You've been Greenwashed - A thread for pseudo green/environmet bullsh!t

Yesterday Lenor started running an advert on TV saying Lenor softner is concentrated so it requires less lorries to transport it than if it wasn't concentrated therefore it has a reduced (you guessed it) carbon footprint.

The fact that it is a completely unneccessary product in the first place seems to have escaped them. Imagine how few lorries would be needed if we just stopped using their product altogether.

Jonathan

British Petroleum reportedly spent around a billion dollars making their signage a darker shade of green about ten years ago.

Just thought that'd a be a great name for munch's son's group The Carbon Footprints - I'll post over on the music thread.

BTW Jonathan - I agree with you on the Greenwash stuff.

Fear not - perhaps that should actually be fear lots - for whatever we do in the West nothing is goping to counterbalance the rise in consumption in China, India, and Brazil with their massive populations...

ATB from George

That Global Warming is caused by rising CO2 levels when in fact it could be the other way round. Evidence was found by drilling down into the polar icecaps which have trapped our atmosphere for thousands of years. CO2 Myth


Here's some more Its Not That Simple


For me climate change is a natural phenomenon, ENJOY IT!



Dean...

quote:

For me climate change is a natural phenomenon, ENJOY IT!

Whizzkid, enjoy it by all means but you better believe your gonna be taxed for it

Yesterday, in the prestigious journal Science, who were discussing what the scientists could do personally in their professional lives about global warming etc one suggetion was

'...to hold annual meetings less frequently.'

Ian

quote:

'...to hold annual meetings less frequently.'

Great to know the edukashun wasn't wasted?

Try reading the novel by Michael Crichton, "State of Fear". In it, he challenges the concept of man-induced global warming and supports his case by doing something I have never seen before in fiction - he gives references to peer-reviewed scientific papers, lots of them.
Crichton suggests that there is a very profitable "disaster industry". As in "remember the Y2K bug?". And it's a pretty good read.
Ken

quote:

Originally posted by Howlinhounddog:

quote:

For me climate change is a natural phenomenon, ENJOY IT!

Whizzkid, enjoy it by all means but you better believe your gonna be taxed for it

Yes that's for sure any excuse for filling up the treasury so they can waste it more efficiently. They've just started the scare stories on alcohol (with the backing of the NHS) as well so they can put forward the "solution" to the problem, you guessed it put more tax on it. I see climate change as no different.

We're all gonna DIE, Arrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhh!



Dean...

quote:

Originally posted by KenM:
Try reading the novel by Michael Crichton, "State of Fear". In it, he challenges the concept of man-induced global warming and supports his case by doing something I have never seen before in fiction - he gives references to peer-reviewed scientific papers, lots of them.
Crichton suggests that there is a very profitable "disaster industry". As in "remember the Y2K bug?". And it's a pretty good read.
Ken

Ken,

That was also the conclusion to a recent Channel 4 documentary, which was filled with very well respected scientists from various fields. Basically if you need funding for your science field and can link what you are researching to global warming/climate change, bingo you get the cheque. Now that's what I call an incentive.



Dean...

It always made me laugh hearing Tony Blair and David Cameron banging on about their desire to protect the environment. The single greatest threat to the world climate is the current size, and growth rate, of the human population, and given that neither of those two seem able to control their fecundity they should find something else to harp on about. Work out the carbon footprint of all those bloody kids you've had, you stupid little twerps!

EW

What about the whole Carbon Credit BS...

Why the hell should be worry and be taxed according to this when the biggest polluters in the world simply dont give a sh*t

The f*ing Green party here in NZ...

quote:

Originally posted by KenM:
Try reading the novel by Michael Crichton, "State of Fear". In it, he challenges the concept of man-induced global warming and supports his case by doing something I have never seen before in fiction - he gives references to peer-reviewed scientific papers, lots of them.
Crichton suggests that there is a very profitable "disaster industry". As in "remember the Y2K bug?". And it's a pretty good read.
Ken

Sorry Ken, but this(as you say)is a work of fiction. It has no more relevance to the reality (or not depending on your point of view) of climate change then "The Da-Vinci Code" does to religion. It quotes selective data from the NASA website which is correct for local regions. However, it does not consider the whole picture and is not scientifically sound.

On the subject of "greenwash" however, I agree that it is pathetic to see the attempts of companies and governments to jump on the "green" bandwagon.

"The new London 2012 Olympic stadium will be the most environmentally sustainable stadium ever built" according to the news thin week

Well that doesn't mean anything apart from they'll buy their construction materials from companies who brag about their green credentials whilst screwing up the environment in exactly the same way as they always have!

JOnathan

quote:

Sorry Ken, but this(as you say)is a work of fiction. It has no more relevance to the reality (or not depending on your point of view) of climate change then "The Da-Vinci Code" does to religion. It quotes selective data from the NASA website which is correct for local regions. However, it does not consider the whole picture and is not scientifically sound.

Trevor,
I have yet to see any presentation of the whole picture. Everyone has an agenda, and I made no attempt to present Crichton's work as a scientific study. But it does strongly suggest that results are being selected to support a "disaster industry". I agree with this view. If you gathered from my post that I was recommending his work as a comprehensive and definitive review of the entire climate change issue, I suggest that you read it again, this time more carefully.

Ken

Just back from a first visit to India. Three lessons learnt:

(a) If global warming is man-mediated, we can't stop it.
(b) India, at least, is not a material threat to 1st and 2nd World economies - too inefficient and with no mechanism to recognise those of its masses with talent and educate them appropriately
(c) Don't pick your nose after eating curried peanuts

I'd hitherto been a bit obsessional about low-energy lightbulbs, turning appliances off rather than to standby etc. It 's plain now that the only value to this is personal - reduction of the electricity bill - there being no wider context.

The only measaures worth pursuing are those with local and immediate benefit such as reducing landfill, I feel.

Fraser

quote:

As in "remember the Y2K bug?"

Sorry, but this dismissal of the Y2K threat as a scare story makes me see red. The organisation I worked in at the time spent months fixing code in the run up to the new millenium. This code would *definitely* not have worked post Y2K without the fix. This is a fact, not speculation or guesswork. The same applies to many, many other systems. And without those systems, business would have ground to a halt on 01 Jan 2000. The only reason it didn't is because of the huge effort many organisations went through to fix the problem beforehand. There is no way that big banks, utilities etc. would make the effort they did if the threat wasn't real.

I concede that some of the headlines were lurid, but the risk was very real.

Dear Fraser

Reading your post two up exactly makes me think that my own conclusion on this was right. China and India only have to double their consumption of fossil fuels per head and even if we stopped using them altogether in the USA and Europe we would still be going the wrong way with this. There is no evidence that China and India are not going to continue to develope their economies with this exact result occuring in any case ...

Thus as you say the only reason to worry about running low energy light bulbs or walking a mile rather than jumping in the car is a personal one and the financial cost at that rather than a question of conscience.

My next light bulb will be an incandesant one because reading with a light saver bulb is much harder, though I shall continue to turn off my Naim Power Amp when not in use as it makes no difference in practice after twenty minutes but saves me on the electricity bill. I would rather walk short distances given what traffic is like!

The human race as a whole is surely showing that natural tendency of any over large population and will self limit when it destroys the eco-system and its abiltity to continue to feed itself. It is a horrible and completley inescapable conclusion. If the climate change issue is not man-made then the conclusion is the same.

I remember as a child considering the fact that for the first time in mankind's history weapons then existed that would destroy the planet. Now sheer weight of population will achieve the same ends without nuclear war. It is inevtable ...

Carpe Diem, George

The lack of insight, on a personal level, too is devastating.

I was listening to someone today pratting about 'green issues'. They had 3 children. They were most put out when I asked what scale of recycling they would have to achieve to offset the carbon footprint of the third child!

Similarly, I recently received a new magazine produced by a Bank. The editorial was given over to self-congratulation on the matter of using recycled paper. The magazine offered nothing not already available manyfold elsewhere. I have written in suggesting that the greatest contribution they could make to environmental preservation would be to make sure that the first issue is the last. Will my letter be printed, I wonder.

Fraser



Fraser

quote:

Originally posted by Fraser Hadden:
I was listening to someone today pratting about 'green issues'. They had 3 children. They were most put out when I asked what scale of recycling they would have to achieve to offset the carbon footprint of the third child!

Yes, exactly. I refer you back to my comment re Blair and Cameron. They'd have to plant a lot of trees...

EW

What is genuinely odd is that it has become a sort Green, PC thing to expect people on times to justify using air-travels, or berate them for using a heavy four by four car to take the children four hundred yards to school or whatever, but then there is news that Heathrow is likely as not to get a Third Runway in the coming years, thus doubling [according to the BBC on Radio Four] its capacity in the coming years. We see public buildings floodlit every day of the year, huge amounts of street lighting which seems more than necessary, public buildings heated to unpleasant levels, and so on, let alone talk of the need to raise the population and birth rate to allow for continuing economic developement!

Surely the best thing to do would be to encourage a lowering of the birthrate and abolish the notion of retirement, thus shortening peoples' life expectancy!

I also think smoking should under many circumstances be actively encouraged as a good thing, again to shorten peoples' lives [as it is known to do] and also certainly not discourage obese tendencies.

My main arguement for these life shortening strategies would be two fold. Firstly the cost of doctoring a cancer patient through the usually fatal experience of lung cancer is a pitance compared to nursing them into their nineties into the almost inevitable state of senile dementia, and physical incapacity. Equally I would think from the economic point of view an overweight person having a fatal heart attack in their forties or fifties has much to commend it compared to the option of looking after the physical husk of a body no longer containing a useful mind into extreme old age.

Appart from the obvious inconsistencies of public policy on wasting energy, I am certain that like the issue of terrorism this green/fuel/ecological/global warming issue will be used as a basis for government to tax the working population more and more heavily and in previously unimagined ways, and restrict out lives as seems the bent of modern government!

The Green Agenda is no less a means of allowing for rotten new laws than the so called new terrorist threat. In UK we have lived with a terrorirst threat of one sort or another almost all my life, but only in the last ten years has it been taken as opportunity for government to take unto itself more and more power and restrict our basic freedoms. I feel that the Green issue will be used in similar vein in future, and those who value their freedom will do well to oppose the ever growing grip of the nanny state style governement we are witnessing!

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:
Surely the best thing to do would be to encourage a lowering of the birthrate and abolish the notion of retirement, thus shortening peoples' life expectancy!

... two things that will inevitably have to happen if the population continues to grow that the current rate. Unfortunately I don't think anyone will do anything to try to control population growth until it's too late. Well, it probably is too late, the current population size exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet as it is (most studies put it at 2.2-2.6 billion).

I don't think Homo sapiens is a very good name for our taxon; we aren't very sapient I'm afraid. I suggest Homo bloodystupidens.

EW

Dear EW,

It is depressing, but you are absolutely right! I wish my parents had shown more restraint! Neither my brother nor I would have been missed. Then I would not have to consider the lack of restraint of others! I have absolutely no doubt of the rectitude of my position entirely eschewing the chance to breed, and I caution my friends with the advice that the children are going to have a much worse time than even we shall. We are both young enough to see the the begining of the end of modern capitalistic consumerist society, and I do not imagine that it will be a pretty thing to witness ...

In bleaker moments I have thought of rectifying my parents undoubted mistake!

Then I listen to some Bach! Carpe diem, and just get on with it in spite of all human life being a proverbial crock of sh***!

ATB from George