Re: Someone else took your idea and ran with it.

When the environmentalist movement began to gain mainstream momentum in the early '90s, the consequent increase in public awareness of environmental issues prompted a growing desire among consumers to change their buying habits in such a way that they could minimize their negative impact on the planet's ecology. As a result, more and more companies sought to take advantage of this new attitude among potential customers by marketing their products and services as being relatively easy on the earth and its resources. Some of these firms really did make good on their claims; others simply spent millions on advertising to make it seem as if they did. The practice of employing public relations campaigns to convince the public that a company is operating in an environmentally-friendly manner when it's actually not is called greenwashing. And although the term has no exact definition, a company is generally considered to be engaged in greenwashing when its words don't match its actions with regards to its environmental track record.

Because greenwashing is basically a method of appearing to follow environmentalist trends, it tends to follow in the footsteps of the general public's knowledge of environmental issues at any given moment. In the first half of the '90s, for instance, when such concepts as recycling and the depletion of the ozone layer were chief among many people's environmental concerns, companies responded by advertising their products as being made from recyclable materials or as having been produced in an ozone friendly fashion. And though some of these claims were technically accurate, it wasn't long before some companies realized that they could achieve greater sales to green-minded buyers without actually making good on their promises to the environment. When the term biodegradable came into the public vocabulary, Mobile Chemical began to tout it Hefty line of trash bags as being just that. And although the new trash bags were indeed biodegradable in the sense that they decomposed under direct sunlight, the vast majority of these bags actually end up in landfills where sunlight can't reach them, and thus they rarely get a chance to decompose at all. Although several environmentalist organizations pointed out that the Hefty trash bag claims were misleading, most consumers didn't get the message. This is often the case with incidents of greenwashing, and it helps to explain why companies engage in such activity - because it tends to work.

One of the most well-known greenwashing campaigns in the history of such things has also been the most effective. In 2000, British Petroleum launched its famous Beyond Petroleum campaign in hopes of convincing the public that the company had taken a major lead in ushering in a new age of clean energy and that it would only be a matter of time before it abandoned oil in favor of other, more sustainable fuels. In fact, BP had indeed begun to take steps in the right direction in 1995 when the company officially broke with the view that climate change is not caused by human industrial activity. And in the years since, BP has also invested in solar energy and other clean technologies. But such moves have been mostly cosmetic; the company's purchase of a major solar energy firm for $45 million pales in comparison to the more than $25 billion it spent on the purchase of a rival oil firm around the same time. Because BP's ad campaign gave the misleading impression that clean energy now made up a significant portion of the company's operations, it was universally denounced by environmentalist groups; nonetheless, advertising industry insiders deemed Beyond Petroleum to be the most effective marketing campaign of its time.

Other companies have engaged in similar high-profile campaigns to improve public perception. Similar to BP's campaign was General Electric's Ecomagination ad blitz in which the company spent $90 million in an effort to highlight G.E.'s pledge to spend more on research and development of cleaner energy technologies over the coming years as well as to make environmentally-friendly energy services a larger share of its profit sources. But at the same time that it was touting its environmentalist credibility, G.E. Was still engaged in a considerably more low-profile campaign to lobby Congress in an effort to fend off legislation that would have cut into the company's profits with new environmental regulations. Worse still, G.E. was also fighting to delay a federal order that would have required the energy firm to undertake an expensive cleanup of a portion of the Hudson River that G.E. had damaged through its own negligence.

This policy of attempting to distract the public with massive public relations campaigns while simultaneously working behind the scenes to fight green-friendly legislation has become fairly widespread among those corporations that stand to lose if such legislation is made into law. Some of this political manipulation is done by way of direct campaign contributions to friendly lawmakers who may be depended upon to vote according to a corporation's financial interest instead of the public interest. But that unfortunate practice is now increasingly coupled with stealth messaging campaigns by which several companies will establish a benevolent-sounding organization to relay its viewpoint to the public in such a way that message appears to be coming from an independent third party. For instance, the National Wetland Coalition would certainly appear to be an environmentalist organization intent on preserving the nation's wetlands, to judge from its name. In fact, though, it's a lobbying group that seeks to weaken existing environmental legislation, and its membership is made up of such entities as Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and the National Association of Homebuilders all of which would like to see increased development of federally-protected wetlands.

Because companies still find it to be effective, it's unlikely that we'll see an end to greenwashing any time soon, and this makes it more important for green-friendly consumers to keep informed. Before doing business with any company that claims to be environmentally friendly, do some research; resources such as The University of Oregon's greenwashingindex.com can help you to determine which companies are making real efforts to protect the environment and which are just paying lip service to the earth.

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> wrote:

Did you finish all those "green" articles? I didn't get to see them.

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, I didn't exactly invent the top ten list, but my Friedman piece might have reminded them about what a good format it is.

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> wrote:

Politics and Power

Rush Limbaugh's 10 Dumbest Remarks

by Christopher Bateman

March 31, 2009, 1:00 AM