are demanding rapid transportation of goods around the world, and the companies that offer the quickest service are the companies who will get the lion’s share of the custom. UPS are responding to a global demand for rapid transport, and as a consequence of their size they have a lot of aircraft, a lot of trucks and a lot of vans. So, it appears that the businesses who want things NOW have driven the growth of UPS rapid transportation, which has driven the growth of the emissions from freight transport.

However, isn’t it UPS’s CEO who says: “The global trends…are creating compelling growth opportunities for UPS.”

UPS are loving their position in the market, and they will continue to transport things faster and faster, producing more and more emissions because it is good for business – their business.

Just to conclude, I had to include this little snippet, from the Carbon Disclosure Project:

“What renewable energy and energy efficiency activities are you undertaking to manage your emissions? ”

“Solar power provides 70 percent of the power needs at our Palm Springs, Calif., sorting facility. Since its deployment in July 2003, the 100 kilowatt solar panel initiative has produced over 523,000 kilowatt hours of energy, reducing our CO2 output by 1 million pounds. This is the equivalent of removing 99 passenger cars from the road for a year.”

Wow! 1 millions pounds, or 500 tonnes, or 0.0002% of their total USA emissions per year! Possibly the most pathetic statistic I have so far read in 2008.

If you are one of the most successful retailers in an economically rich country then, when you say you are going to become environmentally friendly, that can only really mean one thing: going out of business. Retailers won’t admit that, of course, which is why they insist that “going green” is just a case of lowering their environmental impact, but being able to carry on selling loads of unnecessary products to people who have been brainwashed into thinking they need them by the adverts those same retailers keep running in the media.

Marks and Spencer, a very large and very well thought of UK retailer, is doing more than most, admittedly. In January 2007 they launched Plan A, the inference being that there was “no Plan B”. Plan A, according to M&S, is doing everything necessary to protect the planet, because we only have one. Plan A is also about preventing Plan B from becoming necessary because, although they won’t admit it, Plan B is commercial suicide. Plan B is admitting we don’t need to go shopping.

This week — with huge fanfare — M&S promised to massively reduce their customers’ use of plastic bags. By giving away 280 million less bags a year (a 70% reduction), through charging for them, M&S would save 3,400 tonnes of plastic from being produced. I then had a little search and found this in an M&S business report:

Of the 100,000 tonnes of packaging we use a year, some 79,000 tonnes relates to food packaging.

Hang on! If plastic bags only account 4,800 tonnes of plastic at M&S, then that is only 5% of the packaging that they produce. So why are M&S making such a big deal about plastic bags?

The reason is that the public have been made to think that they can really make a big difference to their environmental footprint by not using plastic bags. This costs the retailers nothing, in fact they save money, and can even make a little on the side by getting customers to pay for reusable advertisements bags.

In the meantime, the public keep shopping: the goods keep getting made, transported and thrown away, and the economy keeps rolling on, using up more and more resources as it goes.

M&S Chief Executive, Stuart Rose is jubilant: 

We’ve made good progress on Plan A. We’ve a lot more to do, but we remain committed to delivering the goals we’ve set. More and more of our employees and suppliers see Plan A as a way of helping us all innovate and do things differently. For example, we originally began working with our suppliers to open three ‘eco’ factories. Now we have plans for several more, including our first in China.

Oh yes! Factories in China. That’s most definitely in the spirit of Plan A.

Some more reportage from those brilliant people at www.unmadeinchina.org. This time its the sponsors they are having a go at. In a way it’s difficult to accuse a company as crassly destructive as Coca Cola or BHPBilliton of hypocrisy in sponsoring the Oppression Olympics (I think that’s what I’ll call them from now on), but as all of the non-Chinese companies purport to be ethical in some way, then it is vital that their names are made public.

If you click on the names you will be able to send a mail to them.

Worldwide (Permanent) Olympic Partners*: 

Coca Cola (j.brock@cokecce.com)
Atos Origin (more-info@atosorigin.com)
General Electric (jeffery.immelt@ge.com)
Johnson & Johnson (wweldon@jnj.com)
Kodak (antonio.perez@kodak.com)
IBM (trading as Lenovo) (ameliow@us.lenovo.com)
Manulife (dominic_d’alessandro@manulife.com)
McDonalds (james.skinner@mcd.com)
Omega Watches (nicolas.hayek@swatchgroup.com)
Panasonic (taylorj@us.panasonic.com)
Samsung (klee@sta.samsung.com)
Visa (hmorris@visa.com)

(* These companies are able to influence Olympic policy)

Non-Chinese Beijing 2008 Partners:

Volkswagen
Adidas

Sponsors:

UPS
Haier
Budweiser
BHPBilliton

Exclusive Suppliers:

UPS
Snickers
Technogym
Staples
Aggreko
Schenker

(Full lists at http://en.beijing2008.cn/bocog/sponsors/sponsors/)

As for every Olympic game, the Beijing 2008 sponsorship is organized in tiers:

• The TOP sponsors (who usually sponsor more than one edition of the Games)
• The Sponsors
• The Suppliers (both exclusive-and not).

How many are there? As Mr. Gerhard Heiberg, Chairman of the Marketing Commission of the International Olympic Committee proudly states “since the marketing program for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games was launched on September 1, 2003, a total of 54 enterprises have become Games partners, sponsors and suppliers.”

Is “54 enterprises” a big number? In other words: what is this “marketing program” really worth, at the economic level?

Official numbers are not yet available, but we can take a look at http://www.olympic.org/uk/organisation/facts/revenue/index_uk.asp the official result of the previous 4-year period (2001-2004). We learn that “Olympic Movement generated a total of more than $4,000 million USD in revenue during the most recent Olympic quadrennium.”

That’s more than 4 billion dollars revenue for marketing. That is, minimal costs to be subtracted.

That was in the far 200-2004, now we are talking of Beijing 2008, “the Games which the world has never seen before” (again, quotes from Mr. Heiberg).

Quite a lot of money, isn’t it? Imagine the campaign… But, wait, there’s not that much advertising of the Olympics (compared to the marketing budget)… Why is that? Once again, the very same Mr. Heiberg comes to our aid: “We are aware that over-commercialization is detrimental to the Olympic Movement and all our sponsors, our partners understand it and accept it”.

Yes, Mr. Heiberg, let’s not make it evident what the Olympics really are, it could be detrimental…

Nice business strategy! What kind of “Olympic spirit” is that?

(from http://www.unmadeinchina.org/contStd.asp?lang=en&idPag=63)

Whoops, there goes another statistic, out of the window before someone notices it’s gone. The Canadian Province of Alberta have a government that are particularly adept at this move, as I found to my annoyance when searching for some figures while researching my book.

It seemed simple enough: go and find out whether the carbon emissions of Alberta have gone up as result of the mining of oil sands in the Athabasca region. You might remember an article I published about this on The Sietch Blog and a little expose I did on Shell, on this very site not long ago – it’s pretty obvious from these that the emissions are bound to be going up. So what a surprise when I go to look for them, to find that the figures are missing, airbrushed from history to be replaced by the magical economic plaything called “Carbon Intensity” (or in Alberta’s case, Greenhouse Gas Intensity, just to make sure everything is neatly covered).

Apparently the quantity of greenhouse gases went down by 20% between 1994 and 2004, but only when compared to the huge amount of money Alberta is making from oil production; when you consider that Alberta’s Gross Domestic Product  went up by 3.6% per year in the same period  then you realise that, in fact, Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions have actually gone up by 20%.

They don’t want you to know that, of course, and the Canadian Government are more than happy to let them get on with this, because Alberta is the big cheese, the top dog, the grand wizard of economic output:

“The federal government will receive 41 per cent of $123 billion of total government revenues from the oil sands”
(from CAPP, Industry Facts and Information)

Odd then that even the Government of Alberta say, on the very same page they banished the Carbon Emissions from:

“As greenhouse gases are added to the atmosphere, they contribute to the enhanced greenhouse effect, causing the increase in global temperature to take place at a faster rate than has ever been recorded. It is predicted that as temperatures continue to increase in the coming years, we will see more heat waves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.”

When it comes to money versus life, then money always wins where politicians are concerned.

When an energy company, especially one that also generates electricity, urges its customers to use less of its product then my heckles are immediately up. One or two energy companies – the small ones, mind – see being environmentally friendlier as good sense, not just from a business point of view; but it’s the big ones, Duke Energy, RWE Group, BG, EDF Energy, who really make me suspicious when they talk of “saving energy”.

To put things in a nutshell, some companies are being forced to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions as part of energy trading schemes the countries they operate in have signed up to. Trading greenhouse gases is not something I advocate – it just pushes the pollution somewhere else, and merely incorporates something that should be a global right – namely the right not to have your environment destroyed. The same companies also have to be seen to be doing the “right thing”, after all, who wants to be seen as a big polluter in a dying world?

But the trick is not to actually do anything useful, but instead merely to seem to be doing something useful. Like encouraging your customers to save energy. In the case of EDF Energy, the vast majority of their UK electricity comes from coal, despite what they imply on their web site. They have two 2GW coal-fired stations here and here. They also have a scheme which is apparently intended to encourage customers to reduce their emissions. Here’s how it works:

1) Use EDF Energy’s products for a year and record your energy usage through billing.
2) Whoops, first you have to be a Nectar Card holder. Nectar is a reward card, that allows participating companies to know everything about your buying habits.
3) When your year has finished, you stay with EDF Energy for another year and record your energy use through billing.
4) After that year, if you have reduced your energy consumption at all, even by just one unit, then you get lots of Nectar Points.
5) If you reduce your energy consumption by 50% then you get no more rewards than if you hardly reduce your consumption at all.

The benefit to the customer is…hmm! not really sure here. Oh, yes, 1000 Nectar Points. I tried to find out what you can get for 1000 Nectar Points, and really struggled – even The Da Vinci Code costs 1,700 points. I think you get £5 off at Sainsburys for all your hard work. Well done!

The benefit to EDF Energy is:

1) They have a guaranteed customer for 2 years, which is vital in a dynamic market.
2) They don’t lose on energy costs because the customer only has to reduce consumption by 1 unit
3) They get to sell information about you to 3rd parties. I’m not lying, this is in their terms and conditions:

“By registering and accepting these Rules, you are also agreeing to allow EDF Energy to use, disclose and share with other relevant companies (including LMUK) all information relating to you which is reasonably required for the purposes of registering you, managing and properly operating this Scheme” (from https://www.edfenergy.com/readreducereward/showTermsAndConditions.do)

So, do EDF really care about reducing greenhouse gases?

What do you think?

I think by now everyone in the UK has heard of the £1.99 whole chicken being sold in Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in Europe. In fact I would be surprised if the news hasn’t spread elsewhere; such is the disgust being shown by many people who previously (had it not been for the likes of Jamie Oliver – see this article) would not have given a fig. In fact there are still many people who don’t give a fig that chickens are being bred in brutal conditions and sold as a bargain bin line; like this person who wrote to a London newspaper:

“I don’t give a fig about the welfare of chickens and I’m tired of well-heeled liberal bores in expensive areas of the South-East telling me what I should eat and how much I should pay for it.”

That is so obviously wrong on so many levels, but I would just like to ask the writer whether they are happy growing and killing their own food. If so, then you just carry on eating…somehow, though, I think the answer might be “No”.

There are others who do give a fig (there are lots of figs flying about), such as this person in the same paper:

“I’m on a tight budget, but I’d rather feed my kids vegetables than substandard, poor-quality chicken.”

Not quite a welfare evangelist, but sensible, all the same. Tesco, on the other hand, don’t have a leg to stand on. They say, in a press release:

“Tesco today announced it has doubled its order for premium chicken – which means there will be far more Free Range, Willow Farm, Finest and organic chicken available for shoppers.”

and then say:

“Tesco is also cutting the price of standard whole birds from £3.30 to £1.99 to ensure shoppers on a budget also benefit. This lower price will mean families can sit down to roast chicken and all the trimmings for less than £1.00 per person.”

Hang on! So what proportion of their chickens are “higher welfare”?

“This will bring the proportion of higher welfare chicken Tesco sells up to around 30 per cent of total chicken sales, an increase of 70 per cent compared to this time last year.”

Which means that 70% of their chicken is, to be quite frank, crappy welfare. They say as much themselves.

I’ll stick to nut roast if you don’t mind.

I don’t make a habit of swearing, but this morning has been testing, to say the least. Formerly known as the “World’s Favourite Airline” until the world decided that it wasn’t too fond of airlines pushing out carbon dioxide into its upper atmosphere, British Airways have decided, in its eternal wisdom, to kit out a couple of Airbus A318s for its most luxury conscious business travellers. An article in The Guardian (which happens to carry popup adverts on its website for said airline), states:

“The route announced yesterday will see two daily flights between London City airport, next door to the capital’s financial district, and JFK. BA will use two Airbus A318 planes fitted out with flat beds and carrying a maximum of 32 passengers.”

“Willie Walsh, British Airways’ chief executive, said: ‘Given the range of corporate clients that we have based in and around London City, we thought it was a great opportunity. It’s about us being innovative and listening to our customers.’ “

I stared at this article, wondering how ostentaciously polluting it was possible to be, and short of having your own private jet, this is pretty close. The Airbus A318 is normally equipped to carry 107 passengers, but try to get hold of the carbon emissions figures for this aircraft and you find that Airbus have conveniently removed them from their information pages. Airbus’ head office in Toulouse likes to cut callers off when they mention carbon emissions, so I resorted to using the ClimateCare (don’t even think of going there to offset your flights – just don’t fly, for goodness sake!) calculator, which gives a typical return flight from London City to New York JFK as 1.55 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s about the same as the total annual carbon emissions for a person in Uruguay.

Turn a 107 seater plane into a 32 seater plane, like British Airways are doing, and you can then multiply the emissions per person, per flight by 3.31, giving each rich businessman (yes, they are almost all men) a total of 5.18 tonnes of carbon dioxide for their return flight. That’s 35% more than the total annual carbon emissions for a person in China!

This from a company that states:

“We are leading the climate change debate in our industry.”

If they are the leader in the industry then I think it is fair to say that you should never listen to an air executive when they talk about climate change.

Blimey! Some good news – it’s not a company that have decided to stop greenwashing (that would surely be something significant) but it does seem that people are waking up to the sins of Greenwashing. British Gas (or BG, as they like to be known around the world) tried to convince the British people that they were selling gas that was “carbon neutral”, as well as claiming that their electricity (yes, they sell electricity too, produced mainly with gas) was the greenest around.

Wrong on both counts, really wrong…

“A TV and press ad campaign for British Gas has been banned by the advertising watchdog for making false green claims about an energy tariff. The ad regulator ruled that the TV commercial was misleading and should not be shown again in the same form.”

“A second ad – a national newspaper advertorial, for the same ‘green’ tariff – was criticised by the ASA for making the claim it was the ‘greenest domestic energy tariff’. The company admitted that the [Energywatch] website did not rank tariffs in order of “greenness” and that there was no industry-wide methodology.”

(from The Guardian)

With a history of energy exploration in the Amazon, and interests in drilling for gas in the pristine Arctic wilderness, BG (or Bad Greenwashers) have felt the first slap from the increasing number of people who won’t tolerate hypocrisy. Keep it up readers – don’t let them get away with it.

Sorry about the big image, I did my best reducing it from the broadsheet newspaper advert I stumbled upon last week, but it’s got to be big, hasn’t it? Land Rover are taking out adverts in all the newspapers, they are so concerned about the planet that they’ve decided to jack it all in: yes, it’s true, Land Rover are no longer making or selling cars. No more Freelanders, no more Range Rover Sports, no more Defenders, nothing. It’s all going on the scrap heap because they have finally realised, after years of marketing vehicles that do 18 miles per gallon (that’s just over 14 MPG in North America) or even worse, that the planet is frying and they are partly to blame. So, in deference to our only reason for existing, they are giving up the motor trade.

Great!

If only it were true.

Sadly, that’s just in my dreams. In reality, Land Rover – owned by our old friends, Ford – are just splattering the pages of newspapers and magazines around the world with the same old rubbish about carbon offsetting, sustainable vehicles, new technology and, that old favourite, supporting green projects. Good old Land Rover – masters at pretending they actually care. Good old Land Rover – masters at the greatest mass-mobilisation PR campaign we are ever likely to see in our lifetimes: the motor industry going “green”.

What a load of greenwash.