Companies often tout what a great job they’re doing, environmentally speaking – even though what they’re doing may be something they’re required to do and which they fought tooth and nail for years or even decades to get out of doing. Some of this is just greenwashing, trying to get you to buy a product by adding some bogus claim of "eco-friendly" to the packaging or advertising. Greenwashing is just a fancy word for lying. Or as EnviroMedia Social Marketing defines it:
...when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be "green" through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact. It’s whitewashing, but with a green brush.
CorpWatch gives it a harder edge:
green*wash: (gr~en-wosh) washers, washing, washed 1.) The phenomenon of socially and environmentally destructive corporations attempting to preserve and expand their markets by posing as friends of the environment and leaders in the struggle to eradicate poverty. 2) Environmental whitewash. 3) Any attempt to brainwash consumers or policy makers into believing polluting mega-corporations are the key to environmentally sound sustainable development 4) Hogwash.
Greenwashing is designed to deceive, to conceal, to distract. If you want to know what corporate bosses really think about the environment, don’t look at how they behave in a place where strict environmental laws are enforced. Look at their behavior where there is little or no enforcement, and sometimes no laws. Such as Ecuador.
On September 9, writes Han Shan at Alternet:
...a powerful new documentary film is opening in New York, and then playing in select theaters across the country. Called CRUDE, the film tells a shocking story that Chevron does not want the world to know.
Three years in the making by acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother's Keeper, Paradise Lost, and Metallic: Some Kind of Monster), CRUDE chronicles the epic legal battle to hold Chevron accountable for its systematic contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon -- an environmental tragedy experts call the "Amazon Chernobyl," and believe is the worst case of oil-related contamination on Earth.
While drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1964 to 1990, Texaco, now Chevron, deliberately dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater, spilled roughly 17 million gallons of crude oil, and left hazardous waste in hundreds of open pits dug out of the forest floor. The company operated using substandard practices that were obsolete in order to increase its profit margin by $3 per barrel of crude. Of course, the local people and ecosystems paid the price instead, but they're fighting back.
Centering on a landmark lawsuit filed by the indigenous people and campesinos who continue to suffer a severe public health crisis caused by Chevron's contamination, CRUDE is a high-stakes David vs. Goliath legal drama with 30,000 Amazon rainforest dwellers facing down the San Ramon, California-based oil behemoth.
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The rescue begins below and continues in the jump. Inclusion of a particular diary in the rescue does not necessarily indicate my agreement with its contents.
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RLMiller urged the Senate: Pass A Reality-Based ACES Bill: "How, specifically, can we help the Senate to strengthen ACES, the American Clean Energy & Security Act (aka Waxman-Markey, aka HR 2454, aka cap & trade)? The starting point is simple: Pass a reality-based bill. The bill should, as much as possible, reflect scientific reality, not earmarks or a coal porkfest. And that reality is 350 ppm, or 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere...although rumor has it that the Colbert Nation will be demanding 349 ppm,"
Ellinorianne declared PETA's Insulting Ad Campaign No Day at the Beach: "Peta does it again, they find something to mock and deride thinking it might be the way to reach the ‘average’ American. Their ultimate goal is not for women to lose weight though, they tend to be radical in their agenda. So why are they bothering if they only means to reach out is to make fun of me?"
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palantir has posted the Overnight News Digest.
Haole in Hawaii posted a photo diary of Hawaii Underwater at Night.
RandySF expressed some worry about a new Study: America's Breadbasket Could Bear Brunt of Climate Change: "Over the past couple of years, many of us (myself included) were preoccupied with the impact of climate change along the American East and West coast. But if this study is correct, flooded real estate may be the least of the country's worries as the environmental bulls-eye could planted smack dab in the middle of our food producing Midwestern states."
Alfonso Nevarez had some worries, too, in Ice-Free Planet?: "I knew things were bad, but this is urgently catastrophic. If this is even close to being true this needs some serious message revision. We need the global warming version of ‘kill grandma.’ We need a modern daisy commercial. We should be distributing predictive photos of cities under sea and Florida dust bowls. For fuck's sake people should be scared out of their minds."
mogmaar reported on an action in D.C. in 4 Years Since Katrina: Prevent the Next One: "International climate activists floated two roof tops in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool early Thursday afternoon in anticipation of the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One of the roofs read, ‘HELP—The Water Is Rising.’ The 30 ft. banner behind the roofs declared, "Prevent the Next Katrina, Restore the Gulf, Stop Global Warming."
VICTORY: Persistence Stops A Train - and Global Warming Slowed gave Bruce Nilles a smile: "A massive new rail line planned to move millions of tons of low-grade coal from northeastern Wyoming to the Midwest has been stopped. For more than 9 years Sierra Club and our allies have been battling plansby Dakota Minnesota& Eastern Railroad Corp. (DM&E) to build this new coal line and late yesterday DM&E announced the project is ‘on hold.’ The $6 billion rail line would have carried 100 million tons of coal annually, enough to power about 50 coal plants. If burned, the coal shipped by this rail line alone would have emitted approximately 200 million tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of adding about 40 million cars to our highways. By stopping this coal line we are ever closer to averting runaway global warming and jumpstarting a clean energy revolution."
OrganicKitchen add the Daily Kos’s growing list of diaries asking How Much Weed Killer Is Safe in Your Water Glass?: "We wrote here recently about Nicolas Kristof’s excellent column, ‘Chemicals and Our Health.’ About the ubiquitousness of ‘phtalates’...finding their way into our lives via plastic bottles, cosmetics,, some toys, hair conditioners and fragrances. Many scientists have linked them to everything from sexual deformities in babies to obesity and diabetes. And now we’ve got this uplifting story about the vast water contamination (ok, let’s call it poisoning) with atrazine. What are our choices?"
The Truth About Fiji Water was the subject of headzup’s diary: "I was recently asked by the Nation Institute to make a short video to draw attention to an excellent story about Fiji Water by Anna Lenzer that's in this month's Mother Jones. I think the video turned out pretty well so I'm posting it here."
angry liberaltarian wrote Cash for Clunkers: Giving Taxpayers Money To Asia: "As Cash for Clunkers concluded earlier this week, now is a good time to revisit the issue and once again condemn all you ‘liberals’ who bought foreign cars. Michigan, GM, Chrysler, the UAW and American taxpayers say: ‘Thanks for nothing you selfish dipshits.’ As a former labor staffer for a Michigan Congressman and as someone whose family depends on the auto industry and Tier 1 and 2 suppliers, I know all too well the hardships Michigan workers face. My father, a salesmen of air valves and pneumatic products over the last twenty years, has never seen the inside of a Japanese or Korean auto factory. Foreign auto makers import their tooling from their home countries and refuse to give access to American manufacturers and suppliers, to either American auto plants, or their auto plants in their home countries. That's called trade protectionism. And it's illegal, but America doesn't call them on it. Congressman Levin has tried repeatedly to draw attention to this very issue."
kloris updated us on Cash-for-Clunkers: $543M And 1.8M Metric Tons Of CO2 Saved: "Clunker Facts: 690,000 - # of new cars due to Clunker program; 12,500 - avg miles driven per year; 8,625,000,000 - avg miles driven by these new cars per year; 16 - avg clunker trade's mpg; 26 - avg new car's mpg; 10 - avg mpg improvement of new car vs. clunker; 63% - avg % improvement in gas mileage ...Environmental savings: 0.00881 - metric tons of CO2 saved per gallon of gas: 1,826,593 - metric tons of CO2 saved per year."
faithfull reported FACES of Coal are iStockPhotos?: "We've touched on the fact that the new coal industry front group ‘FACES’ has yet to come forward with a list of their members. Well, thanks to a few new media gumshoes, including our own Jamie Goodman and our friends at DeSmogBlog, we've learned that not only is FACES hosted by a K-Street firm called Adfero, but all of the ‘FACES’ of coal are actually just istockphotos. They couldn't even get real photos of their supporters. Astroturf win?"
gmoke discussed High Concentration Solar Electricity: "It's always a pleasant surprise to go to a lecture at MIT or Harvard and find somebody who not only knows the subject deeply but is having fun playing with that knowledge, has real enthusiasm, and can communicate that excitement as well as the relevant data. Jeffrey Gordon of Ben-Gurion University is one of those people. He spoke at MIT on 8/12/09 about his work with concentrating light for solar electricity. He is working with Solfocus to make small scale high concentration solar electric systems. Already in commercial use is a 1 cm2 cell with 31 cm parabolic mirror. The 1mm2 version is still being tested."
angrytoyrobot pointed to the machinations of The Chamber of Commerce on Global Warming: "The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. ... In other words, the Chamber of Commerce wants a forum to bring in the Town Hall Teabagger shouty types. Who knows, the Teabaggers might bring guns! Yeeha!"