Update: Ironically, this post has been censored by Facebook and other social media co’s, despite it containing no factual errors.
Greenwashing, in case you don’t know, is the “disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image”.
You know, this sort of thing:
This is taken from the time of the now infamous Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal. Since then, other large car companies have faced similar controversy — jumping on the green band wagon. It’s because these days, it pays to be “green” (for more information, see Elon Musk).
But here’s the thing that otherwise intelligent people seem to fail to comprehend: Greenwashing extends way beyond false advertising in consumer goods. It’s made its way into politics, investment products, journalism, and now mainstream opinion in “the West”.
Greenwashing is actually now the norm, which we’re now going to get into after I fire off an early warning trigger alert:
This warning is if you’re a current believer in the generic clean energy revolution. You know the one — it goes something like this: Unless we “decarbonize” and move from fossil fuels to so called “clean” energy, within the next decade or so the world suffers irreversible and catastrophic changes that will:
- Lead to increasingly warmer temperatures
- Kill off swathes of wildlife, causing mass extinctions
- Cause untold starvation and hardship for us bipeds
- Increase inequality
- And so on…
Well, today we’re dissecting this popular narrative that has virtuous intentions, but — like many things our governments have been mandating these days — are doomed to fail and actually make things worse than if nothing was done at all.
“That’s a little hyperbolic,” I hear you say.
Well, let’s see…
Here are some cold, hard facts, regardless of how controversial they might seem by today’s standards.:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An operation of fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil near Chicago, USA [Richard Hurd, Flickr CC BY 2.0]
