I was taking a bus into the centre of a nearbye town a few months ago, and noticed that the development of a new “Park and Ride” scheme was nearing completion — so said the signs. It was being promoted as part of a “sustainable” transport policy, yet I was taking the bus all the way from my town to this town, but could well have caught the train instead. If I had lived a bit closer I might have considered cycling, except there are no cycle paths to speak of. This got me pondering the logic of Park and Ride with my cynical mind, and I quickly realised that it was simply a way of drawing more people from outlying areas into major towns who would otherwise shop locally, or drive to a shopping mall because there was too much congestion in the town. Park and Ride, I concluded, exists for purely economic reasons.

Go forwards to the present day, and I find this on the Save Bathampton Meadows web site:

Park and Rides are an out-moded form of traffic management, proven to have a minimal impact on reducing congestion. As Henrietta Sherwin, Vice Chair of the South West Campaign to Protect Rural England states:

“Park and Rides were conceived in the early 1970s before transport policy had moved towards demand management and trying to restrict car traffic; they are an out of date policy and no substitute for the development of an integrated public transport network particularly with an ageing population.”

“Park and Rides were initially sold as a green transport intervention until it was discovered that they can undermine existing public transport and actually create car mileage. Should limited resources be spent to encourage car access to Bath? Park and Rides are expensive and have a considerable environmental impact but a very marginal congestion benefit.”

I agree that they were originally sold as a green transport intervention, but I am willing to bet good (or bad) money that the initial motivation was economical — more people can come into a town and spend money if you let them drive most of the way rather than encourage them to go by public transport or (obviously) use their local facilities.

I wouldn’t have been so interested in an article about the further concreting over of the countryside surrounding the historic city of Bath, England, in Monday’s Guardian, had I not taken a trip there last week.

Environmental campaigners and residents are vowing to fight controversial plans to turn historic meadows close to the river Avon in Bath into a huge car park.

Bath and North East Somerset council wants to build a park and ride for 1,400 cars on land to the east of the city, though it lies within the green belt and is bordered by an area of natural beauty and a nature reserve.

More than 500 people have written objecting to the £6m plan, claiming that it will “desecrate” Bathampton Meadows. Natural England, the independent public body dedicated to protecting the urban and rural environment, has also raised concerns.

But at a heated meeting last week councillors supported the plans, which will now be sent to Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, for her approval.

Protesters say the scheme will ruin the meadows and become an eyesore visible from miles away. They are calling for the council to come up with more radical and more sustainable solutions.

It was while walking through the maze of soulless shopping streets near to the railway station, trying to dodge construction vehicles and step over temporary paving abberations, that I realised that the new Southgate Shopping Centre was utterly superfluous. Here’s a picture of what the developers think part of it might look like when it is complete:

I particularly like the ironic bicycles dominating the left hand side of the scene, while the yawning commercial edifice lurks in the background, coaxing people in to buy more pointless crap that, even had they wanted pointless crap, people could already have bought elsewhere in Bath, or anywhere else they live for that matter. It is such a marvellous coincidence that the new bus station, which will act as the terminus for the Pointless Park and Ride schemes, just happens to be right next to the new Southgate Shopping Centre. So, as the Park and Riders alight from their multi modal journey (oh, sorry, that should read “largely car-based journey, which involved a considerable diversion from the original route, and had a bit of bus tacked onto the end”) they are immediately presented with a phenomenal shopping opportunity.

I have little doubt that the loss of meadow will happen, and it will keep heppening until we lose our twin addictions to driving and shopping. Maybe if the existing Park and Rides start emptying then the scheme (and the other three to be expanded, which are also going to slice further into the countryside) will be abandoned as a loss-maker. Somehow, though, I get the feeling this will be another case of the customer is always right: even if they have been brainwashed.

A little nugget of potential greenwashing came to my attention this morning. As you read it, keep in mind this quotation, from Shell’s own marketing brochure:

“Unconventional hydrocarbon resources is a significant area in which boundaries are being pushed to meet growing demands. Shell is privileged to be working on one of the most important unconventional resources: the oil sands project in Alberta, Canada. We report on how new and innovative technology, coupled with working closely with the local community, has made access to this massive resource possible.”

Now here is the article – you can make up your own mind what Shell’s motivation is for having an Eco-Marathon:

Petrolheads should look away now. Engineers and racing car enthusiasts are gathering in Germany today for a car race with a difference – one that does not reward the fastest car, but focuses instead on the most fuel-efficient. In this Shell sponsored Eco-marathon, the best cars could travel the entire length of Britain five times on a single gallon of petrol.

More than 200 teams from 29 countries will battle for the €1,000 (£895) top prize in this annual green car rally, which is the biggest of its kind in the world. Futuristic, lightweight vehicles will race around the EuroSpeedway circuit in Lausitz, Germany, with the goal of burning as little fuel as possible over a set distance and producing the lowest emissions.

“For participating teams, ‘sustainable mobility’ is more than just a buzzword: these are the engineers of the future who are helping to turn it into reality,” said Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Shell . “Society needs a new generation of talented problem-solvers to address the world’s energy challenges.”

From the UK, teams of engineering students from the universities of Coventry, Brunel and Central Lancashire will pit their cars against more established racing teams from other countries.

John Caulderbank, motorsport course leader at the University of Central Lancashire, said sustainability was a big part of his students’ coursework. The Central Lancashire team’s car is based around a 30cc petrol engine developed in-house, coupled with a bespoke engine management system to keep fuel consumption low, and the brakes from a mountain bike. His team plans to be very careful in the style they drive, conserving fuel by only accelerating for 20 seconds out of every minute of the race, and allowing the car to coast for the remainder of the time. “The target is 3,000 miles to the gallon,” said Caulderbank.

Each prototype vehicle is judged on how much fuel it uses to complete eight laps of the EuroSpeedway circuit – a distance of around 15.5 miles (25km). The cars have to do the full course in under 51 minutes and each team gets four attempts to use as little fuel as possible.

The current records are staggering. For a hydrogen fuel cell car it stands at 3,836km per gallon, achieved by a team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich in 2005. In the conventional petrol and diesel-powered category, a 2004 team from Lycée la Joliverie in France designed a car with a range of 3,410km. The record for best CO2 emissions profile was attained in 2006 by a prototype from Lycée la Joliverie with a car emitting just 0.5g/km – the average for a passenger car in Europe is around 160g/km.

Christoph Bastian, programme manager for automotive engineering at Coventry University, said that being economical with fuel was a key part of the work that modern engineering students had to do when designing cars, given that the motor industry was keen to head in this direction.

The Coventry team’s car is a three-wheeler made of tubular aluminium sections. Along with the 31cc engine from a garden strimmer, it weighs just 45kg. They reduced much of the weight using computer models. “We used some advanced engineering tools to predict where the forces are going to travel in the frame and, by calculating this load path, we were able to remove material.”

The team, which is entering the Eco-marathon for the first time this year, expects to get a range of around 1,000km for a gallon of fuel. That’s nowhere near the leaderboard for this race but Bastian says he hopes to get closer to the top in coming years. For next year’s entry, the team is already planning to focus on improving their car’s aerodynamics and cladding the body with lightweight carbon fibre rather than plastic.

At the start of this year’s race, José Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission said sustainable transport would be central to meeting the continent’s climate goals. “It accounts for almost a quarter of Europe’s CO2 emissions and a third of our total energy consumption. We need to concentrate minds and efforts on helping reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency in the only sector in which emissions have increased since 1990. The Shell Eco-marathon is a key educational platform that encourages students to focus their minds on the challenge of maximising fuel efficiency, whether using traditional or alternative fuel sources.”

Shell have the following to say about their Eco-Marathon and themselves: “As an energy company, Shell is committed to reducing the environmental footprint of its operations and products, and to help meet the world’s growing demand for energy in secure and sustainable ways. The Shell Eco-marathon inspires others to think about energy efficiency and offers a platform to work on solutions in a very practical manner.”

Now I’d like you to watch this interview between George Monbiot and Jeroen van der Veer, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell:

Watch this video, especially if you live in the UK, although it probably applies in many other legal frameworks. Do your homework and find out – this is a VERY POWERFUL TOOL for undermining the system, and the many fictional entities that have statutary power over you.

N.B. Violence and peaceful when mentioned are relative to Common Law, NOT STATUTE. You can LEGALLY use force against anything not backed by Common Law.

People aren’t listening: this is the season of supermarket voucher collecting in schools around the UK, and the exortations to “Collect! Collect! Collect!” are coming thick and fast, in every newsletter sent home with students, on every school website, and on posters liberally pasted and hung on the walls of a school near you.

I have tried my best to be analytical and instructive. The Unsuitablog published a series of three articles last year giving details about the operation of, the commercial incentives and the brainwashing imposed by such schemes. Here they are, in case you missed them:

http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2008/10/13/school-supermarket-voucher-special-introduction/

http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2008/10/15/school-supermarket-voucher-special-greenwashing-children/

http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2008/10/17/school-supermarket-vouchers-special-winners-losers-and-fighting-back/

The schemes are back with a vengeance – most prominently the newly rebranded Tesco for Schools & Clubs and the Sainsbury Active Kids 2009 schemes: both designed to teach children and their parents that supermarkets are a force for social good, and not the commercial resource-sucking, community-killing, globalization machines that anyone who pauses for even a short moment would realise they really are.

In the last article I tried to suggest ways of stopping these schemes, and tried a number of them myself, to little effect – all except for one, which worked wonderfully!

All you need is a pair of these:

Take a look at the photo at the top of this article, paying particular attention to how the incidious banners — which provide supermarkets with wonderful free advertising on public land — are attached. Not very securely, are they?

Now, with your wire cutters to hand, pay a visit to any school which has one of these banners, preferably when it is dark, and with just four quiet snips, you can cut down this brainwashing tool, stuff it into a bag (why not use a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s one, for extra irony) and then put it in a bin a few streets away. It’s not illegal, by the way: you are doing a public service, and the banner was a “gift”, rather than part of a contractual arrangement.

Once you have done it once, then you’ll want to do it again: and maybe in a short while, we will have together, given the supermarkets a good kick in the balls, which is the least they deserve.

When the Stern Review on the economics of climate change was released in 2006, a big crowd of environmental campaigners leapt into the air and waved their arms about. This was not a form of yogic exercise, but a genuine reaction to a document that was meant to radically change the relationship between economics and environmental thinking: no longer could you consider profit margins and growth without considering the effects of climate change. The only problem was that you could still think about profit margins and economic growth – very much so, because the Stern Review was not a report designed to prevent economic growth, it was a report designed to ensure that economists took climate change into account before investing in whatever artifact of Industrial Civilization they were going to invest in.

The Stern Review was not just greenwash, it was a complete whitewash: a way of rebranding economics as a holistic way of looking at the world’s systems, including the ecological systems that we depend on for our survival. Many environmentalists found solace in this: things would get better because economists were starting to care, regardless of the fact that everything in the Stern Review was about maintaining economic growth and keeping the industrial machine ticking over.

This week, New Scientist published a comment by Nicholas Stern called “Decision Time”. I would love to reproduce it in whole here because it screams of a man desperate to maintain his environmental credentials, while clearly not having a clue what he is talking about. To save space, though, I will comment on some of the more pertinant and – quite frankly – scary things he says…

So, whereas our review recommended that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases should be stabilised within a range of 450 to 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide-equivalent, it now seems that our target should not exceed 500 ppm. That’s if we are to keep down the risks of potentially catastrophic impacts which could result from average global temperatures rising 4 °C or more above pre-industrial levels.

This is dangerous garbage. 500ppm is close to a guarantee of runaway global warming. The only reason he is comfortable, as an economist, with this figure is that it is well within the capabilities of Industrial Civilization to — at first — level off carbon levels at this figure. The environmental impact of 500ppm is ignored (see this paper by James Hansen), as is the result of such a high concentration of carbon dioxide causing numerous positive feedbacks in the soil, oceans and permafrosts, increasing the figure to something far greater and more catastrophic.

He goes on to say that global emissions must fall to “half their 1990 level by 2050”, again denying the reality of required emissions reductions.

This requires policies and measures that remove barriers and provide incentives for technological development over three timescales.

First, action is needed to further spread existing low-carbon technologies, such as “green” household appliances. This can be done by creating carbon markets in which the price of emitting carbon reflects the potential impact of those emissions, and by introducing energy-efficiency standards to incentivise innovation, for example.

Creating a global carbon market is the primary outcome goal of the Grantham Research Institute, of which Stern is chair. The GRI is funded by billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, whose raison d’etre is to make money quickly for very rich ($10m+) clients. Carbon markets exist to allow corporations and governments to buy their way out of reduction committments.

Second, we need more support for the development and scaling-up of technologies that could become commercially viable within the next 15 years, such as second-generation biofuels – which do not directly affect food production – and carbon capture and storage.

CCS is crucial for countries with fast-expanding economies, such as India and China, which currently rely on coal-fired power stations for growth. We need about 30 CCS demonstration projects, on a commercial scale, carried out in developed and developing countries over the next 10 years. This technology needs to spread through international and public-private collaborations.

Second generation biofuels may not directly affect food production, but they most certainly do directly affect habitat: millions of acres of switchgrass at the expense of what? For this and CCS, you only have to turn to page 30 of the same New Scientist to hear what James Lovelock thinks:

Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?

Not a hope in hell. Most of the “green” stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning.

What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?

That is a waste of time. It’s a crazy idea – and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.

Never forget that Nicholas Stern is an economist: he was Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank for 4 years, and has seemingly not lost his touch for pretending to care while serving the market system he so adores. When Stern speaks, he is speaking for the economy, and nothing else.

I could probably do about a million articles like this, given ExxonMobil’s long and nefarious history of throwing money at “educational” projects and hoping some of the contaminated information sticks in the minds of the young people they are trying to brainwash, but this one is related to another article I wrote back in June about the Science Museum in London. Just to see whether anything had changed I looked at the “The Science Of” web site, to find that the exhebition had moved to the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey.

Lo! and Behold! It is still sponsored by the same three awful corporations that were doing their best to brainwash minds in the UK:

I sent a quick note to the press office at LSC:

Dear Dina [Head of Public Relations]

I have just noticed that LSC has started hosting the corporate exhibition “The Science Of Survival”. This is not an objective exercise in encouraging children to be environmentally sustainable, it is a way to allow the sponsors and other corporations who support high technology to make a case for their own “solutions” to the environmental crisis.

I would be grateful if you were to read my article at http://thesietch.org/mysietch/keith/2008/06/03/science-museum-london-letting-corporations-control-young-minds/ which related to the very same exhibition being hosted by the Science Museum in London.

Maybe you could pass it on to whoever was responsible for putting the exhibition on, so they can consider whether it is appropriate to allow corporations to have such a free reign over young, impressionable minds.

Kind regards

Keith Farnish

It was while writing this, and checking out a few other parts of the web site, that I realised there was absolutely no chance of the Liberty Science Center doing anything about their greenwashing exhibitions: they were hosting one called “Energy Quest” sponsored by that bastion of objective and sustainable thinking — ExxonMobil.

Meeting the needs of the future

Energy is one of the greatest concerns facing humanity today. Where will it come from in the future, and what will it do to our planet? Can we balance our ever-growing need for energy with its impact on the environment? Energy Quest – the only exhibition held over from our former building – takes you on an unprecedented journey through the five major sources of Earth’s energy in search of the answers.

Help me with this, please: do you think the exhibition will be saying we need to stop using so much energy, especially the non-renewable kind? It’s a tough one.

And no wonder it’s the only exhibition held over from their former building, one member of their Board of Trustees is Vice-President of ExxonMobil’s research and engineering branch. In fact their Board of Trustees list reads like a roll call of the very people you most definitely would not want to entrust your planet to.

Too bad that there is nowhere for kids to get objective environmental information from: guess we’ll all have to start working things out for ourselves.

What can you say about an advert that fills an entire page of a broadsheet newspaper, containing a title (“The Triangle Of Peace Foundation”), a heavy duty strapline (“The birth of Philanthropical Capitalism, a new global responsibility.”), an address in New York (“Triangle of Peace, 420 Lexington Ave, Suite 518, New York, NY 10170 USA”) and a section of some kind of stylised monolith, all tastefully decked out in black and white?

My instincts say, “What the hell is this?”

I am writing this article completely cold, and I want you to come with me, because everything about this advert says “sinister”; it says “hypocrisy”; it says “cover up”; it says “business as usual”. It says lots of things and none – because you are only meant to wonder. There is no telephone number; there is no web site.

It is aimed at big business, and my bet is that it is the start of a new club in which the remaining “masters of the universe” reposition themselves as the saviours of the human race.

Let’s see if I am right.

Google search: “the triangle of peace foundation” = no hits.

Google search: “triangle of peace” = 59,000 hits.

A quick browse finds www.triangleofpeace.tv and a video which puts the United Arab Emirates in the driving seat:

http://www.triangleofpeace.tv/?bcpid=1827892797&bclid=1825927544&bctid=1840665880

“Peace and stability through trade”. What do you think of that? Trade is ultimately the cause of all anthropogenic global warming, and a leading cause of social hardship (think slavery, sweatshops and urban deprivation). Is this The Triangle Of Peace Foundation?

There is an Invitation to a star-studded Reception Dinner, based at Jumeirah Essex House, New York. Let’s find the address of this hotel…

…it’s at NY 10019, so not far away from the address given above. But this looks too similar to the sense of the print advert, so let’s find out more. Back to the Google search…

Bingo! It is launch day, today, in the UAE, according to Cityscape Intelligence. The article says:

The Triangle of Peace initiative has been launched by a collective led by Sheikh Nahyan bin Zayed Al-Nahyan.

Dhabian Holdings and the World Trade Centers Association and the World Trade Centers Management Company are all behind the $3.2 billion proposal which is hoping to provide a programme which will help build sustainable communities.

More than one million corporations are to be involved in the project when it is officially launched in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on November 10th.

Guy Tozzoli, president of World Trade Centers Association, said: “The Triangle of Peace Initiatives are essentially three programs for building new and restoring and rejuvenating existing cities.”

They offer a higher quality of life as well as a variety of social and economic benefits united by a vision of peace brought about by trade, he added.

On September 23rd the project was officially announced in New York and enrolled in the United Nations’ Global Partnerships programme.

There is so much wrong with this whole concept, I don’t know where to start, but I do know that we have found the source of the advert, and also that the following organisations are involved:

– The government of the United Arab Emirates (an oil-rich dictatorship, dependent on global trade)

– Many, many corporations (which would obviously define trade as being the most important thing…ever)

– The Clinton Global Initiative (members only global projects body)

– World Trade Centers Association (a organization dedicated to expanding world trade, strapline “Peace and Stability Through Trade” – where have we seen that before?!)

– United Nations Global Partnership Program (I can’t find any official reference to this, but as an example of the kinds of bodies enrolled in this Program, take a look at this one, which offers courses in everything you need to f*ck up the planet!)

What is particularly significant, but not surprising given the level of stupidity practiced by many people in the public eye, is the level of support this work is garnering outside of the commercial arena (or at least being shown as support); especially as this does indeed appear to derive simply from one, very small, very rich playground: Dubai. So sad, yet so symptomatic of how dumb civilization can be.

Given that information, I’ve decided to add the rather unsavoury, but accurate subtitle, “Shitting On Us All” to this article.

Ok, so where now? Well, it’s clear that The Triangle Of Peace Foundation is a front for expanding global trade, under the pretence of peace and sustainability, but far more than that, it appears to be both fronting a number of massive development projects to enrich the bank accounts of its members (see this press release to see the level of glee one real estate web site expresses over the idea), and also acting as a focus for many of the worlds richest and most powerful people to make themselves richer and more powerful.

I was right.

Open your eyes.

Following on from my series about supermarkets in schools, here is something that has been irritating me for a while: British Gas are part of a huge energy company known as Centrica, which operates in energy markets across the world. For many years now BG have been losing out to other energy companies in the domestic market due to the deregulation of the energy industry; they have managed to diversify into electricity, but are nothing like the force they were before the 1990s in the UK.

So what have they decided to do? Get into the business of education, subtly but incidiously. Here is the advert for their Generation Green campaign…

Like the supermarket campaigns, schools can get rewards for collecting vouchers, or “leaves” (love the green tinge already!). I have no idea how many leaves are required for a solar panel, so it would be foolish for me to suggest that it would be an extraordinary amount, but it might be – that’s all I’m saying.

More importantly for British Gas, there is a huge amount of subtle marketing going on:

– To get 200 leaves, a school can download a lesson plan which contains lots of information about saving energy, but also has a British Gas logo on every page. The lesson plans are particularly interesting in that when they discuss the causes of climate change they highlight how bad coal is, but completely neglect to mention natural gas as also being a source of both carbon dioxide and methane. Interesting.

– To get 150 leaves, a parent can complete a British Gas “Energy Saver’s Report“. I started to fill one out, honestly, and at Step 6 was asked what my main heating fuel was – it is wood, but this is not an option. I carried on, using gas as my source, and when I got to this page things got even stranger – I could not say that I only heat my home in the evening, and I could not say that my thermostat was set to 15C. The minimum allowed was 19 degrees centigrade – very hot for us. I completed the plan, and was offered some nice services and goods that could be supplied by British Gas, and that I had only earned 100 leaves!

This entire operation has light green platitudes stamped all over it, just like the supermarket greenwashing I wrote about last week. The changes suggested are not bad, but they are insufficient and completely within the comfort zone of a commercial organisation.

It also, like the supermarket vouchers, allows a large commercial entity to worm its way into a so-called place of education, via the teachers and students using the lesson plans, and the parents of the students filling out surveys in order to earn the schools more leaves.

Now watch the advert again and see how good you feel about British Gas.

(although I love the idea of shutting down the lights at the supermarket – go on kids, you know it makes sense!)

There is no fine line between commercial activity at schools and proper education, assuming you understand that education doesn’t mean preparing a child to be a valuable consumer. On the other hand, if you consider schools to simply be conduits into the spending habits of children and their parents then the efforts of supermarkets in the UK and Ireland (and, undoubtedly many other countries) make perfect sense.

This week, The Unsuitablog is concentrating on a particular phenomenon which is growing ever more insidious: the School Supermarket Voucher Scheme. Even if you haven’t directly encountered one, you will probably know how they work: shopper buys goods from supermarket; shopper is given some vouchers in return for their custom; children of shoppers take vouchers into school; school collects vouchers and exchanges them for items that are of use to the school.

Simple. So what would explain the different attitudes being exhibited by the following three quotes:

Tesco announced today that it is creating a brand new voucher collection scheme that will offer schools and clubs a huge range of exciting products to collect for.

By merging its two highly successful voucher schemes into one bumper catalogue, the supermarket will offer schools and clubs much greater choice as well as the freedom to decide where their priorities are.

Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Corporate and Legal Affairs Director said:

“Over the last 17 years millions of children up and down the country have collected Tesco vouchers for their schools. We wanted to build on this success by extending our support into others areas of the curriculum, such as health and art. Our enhanced voucher collection scheme will make it easier for schools and clubs to benefit from our programme, and we expect it will prove to be our most popular yet.”

(from http://www.tescoplc.com/plc/corporate_responsibility/news/press_releases/pr2008/2008-06-13/)

During the summer term, parents and friends of the school sent in their ‘Tesco Computers for Schools’ vouchers and parent helpers in the library spent many a happy hour counting them – thank you.

This year we collected 17,053 vouchers, which were added to the 15,104 ‘banked’ last year. This gave us a total of 32,157 vouchers to spend.

We recently took delivery of a brand new Apple iMac costing 26,500 vouchers – leaving 5,657 banked for next year.

Many thanks to all who sent these vouchers into the school. As you can see, they have been converted into a really useful piece of computer equipment, which will benefit all of the students here.

(from http://www.colytongrammar.devon.sch.uk/news/index.htm)

A Sligo school is among the first in the country to formally oppose what it calls ‘covert and exploitative’ activities by major companies seeking to advertise their products to young children.

The Sligo School Project has outlawed activities such as high profile token collection schemes operated by big supermarkets, as well as commercial presentations and the use of sponsored curriculum material, as part of a formal policy on commercial free education.

The school’s co-ordinator for commercial free education, Ms. Carmel Morley told THE SLIGO CHAMPION that the school decided to take a stand in response to the growing number of commercial schemes aimed at marketing to pupils and their families through the schools.

She maintained that offering primary school children advertising in the guise of education was ‘unethical and exploitative’.

(from http://www.sligochampion.ie/news/sligo-school-outlaws-store-token-schemes-1495619.html

That last one was rather at odds with the other two, but before you decide whether these schemes are “unethical and exploitative”, it’s worth just explaining some of the techniques used by the supermarkets to ensure the success of these schemes.

The Techniques

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I have broken them down into four main areas:

1. In-school promotion

The companies operating the schemes provide large amounts of promotional materials for the schools that have registered with them: these include headed paper which which to write introductory letters to parents; branded collection boxes for classrooms and common areas; posters and large banners to attach to internal and external walls, school boundary fences and other visible areas; curriculum resources including resource packs, information sheets and other information related to the scheme. Not forgetting the branding of the vouchers themselves, which always contain a supermarket logo.

2. Community Emphasis

The schemes always operate under the auspices of “community”: this may be by providing the schools with equipment such a play equipment, computers or books; by having a social or environmental angle on the scheme; or by implying that the company are “bringing together” different parts of the community to ensure the success of the scheme. This is reinforced by the schools using the branded letters and other materials to encourage parents and children to take part in the schemes for the benefit of the school. Schools are encouraged to use the local press to promote their participation in schemes to the wider public.

3. Bonus Vouchers

In many cases, vouchers are handed out for a set value of purchases or (in one case) for a set number of shopping bags, but this can be augmented if the shopper buys certain products or a certain number of a particular product, such as buying 3 bottles of drink and receiving more than the individual voucher value of the product. Bonus vouchers are almost always attached to high profit goods, or bulk purchases greater than the shopper would normally buy.

4. Limited Timespan

It is very rare for a scheme to operate over a long period of time. Normally the collection period is no more than a single term (semester), which compresses the activity into a short period. This ensures that schools do not become complacent or lose enthusiasm, and also allows for annual (or more frequent) scheme episodes, which always have a slightly different branding from the previous episode.

I have a confession to make: about 18 months ago, when I was still part of the economic machine, I spent some time calculating the carbon footprint of the company I worked for. To help me, I used the guides provided by the Carbon Trust a, what I thought then, fairly reliable and objective agency of the UK Government working for, I thought at the time, reducing the overall carbon emissions of the UK.

How stupid was I?

In these times of economic downturn and the promise that the runaway consumer culture may be on a crash course in all sorts of ways (hooray!) this apparently earnest organisation turns out to be nothing more than a cheerleader for business growth. Take a look at the advert above or, if you dare, some of the other promotions. Superficially you might think that what they are saying is that, by reducing your energy consumption, you will improve the profitability of your existing business. In actual fact they are pushing something very bad indeed: business growth as an incentive for reducing emissions. A display advert of theirs says:

“Last year consumers bought £4.3bn worth of low carbon goods in the UK alone. Good news if you’re in the market for new customers”

Do you see what they’ve done? In effect they are not cutting emissions at all because all that is being done is allowing more wriggle-room for business to boom, while increasing the carbon intensity of the business – less carbon per monetary unit, but no less carbon overall.

You might think that this is a good thing: after all if business keeps growing then it’s better to reduce their impact. But that’s not the point at all – why should businesses grow at all? Profit is simply the result of excess consumption, which feeds further growth which leads to further consumption – profit drives the capital economy which actively discourages (nay, suppresses) any attempt to merely sustain or reduce consumption.

In March 2008, The Carbon Trust joined hands with HSBC, one of the largest banks in the world, to provide funds for renewable energy projects in the public sector; in other words a bank was allowed, through a government agency, to start driving funding for public sector projects while at the same time making themselves look like they were doing good. HSBC were given a great deal of power over public policy for a pittance (£18m).

It was so obvious that HSBC were greenwashing but stupid is as stupid does – I remember one great thinker saying (ha!) – which would explain why Greenpeace grabbed the bait with both hands and immediately clarified their position on private interference in public life:

“This is an excellent example of private finance delivering real emissions reductions through innovative partnerships. It also demonstrates that significant cost effective renewable energy potential exists at all levels rather than simply in industrial scale wind power, and that a viable business case can be made for this investment. Within the context of the UK’s demanding emissions reductions targets, we sincerely hope this is a sign of things to come.”

“Industrial”, “Hope”, “Innovative partnerships”, “Demanding emissions reduction targets”? Welcome to the corporate world of Greenpeace: and perhaps goodbye to a few Greenpeace subscription renewals…