Something called the Little Green Book showed up in my e-mail box the other day. It's a very creative viral marketing piece from Morgan Stanley that allows friends to pass on 50 things that any household can do to "make life greener and help tackle climate change."
Unfortunately, this well-done and helpful book is also a good example of the threat to real action on climate change. As long as we have the illusion of easy answers, we can avoid taking on the hard ones.
What you don't know unless you do a quick search of Morgan Stanley and CO2 is that in 2007, the company was one of the lead banks, along with Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, in a proposed project by the energy company TXU to build 11 coal-fired plants in Texas. The project came under sharp and wide attack from Texans, neighboring states, environmental groups and others.
The problem: even though they were new plants, they would use old technology -- burning cheap, but dirty pulverized coal that would put 78 million tons of CO2 a year into the atmosphere -- not to mention mercury and assorted other unpleasant byproducts of coal combustion.
Environmental Defense, by all accounts a practical and collaborative environmental group, offered some perspective. The added C02 output from those 11 plants would match the total for Sweden, Denmark and Portugal combined. It would be like putting 10 million Cadillac Escalades on the road, or cutting and burning all the trees in a forest the size of California.
The 11 plants were cut to three, but only as an environmental incentive to allow completion of a private equity buy-out. That leaves one to ponder how eight of the 11 plants that TXU argued were essential to meeting demand could so easily be thrown over the side.
As one part of Morgan Stanley was funding a project that would produce CO2 at a rate 2.6 times the total benefit of California's hard-fought greenhouse gas reduction program, another part was creating a booklet that said the answer to climate change is shorter showers, recycled plastic bags and using bicycles for local errands.
This is bad news for our children.
Truly dealing with climate change is going to ask a lot of Americans -- even giving up our fuel-chugging land cruisers, toasty room temperatures and other perks of a nation that grew up on cheap energy and assumptions that our planet could take whatever we dish out. It's going to ask a lot of people in developing countries who rightly aspire to how we live.
Sacrifice and hypocrisy are a bad mix in the cause of change.
There is evidence that for a number of companies painting themselves green, the base coat is disturbingly thin. They appear to be following that time-tested script for avoiding change that hurts profits: deny it, delay it, dilute it, do it, market it.
An environmental marketing company recently surveyed six big-box retailers and found 1,000 consumer items that made 1,700 environmental claims. Every one of them had at least one hidden trade off, unproven generalization, irrelevant statement or outright fabrication.
The auto makers are moving quickly to give us better hybrids and new electric cars, but still fund an army of lobbyists to fight emission and mileage standards.
Celebrities have done a great job of building consensus. But they tear it down again when a rock star flies 10,000 miles on a private jet with a staff of 20 to pick up an environmental award.
Big change cries out for big leadership. People are being asked to alter their lives and downsize their expectations in return for uncertain benefits that won't even appear until many of us are gone.
If there is a hint that the color green is just a thin veneer of marketing and misdirection, commitment will falter, change will fail, and the future will pay.
Follow Dr. Peggy Drexler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/drpeggydrexler
the mojave alone has more than 600,000 acres of pristine, fragile, but totally thriving gorgeous wilderness (think Joshua Tree National Park terrain) currently under review (with thousands more projects, averaging 10,000 acres apiece coming in) for permanent, total decimation. hundreds of millions of gallons of scarce groundwater sucked out every year, billions of species dead and displaced, erosion, drainage disasters, dynamite, bulldozing, gas lines, toxic sludge and salts produced, and so many more detrimental impacts (think deforestation, dead reefs, rainforest losses - this is the new version).
But they have the nerve to call THOSE projects "green" and hypocritical sellouts like Sierra Club and NRDC are endorsing them!!! since when is it ok to kill off millions of acres of our taxpayer-owned, critical habitats and open spaces to privatize utility company profits and get "renewable energy" subsidies (and RPS credits), when all that money and effort could be putting PV panels on every sprawling rooftop and a few utility scale projects could be built on previously-developed land near point of use.
winning solution - no lengthy transmission, no wilderness death, no blackouts, no chokeholds and price increases, and generous paybacks to individuals who produce power on their own property.
THIS is far worse than a bank greenwash - this is Schwarzenegger, Villaraigosa, Sierra Club, NRDC and other enviro-braggarts with the future of our ecosystem in their hands. at this stage, it is heading towards a vicious, permanent bloodbath covered in a shroud of self-congratulatory green... There is even a voter initiative gathering signatures in CA called the ""solar and clean energy act" which will sign the death warrant for all CA wilderness.
Please contact any one of these parties and firmly object, and advocate for ubiquitous PV on EVERY rooftop before one inch of wilderness is harmed, or you may find yourself wondering what the hell happened while you were blindly cheering for "renewable" power.
It happens all over, but the most sickening place is in agriculture where environmentally conscious people go gleefully with their canvas bags to shop at Whole Foods or Trader Joes or wherever. That imported from S. America "organic" asparagus might have been organic when it was grown, but it all flies through Miami International airport, where every spear was fumigated with toxic fungicide...by law.
The happy, fuzzy, hippy stories on the packaging of salad mix fail to mention the Mexican labor that replaces the fertilizer or the industrial post harvest process or the slathering of Bt (which is organic and still toxic) to control pests.
Green is, in most cases, nothing more than the new advertising campaign, because Americans don't care so much about "green", they care about have a green conscience.
Wow.
Well, like his like-minded ostrich-conservanazi ilk, it takes, apparently, far more than facts to wake him up.
Too bad I couldn't give that too him, with sawed-off clarity.
SMdM
Energy independence means basically, the 'little people', the small fry, have to start learning and doing this stuff for themselves. If ElectroCorp can't sell me a single watt-hour because I can 'grow my own', they have to find day-jobs. It's that simple.
Think, and do, for yourself. If the corporate model is bust because they can't well keep their hands out of the till, then to hell with that model. Check out journeytoforever.org
This Global Warming nonsense is such a sham.
CO2 is not a pollutant.
The only reason why big corporations are pushing green energy is because they realized they could make billions selling carbon credits with zero cost so long as legislatures make it legal.