Sorry, it’s not quite so simple as that.
Listen to this program, broadcast 10/02/08 on ABC’s Background Briefing.
The reference to the Papal indulgences could hardly be more appropriate.
Just a little note…
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I’m green, and my conscience is clean.
February 9, 2008, 8:01 pm — SwinishCapitalist4 Responses to “I’m green, and my conscience is clean.”
Well, SAY something...
TizonasWeblog
The Tizona Group 
February 9, 2008, 9:18 pm at 9:18 pm
Dear Greenwashing,
My skin color is brown, olive oil brownish actually. My questions are:
1. Am I just a dying green?
OR
2. Am I just safe from all this greenwashing shit?
February 10, 2008, 2:04 am at 2:04 am
I couldn’t listen to the whole thing. It was pretty bad. During the whole first part with the chemist I understood very little, and came away wondering what was bad and what wasn’t and where the producers were supposedly leading us astray.
Then we had the Terra bunch with their six green sins. Fibbing was the least sin indulged, only ten instances out of over a thousand samples, but the local news led with a headline about false green advertising. Another small tell was the presenter’s remark when she saw the view from Terra’s 35th floor offices: she stated that you could “keep an eye on everybody from up here.”
After that we had a government lawyer tell us that consumer complaints have grown with the movement. He explained that while a company may run its advertising and labels past a lawyer so that they won’t be sued, but that it will do little good because he may prosecute you anyway just to test a law (even though, he helpfully explains, your reputation and business may be ruined even if you are innocent). This will come about because the “line in the sand” for what is acceptable isn’t a clear, straight line, but is “blurred.” In other words, no matter what a producer may do, he is automatically assumed to be guilty of something because the legislatures and regulation writers are unable to define their terms; the law is not objective. It is my experience that they never define their terms, but use this blurriness as a cudgel with which to blackmail business into accommodating their power over them. All for the greater good, of course. Who gives a damn about business anyway. We all know they’re a bunch of greedy bastards who want to manipulate us, thereby ruling over us by offering us something we choose to value in voluntary trade for our money. Not like those in the government, and the non-profits. Those are elites who presume to do our thinking for us, act to rule by only the purest of motives, and tax us for the privilege.
That last bit of corruption was the last I could stomach.
February 10, 2008, 2:59 am at 2:59 am
I am pretty sure I use one of the products checked over by that chemist – a dishwashing detergent that claims to be ‘biodgredable’ and ‘phosphate free’. His points were that the first is a simple requirement of law, and phosphates aren’t used in diswashing detergents anyway, so both claims, although correct, are empty.
One woman interviewed runs an organic-everything shop in Melbourne. She argued that buying tinned tomatoes flown in from Italy was a better environmental choice than local tomatoes because, among other reasons, tomatoes grown in Australia degrade our soil. Whereas they’ve been growing them in Italy for centuries.
I don’t think it was Terra on the 35th floor, but the office of Graeme Samuel, the head of Australia’s consumer affairs authority.
It was the last part that I found most interesting, because it described how wealthy developed nations can prove their enviro cred with schemes in the poorer parts of the world. That however doesn’t always work to the benefit of the natives, who might lose the use of some land in the process. There was a comparison made somewhere in this to the Indulgences of centuries past, whereby wealthy sinners could put a few more sov’s on the plate and have their blemishes wiped from the record. Carbon offsets sounds like a scam from the same book.
I posted the link because the essence of the program, as I heard it, was that some people are sticking ‘green’ and ‘environmentally-friendly’ on anything that they might get a buck from, and some other people are quite happy to believe their claims. Hardly news, but it was interesting that it should run on the ABC. Background Briefing is one of the few programs that isn’t completely overwhelmed with moonbattery.
February 10, 2008, 3:41 am at 3:41 am
EVERYTHING is biodegradable. Some people are just impatient.