It’s painful to watch this, but if you really want to see a giant green marketing Weeble take centre stage at a presentation by a racing team that, by its own admission, will “dabble in just about anything that has wheels”, then feel free. It gets really silly about 5 minutes in.

But first is the email exchange between myself and Megan Palmer who works for a PR company, promoting a product that – and it gets a bit complicated here – has a part to play in the thing that they actually mention, as opposed to the thing they don’t mention which is the product they are supposed to be promoting! You’ll see what I mean if you keep reading…

From: Megan Palmer
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 1:09 AM
To: Megan Palmer
Subject: FW: Rick Ware Racing Video Press Conference Tomorrow at 3pm EST To Announce Green Sponsor

Hi,

I wanted to introduce myself and invite you to participate in Rick Ware Racing’s Video Press Conference where they will announce our green client as their multi-year sponsor for NASCAR, right before Daytona 500 next week tomorrow during a live video press conference. I will be contacting you in the near future regarding this exciting green product.

The press conference is tomorrow at 3pm EST http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rick-ware-racing or follow them on twitter for more @rickwareracing

Hope you can tune in and I look forward to working with you soon!

Megan

Megan Palmer
Executive Account Manager
Public Relations & Events

megan@amgwagency.com

ph: 305.856.8004 x: 304
fax: 305.856.8650
bb pin: 30FDCD98

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/meganpalmeramg

900 SW 8th Street C-2
Miami, Fl 33130

From: “Keith Farnish”
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 09:25:10 -0000
To: Megan Palme
Cc: Keith Farnish
Subject: Re: Rick Ware Racing Video Press Conference Tomorrow at 3pm EST To Announce Green Sponsor

WHAT! How can a “green” client be a sponsor of a motor racing team?!

Please respond as this is astonishing.

Keith

From: megan@amgwagency.com
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 11:28 AM
To: Keith Farnish
Subject: Re: Rick Ware Racing Video Press Conference Tomorrow at 3pm EST To Announce Green Sponsor

Good morning, maybe its better phrased as ‘eco friendly’. :) hope you can tune in.

Sent on the Now Network� from my Sprint® BlackBerry

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 6:33 AM, Keith Farnish wrote:

That still doesn’t make sense, Megan. What part of motor racing is “eco friendly”?

Keith

From: Megan Palmer
Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 11:54 AM
To: Keith Farnish
Subject: Re: Rick Ware Racing Video Press Conference Tomorrow at 3pm EST To Announce Green Sponsor

The product is “eco-friendly” but that’s only one component. It’s an automotive product, which is why they’re taking part in the motor racing sport. I can’t say too much more before the video conference. As I look further at your website maybe it’s not a fit for your type of “green” coverage. Sorry for wasting your time. :) Have a good weekend

My type of “green” coverage. As opposed to what? I assume Megan meant really gullible “green” coverage that dumbly reproduces anything that purports to be green in order to pack out its RSS feed.

[On a sidenote, one reason The Unsuitablog doesn’t have 10000 subscribers is precisely because it doesn’t dumbly reproduce every bit of cack sent to it in order to have 5 or 10 posts per day. I would like to think the people who read this actually care about the subject matter…]

So, much later on I watched a recorded version of the Rick Ware Press Conferenc because, for some strange reason, I didn’t feel like watching it live. It turns out that Megan’s client is (I assume) the makers of Fuel Doctor, the product represented by the Weeble. I popped over to their site and had a read.

Apparently, simply by plugging this little gizmo into the cigarette lighter port of a car, your mileage can improve by 25%. This is mightily impressive considering all it is is an electrical filter, much like the ones you can put between a power supply and an amplifier to (theoretically) improve the sound quality of a hi-fi. Which makes me rather concerned that hundreds of millions of people are driving around at any one time in highly complex pieces of machinery that are so badly made that a simple line filter can fundamentally alter the ability of an engine to process gasoline.

So it’s a good thing that it’s a complete load of bollocks.

The so-called “certified lab tests” show, in shattered English, between 0.055% and 0.5% fewer carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, this incredible “green” technology has the equivalent emissions improvements to cleaning a bit of dirt off the windscreen.

Now, I know the CO2 test is right, because it uses a standard piece of kit, used around the globe to a recognised level of accuracy. But in the test that produced 0.055% less carbon dioxide, the car used 16% less fuel! They have somehow contrived to create something that uses up to 25% less fuel, yet emits virtually the same amount of carbon dioxide. According to a link on their web site:

It should be noted that the majority of the Carbon (99%) coming out of an engine is in the form of CO2. This means that improvements in fuel economy result in reduced CO2 emissions.

How did they measure the fuel use? Well, nowhere does it actually say, except on one of the tests we see some rulers next to some measuring jugs containing alarmingly orange liquid. Anyway, as the man said, emissions should match fuel economy, and they don’t, so nothing on the Fuel Doctor site has any credence whatsoever.

And neither does sending out a press release claiming that something to do with a motor racing team is “green” :-)

There is a story, and it is partly true, that the Ford Motor Company were responsible for the mass incursion of free market capitalism and the associated violent suppression of opposing voices, across South America in the 1960s and 1970s. Certainly the Chicago School of economic thought, led by Milton Friedman, were grateful for the funding provided to a number of their programs by Ford; but as with many of these things, it is not so much the isolated horrors that probing into the history of a great corporation will reveal, as the net effect of thousands of lesser actions, creating a toxic scum around the edge.

Most of these “lesser” actions are in the form of advertising and political funding, and right from the up, Henry Ford was no mug – understanding the importance of having both the public and the political system on his side. Personally I’m not that bothered who killed the electric car – it would have still needed something to run it; what is far more sinister is that such vast corporations can exist at all in a society that, apparently, allows people freedom of choice in how they live their lives.

Any way you like, to paraphrase Mr Ford, “So long as it’s our way.”

A mere trifle, but a perfect example of the corporate mind-meld, comes in the form of an email received a couple of days ago. I reproduce it in full, safe in the knowledge that my readers have the nous to see through the layer of greenwash:

Hello,

Going green is a tagline that everyone wants to be associated with. But Ford Motor Company is walking the walk.

A large part of all auto makers environmental credibility gets placed on how fuel efficient their cars and trucks are. But Ford is taking significant measures this year to spread their sustainability efforts beyond miles per gallon, and into operations and corporate practices.

Today ford announced their Dealer Sustainability Program, in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Institute, aimed at implementing cost-effective ways to improve the energy-efficiency of their facilities, resulting in a long-term reduction in individual dealership’s carbon footprint as well as overall operating costs.

This industry-leading effort kicks off today at the 2010 National Automobile Dealers Association Convention in Orlando.

Please see the full release below let us know if you have any questions or would like any additional information or a follow up briefing from Ford.

Thank you!

FORD ANNOUNCES DEALER SUSTAINABILITY PROGRAM

* Ford Motor Company is launching a voluntary sustainability initiative for Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealers to reduce their carbon footprint and improve the energy-efficiency of their dealerships

* Ford has partnered with Rocky Mountain Institute, a leading energy-efficiency organization to pilot new technologies and architectural design principles, at three dealerships in diverse climates

* The ‘Go Green’ dealer sustainability initiative is fully integrated into the company’s existing architecture to provide dealers with the ability to improve energy efficiency and lower operating costs

ORLANDO, Feb. 14, 2010 – Ford Motor Company’s commitment to contributing to a better world further expands today with the announcement of the ‘Go Green’ Dealership Sustainability Program. The program is being shared with the company’s U.S. Ford and Lincoln/Mercury dealers today at the 2010 National Automobile Dealers Association Convention.

The goal of the program is simple: Collaborate with dealers to implement cost-effective ways to improve the energy-efficiency of their facilities, resulting in a long-term reduction in individual dealership’s carbon footprint as well as overall operating costs. Participation in the ‘Go Green’ Dealership Sustainability Program is voluntary for dealers.

“In keeping with Ford’s commitment to the environment, this program is a great fit for our dealers because it provides a variety of energy-efficient improvement options regardless of the current age and design of the facility,” says Sue Cischke, group vice president, Sustainability, Environment and Safety Engineering. “This allows all dealers the opportunity to participate in improving the energy efficiency of their facility and gives them flexibility in making choices that are right for them and their dealership.”

Ford has partnered with Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), an organization recognized as a leader in providing energy-efficiency solutions to businesses, communities and organizations around the world.

“We applaud Ford for their ongoing energy-efficiency efforts around the world,” said Amory B. Lovins, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute. “This initiative will have a positive impact participating dealers decrease their consumption of energy. Implementing these cost-effective solutions will also improve dealer’s bottom line over the long-term.”

Getting Started

Dealers interested in participating in the ‘Go Green’ Dealership Sustainability Program will first receive a comprehensive energy assessment from sustainability experts at Ford. After the thorough assessment is completed, Ford and the dealer will collaborate on energy-saving options available and will tailor a program to meet the needs of the dealer. Solutions are wide-ranging and can be implemented for dealers with existing facilities as well as dealers who are constructing new facilities.

Dealers who participate in the program will be able to take advantage of several benefits, including guidance on available State and Federal tax credits and incentives, as well as access to technical expertise and resources to assist with selection of energy-efficient products and equipment.

Ford is finalizing details to initiate a pilot program with three dealers located in Florida, New York and Nevada.

“Through this initiative we are making available to dealers the same techniques, principles and expertise we use to reduce our energy use and contribute to a better world,” said Cischke.

___________________________________________
Eddie Fernandez I Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
T: 916.231.7733 / F: 916.418.1515
E: eddie.fernandez@ogilvypr.com
A: 1414 K Street, Ste 300, Sacramento, CA 95814

Hello, Eddie, did you forget to mention that Ford exists to sell cars and trucks that burn fossil fuels. Never mind, perhaps you would like to use the logo at the top in your next press release. It would be a lot more honest.

This is classic greenwash. Vintage greenwash, in fact.

Tesco, the British supermarket giant headed by Sir Terry Leahy (knighted for services to corporate power), has announced that one of their 2,360 stores is to become carbon neutral. I assume, obviously, that this carbon neutrality includes the things they sell in the store, rather than just the operational carbon, otherwise you could be excused for thinking that – heaven forbid – this is a PR stunt.

The story is taken up by Julia Finch in The Guardian, who opens with a cracking statistic…

Supermarket group Tesco, which pumps out some four million tonnes of carbon a year, today opened its first zero carbon store as part of its bid to be a carbon ­neutral company by 2050.

The shop, in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, is timber-framed rather than steel, and uses skylights and sun pipes to cut lighting costs. It also has a combined heat and power plant powered by renewable bio-fuels, exporting extra electricity back to the national grid. In addition the refrigerators – one of the biggest blackspots for food retailers trumpeting their green credentials – have doors to save energy and harmful HFC refrigerant gases have been replaced.

Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy said: “It shows that you can dramatically alter how much carbon you use and life can go on”.

The new store, he said, “cost 30% more to build, but it uses 50% less energy, and with oil at $70 a barrel it is a business case in itself”.

To coincide with the Ramsey opening, the supermarket chain said it intended to spend more than £100m with green technology companies, although Leahy was unsure of the level of supermarket’s current spend on this.

Tesco has been at the forefront of the grocers’ race to be green. The UK’s biggest supermarket has provided £25m of funding for the University of Manchester to set up a sustainable consumption institute, and has a 10-point community plan, with pledges to increase local sourcing and to consult local communities in an attempt to be viewed as a good neighbour.

Apart from the obvious dissonance between Tesco’s 2,360 stores that rip the heart out of communities wherever they are located – and, believe me, they are not located in order to develop a harmonic relationship with any community – there is the small matter of what Tesco sells.

In 2009, Tesco had a turnover – essentially a measure of how much stuff they sell – of £59.4 billion, an increase of 15.1% on the previous year. Of that vast amount, £41.5 billion is from UK sales, with the remaining £18 billion accounted for by supermarkets in Thailand (614 stores), China (50 “hypermarkets”), Ireland (117), South Korea (280), Japan (137), Turkey (100), Poland (313) and the USA (113).

As the “green” store is in the UK, we should focus on Tesco’s activities there: so we see £28.5 billion coming from food retailing – what is considered the Core Business – and the bulk of the remainder from non-food retail (clothes, electrical goods, homeware etc).

If you live in the UK, I want you to go into a Tesco store and pick ten items at random, both food and non-food, then try and find out where the items were manufactured, grown or otherwise produced. You’re going to have an interesting time with food because, like most food in supermarkets, the items contain a huge variety of different ingredients emanating from all across the globe: simplicity is not in the nature of mass food retailing. Fruit, vegetables and other single-source items will invariable be a mix of local (ish) and from much further away; but you can be assured that even “local” items will have been moved from one end of the country to the other a couple of times for warehousing and distribution before reaching the store.

Non-food items are made, basically, in China.

Tesco’s Carbon Disclosure (via http://www.cdproject.net) is interesting, to say the least, and it’s well worth repeating here:

8.1. Please indicate the category that describes the company, entities, or group for which Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions are reported.

Companies over which operational control is exercised.

8.2. Please state whether any parts of your business or sources of GHG emissions are excluded from your reporting boundary.

Production of goods, supplier transport, international freight, asset sites, waste recycling and disposal, employee commuting, customer transport, consumption and disposal of goods.

So while they are honest about their “direct” emissions, they completely ignore the thing that accounts for the bulk of Tesco’s emissions: the production and transportation of the things they sell.

The aforementioned four million tonnes of carbon dioxide is, large as it seems, only the tip of Terry’s toxic iceberg.

Why should this be a problem, given that the companies that make and transport the stuff should be disclosing and accounting for their emissions? Because Tesco is a huge company, and for the most part, if they did not exist to sell people overprocessed, long-haul, extraneous and unnecessary things that people would not buy were they not marketed by Tesco’s gigantic marketing machine, the emissions simply would not be produced. But, hey! They have a carbon neutral store, so that’s ok, isn’t it?

Tesco: every lie helps.

Just been sent a link to this cracking semi-serious article on Cracked.com by David at The Good Human. While I would probably balk at being called an insufferable prick (but I suppose it’s better than being called a Terrorist – see all these links) I go along with everything else here. Pity they don’t bother filtering out their comments…

For a person, “going green” is as simple as recycling more, wasting less and always, always, always behaving like an insufferable prick in social situations. But for a corporation, “going green” can be a much harder task that costs million of dollars, thousands of hours of manpower and often painful company-wide cutbacks.

Or, they can opt to do jack shit and just spend all of their money and effort convincing the public otherwise. This is what is referred to as “greenwashing,” and it works like this:

#6. Who Needs Water When You Have Coca-Cola?

Listen: India is a beautiful, ancient place with a rich and storied culture and we don’t mean to knock it, but it’s pretty damned overcrowded. They’re practically breathing other people right now, and as a result their resources are stretched taut. Water actually still means life over there–as opposed to the Western world where it’s just something that needs to be enhanced with electrolytes or thrown on the t-shirts of girls who hate their fathers.

So when Coca-Cola came to India and started sucking up thousands of gallons of the nation’s precious life-sustaining water each day to make their bottled acid-baths, it kind of rubbed a few (billion) people the wrong way. So to balance out this horrible misappropriation of resources, Coke tried to prove they were environmentally conscious by setting up a donation scheme to help save polar bears… which, of course, aren’t native to India.

Then at a San Francisco business conference, Coke also pledged to go water neutral. Well, actually they said they “aspire to put back” what they “take out.” Aspire. You can aspire to anything; take a poll of a first grade classroom and you’ll get 18 kids aspiring to be astronauts, four aspiring to be policemen, two aspiring to be president and one special child aspiring to be a motorcycle.

Wait, it gets better! Part of the their plan is that if they take all of the water out of one village’s wells, they can become “neutral” by putting the water back… into a different village. You know, like how instead of paying back your loan to your bank, they’ll allow you to just give the money to some random person instead. As long as you’re paying somebody, right?

[Five more of these hideous greenwashes here]

Disaster Capitalism is the name given to the process by which natural or purposefully contrived human disasters are exploited in order to impose a free-market system upon a population. The most extreme examples are those that have been contrived: these include the 1954 military coup in Guatamala, orchestrated by the CIA at the behest of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) to open up markets to the industrial West, and the afternath of the first (in Kuwait) and second (in Iraq) Gulf Wars, specifically to benefit US oil and construction companies. Natural disasters – and even that term is being questioned in relation to the Haiti earthquake of 2010 – have tended to result in a more subtle, but nonetheless significant change in conditions, such as the period following the Indian Ocean Tsunami in which the restoration and expansion of the tourist industry in Thailand seemed to be more important than the rebuilding of peoples’ lives!

I have been watching the developments in Haiti with an overriding sense of distrust, recording some of the more disturbing ones in a blog called Haiti Watch. The imposition of military rule seems to be inevitable, followed by free trade agreements and the installation of a US-friendly President. But it is not just the big guns (pun intended) that are taking advantage of the chaotic situation that, let’s not be coy here, has already left at least 200,000 people dead, hundreds of thousands more injured, and millions of people homeless. Wherever there is a market there shall be an opportunist; that’s how capitalism works, and I have seen a perfect example of this in a press release I received today from a fashion chain that, up to now, I had never heard of:

Contact: Megan Benson
megan@alexandani.com
212-385-1075

ALEX AND ANI SUPPORTS THE VICTIMS OF THE HAITI EARTHQUAKE
WITH LIMITED EDITION CORNELIAN EXPANDABLE WIRE BRACELET
-All Proceeds to benefit Doctors without Borders-

(New York, NY – January 2010) – In an effort to lend support to the victims of the Haiti earthquake, Alex and Ani, designer of couture and contemporary jewelry, has created the “Cornelian Bracelet” featuring its patented, expandable wire bangle™ with 100% of proceeds donated to Doctors without Borders.

The Alex and Ani Signature Expandable bracelet is an innovative wire bangle bracelet that adjusts and expands for a customized fit on any wrist. This exclusive piece features Russian or yellow gold finish plated over a brass etched wire and is adorned with a Cornelian stone. Wear Cornelian to increase energy, self motivate and take action. This stone is also a symbol of protection and peace.

This limited edition bracelet is available at www.alexandani.com and retails for $18 USD. Buy one for a friend, loved one, or yourself.

Alex and Ani was created by Carolyn Rafaelian. The line, which is made in the USA from recycled materials, is named after her two daughters. Their collections are sold at fine retailers such as Henri Bendel, Scoop, and e-commerce sites such as Shopbop and Saks.com. Alex and Ani’s pieces have been featured in publications such as Vogue, Lucky, In Style, Marie Claire and Glamour.

“Alex and Ani…Where Glamour and Consciousness Co-Exist.”

So, let’s get this right – rather than just donate a portion of their profits, or quietly stock a special item in their stores, they instead choose to send a press release out to everyone on their huge mailing list to show exactly how wonderful and full of conscience Alex and Ani is?

The correct term for this is “Opportunistic Marketing”; in the case of Alex and Ali, the “opportunity” is the death of 200,000 people so they can tell the world about their high couture range of jewelry.

If this is what “conscience” means then I need a new dictionary.

Disaster Capitalism is alive and well, and coming to a country near you.

Impinging upon an uncontacted tribe is, by any stretch of the imagination, culturally the most destructive thing it is possible to do: the tribe not only lose their landbase – the source of everything they need to live – but they become subject to foreign diseases to which they have no immunity, and their cultural identity becomes diluted, almost certain to be swallowed up by industrial civilization’s “growth at any cost” mentality. In short, if civilization impinges upon an uncontacted tribe, the tribe dies.

Survival International never let up in their efforts to prevent this kind of thing happening. Their “Greenwashing Award” may be symbolic, but it is a vital way to publicise the awful things that corporations and governments do in order to make money; just money, as though it is more important than life…

A Brazilian company bulldozing an uncontacted tribe’s land in Paraguay has won Survival’s ‘Greenwashing Award 2010’.

The company, Yaguarete Porá S.A., has won the award for ‘dressing up the wholesale destruction of a huge area of the Indians’ forest as a noble gesture for conservation’, says Survival’s director Stephen Corry.

Yaguarete owns 78,549 hectares of forest that is part of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode tribe’s ancestral territory. After satellite photos were published around the world revealing that it has destroyed thousands of hectares of the tribe’s forest, the company issued a press release announcing it intends to create a ‘nature reserve’ on its land.

But plans submitted by Yaguarete to Paraguay’s Environment Ministry reveal that the amount of ‘continuous forest’ in the reserve will be just 16,784 hectares out of the 78,549 hectares total, and the company in fact plans to convert around two thirds of the land to cattle ranching.

Some of the Totobiegosode have already been contacted and vehemently condemned the plans for the ‘reserve’, pointing out that it violates their rights under both Paraguayan and international law. The contacted Totobiegosode have been claiming legal title to this land since 1993, but most of it is still in private hands.

The Totobiegosode are the only uncontacted Indians in the world having their territory destroyed for beef production.

Survival director, Stephen Corry, said today, ‘This is textbook ‘greenwashing’: bulldoze the forest and then ‘preserve’ a bit of it for PR purposes. The public won’t fall for it. Yaguarete should stop playing games and pull out of the Totobiegosode’s territory once and for all.’

Survival’s Greenwashing Award is presented to Yaguarete Porá S.A. for dressing up the wholesale destruction of a huge area of the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode’s forest as a noble gesture for conservation.

The following video shows what is likely to happen to the Totobiegosode people, using the terrible example of the Akuntsu:

From COMMON DREAMS, January 4, 2010

There has never been a better moment for natural gas. It is the “other” fossil fuel, touted as a clean alternative to coal and oil. It may be non-renewable, proponents argue, but it is a bridge or transition fuel to a happier future. Not surprisingly, the industry has gone to great lengths to persuade local residents, members of congress, and the public at large that there’s nothing to worry about. Chesapeake Energy Corporation, one of the major players drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale, which stretches from New York to Tennessee, has successfully billed itself as an environmentally friendly operation.

Accidents do happen, Barrett told me. It’s part of the price of doing business. Something McClendon and the Sierra Club’s Pope might like to acknowledge as they make the case for an industry whose green credentials are far from certain.

“But we have to find a cheap alternative to coal!” Scream the denizens of Industrial Civilization, scared that perhaps the foundations of their beloved, energy-hungry world are starting to crumble. Keep screaming, one way on another it’s going to end in tears.

Unless you are, by some remarkable turn of events, completely self-sufficient in food — which, believe me, I would dearly love to be, except that I live in a society that doesn’t want me to be — then you will have to go out and buy stuff from time to time. Today was one such time; so after walking my younger daughter to school (or, to be accurate, walking about 30 metres in front of her while she chatted to a friend) I continued slipsliding on the surface of pavements covered with just-melting ice, and eventually reached the small National Trust property where I do some wardening two or three times a week. The gate was locked due to the snow and ice being quite treacherous, so I let myself in and spent a happy 30 minutes walking around picking up the odd piece of litter, and generally enjoying the bewhitened landscape, replete with squirrels, crows, chaffinches and a slightly confused mistle thrush.

I left through the top gate, then continued my slidey walk through the town in search of a charity shop woolly hat (£1 from Cancer Research), a mug of coffee (to accompany the planning of The Unsuitablog’s next major campaign), some potatoes and onions from the corner veg shop, and various food items from the Co-op (formerly Somerfield). It was while putting the porridge oats, vinegar, butter, bread flour etc. on the conveyor belt at the till that I noticed the woman in front, dutifully packing all of her items into a range of “bags for life”, that had been bought at Tesco, Sainsburys and Marks & Spencer.

After you’ve clicked on the links in the last sentence, see if you have the same thoughts about bags as me…

See what I mean, especially that last one?

I can’t remember exactly what she was putting in the bags, but it was an awful lot, and most of it didn’t look like staple foods; more the kinds of things bought to satisfy the endless cravings brought on by a life spent in front of advert-strewn television sets. Now, I don’t want to bash this particular person: look at any supermarket queue and you will see the same thing, and far worse in the form of two-litre bottles of Coke and spring water, multi-packs of crisps, loaves and loaves of sliced bread (especially when the weather’s cold, for some reason), ready meals and prepacked meats and pre-washed vegetables and pre-peeled potatoes and pre-grated cheese, bars of chocolate, boxes of cakes…piles and piles of food in shopping carts, of which about 30% will be thrown away, and the rest gorged upon in an orgy of consumer loyalty. This is normal; perfectly normal.

And it’s fine, because it’s all neatly packed in eco-friendly reusable bags.

(This is a guest post by David McKay, environmental activist and writer)

The Greenwash presses have been running over time recently with the Copenhagen climate talks ever present in the news. Apart from the greenwash provided by the conference itself to its participants, companies have been keen to use the opportunity to claim that they, too, want to see a ‘good deal for the climate’. Apart from the very obvious nature of Hopenhagens attempt, as has been shown in previous posts on this blog, there have been some less obvious campaigns. One that caught my eye recently is ‘The Copenhagen Communiqué’, which has recently appeared as a stamp in the corner of many companies newspaper adverts and websites. Given that these companies included such luminaries as EDF energy, this stamp needed some investigation.

The Copenhagen Communiqué is a project of The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders’ Group on Climate Change, a group of ‘business leaders’ the prince has got together who supposedly all care a lot about climate change, along with The University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. They’ve also issued a communiqué for both the Bali and Poznan conferences, so are quite an established group. For many established readers of the Unsuitablog, the concept of business leaders issuing advice on climate change might already raise a few eyebrows, especially as the many signatories include BAA, Shell, BP, Asda, Rio Tinto, Unilever, Adidas, Statoil, Nestle, Coca Cola… just about all the corporations with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of consumerism and industrial civilisation all in one list. Here’s what they say:

This communiqué is being issued by the business leaders of over 500 global companies. It calls for an ambitious, robust and equitable global deal on climate change that responds credibly to the scale and urgency of the crises facing the world today.

Earlier this year, the world’s twenty largest economies (G20) came together and agreed an unprecedented, coordinated response to the global economic downturn. At the London Summit, the leaders of the G20 pledged to do “whatever is necessary” to restore confidence and growth to the economic system.

World leaders now need to demonstrate the same level of coordination and resolve to address climate change. Economic development will not be sustained in the longer term unless the climate is stabilised. It is critical that we exit this recession in a way that lays the foundation for low-carbon growth and avoids locking us into a high-carbon future.

Within the first few paragraphs the intention of the communiqué is already clear – that their primary goal is not to protect the victims of climate change, and the earth’s biosphere but to protect their prosperity and profits. Some might argue that as long as this helps stop climate change that this isn’t a problem, but will these corporations really support the action necessary to combat climate change, or just appear as such and take advantage?

…it will create the conditions for transformational change in our global economy and deliver the economic signals that companies need if they are to invest billions of dollars in low carbon products, services, technologies and infrastructure.

Note how these ‘leaders’ are simply asking the government to make it profitable for them to invest in these new technologies, not taking the initiative themselves. Only if the taxpayer can guarantee them profits will they do anything. But why do they care so much about these low-carbon technologies if the old dirty ones continue to be profitable?

Action at the sector level will help accelerate the large-scale deployment of clean technologies through robust funding solutions, technological transfer and capacity building. The least developed economies need additional assistance including increased and adequate financing, and expanded cooperation to help them adapt to and join the new low-carbon economy.

Here it becomes clearer. The corporations will create the new technologies if the government subsidises them, then they will sell them to the poorer nations in order for them to meet their targets, and those poorer nations will use money from western governments in order to purchase these technologies, money which no doubt they will end up paying back at a later date.

Measures to deliver a robust global greenhouse gas emissions market…

They also ask for carbon markets, which corporations could then use carbon markets as they have done with the European trading scheme, lobbying and persuading governments to issue too many permits, resulting in low carbon prices and effecting their operations very little.

Measures will be needed; to deliver a step-change in energy efficiency, to promote the rapid development, demonstration and wide deployment of low-carbon technologies and also to stimulate new markets for low-carbon goods and services. These measures will include ambitious performance and efficiency standards, bold public procurement commitments, and the development of incentives. Robust intellectual property protection as well as other enabling policies are key.

It is clear what these corporations are seeing in this text is not so much a bold statement on how to prevent dangerous climate change, but how to develop themselves new markets using taxpayer money and subsidies from government, and increase the dependence of poor nations upon them. However, this aim is neatly covered up with environmental rhetoric, with noble-sounding statements on limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, helping poorer nations adapt and limiting deforestation elsewhere in the text. But these are being used to mask the real mission behind these companies – to make money from climate change.

Now stop hoping, and get doing!