synthetic crude
there is an article in the Nov 12 New Yorker about “synthetic crude” being mined from tar sands in Canada. the article states that the US is importing more of this than all sources of oil in the mid-east combined. who knew canada was our #1 source of oil?
“Thanks to what’s happening in the tar sands-output now tops $1 million barrels a day-Canada has become America’s No. 1 source of imported oil. By 2010, tar sands yield is expected to double, and by 2015 to triple. Depending on how you look at things, this is either a heartening prospect or a terrifying one.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/12/071112fa_fact_kolbert
(unfortunately this link is currently only to the abstract, not the full print article)
terrifying because a) keeping cars and trucks on the road with fossil fuel is just no good for global warming and other related environmental issues, no matter what the source, middle eastern or north american, and b) the mining operation devastates the landscape. the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta is 1800 square kilometers, and the entire thing will be razed. i’m sure a lot of people don’t care about a relatively small percentage of the vast canadian wilderness, just like the arguments for oil drilling in the arctic national wildlife refuge centered on it being a “relatively small” area, the arguments against remain the same: it completely destroys what are fairly virgin ecosystems, which affects way more than just those plants and animals who live in it. there are ripple effects for thousands of miles, and it affects the whole planet eventually.
what will probably cause more global concern than the ecosystem destruction is the estimated net effect on the atmosphere:
With unconventional oil extraction, however, the damage to the environment tends to be higher all around—more land gets disturbed, more pollutants are produced, and then there are the greenhouse gases. “All unconventional forms of oil are worse for greenhouse-gas emissions than petroleum,” said Alex Farrell, of the University of California at Berkeley. Farrell and Adam Brandt found that the shift to unconventional oil could add between fifty and four hundred gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere by 2100. There is a great deal of support in Washington for measures that would, in effect, subsidize high-carbon fuels.
i had no idea about these operations or the lobbying going on to support them until i read the article, or that most midwestern cars and trucks were already running on the stuff. it’s amazing to me that after all we’ve learned about how globally destructive they are, people (investors) just aren’t willing to give up with the carbon-based fuels, and instead of spending billions mining another toxic resource invest more heavily in greener technologies. Suncor has a statement on their website about how the profits from the oil sands allow them to invest in sustainable technologies and renewable energy, but i see that as a load of PR bullshit, or at the very least, a nice way of saying “we know we can’t rape the land forever so we’re investing in our company’s future, but while we can, we will.”
Filed in environment | Tagged with greenwashing, new yorker | Comment (1)“greensumerism”
green consumerism is still consumerism – is it an oxymoron?
I USED TO feel bad about mindless consumerism but not any more. The green movement has come to my rescue. With every purchase, I can now enjoy the warm glow of helping develop environmentally sound practices.
There’s my new briefcase, for example. It is shiny and luxurious and its purchase has allowed me to throw my old one into the bin. But there’s no eco-guilt for me.
According to the manufacturer, the leather in my briefcase was stained using “extracts of bark and seeds collected from renewable sources in the forests of Africa and India”. The work was all done by “traditional artisans”, all of them using “sustainable practices” in the “old saddler tradition”. There’s not a lot of detail on the leather but, based on the tone of the pamphlet, I’m pretty sure the cows would have been volunteers.
I feel I now deserve some sort of medal just for handing over my credit card…
…Let’s call it “greensumerism”. Forget the simple mantra of “less is more”; with the help of the green movement you can now indulge in a frenzy of consumerism, with each luxury purchase excused by the idea that you are helping the development of the “green” sector.
People will ditch a perfectly good car in order to import the latest hybrid eco-model and expect to be praised for their sensitivity. Magazines like Vogue Living are now full of these luxurious holiday houses – temples to excess and over-consumption – which the owners claim as their personal contribution to sustainability.
There’s even a new category of glossy magazine – selling the green lifestyle. Rarely do these magazines suggest we should simply consume less; the advertisers wouldn’t care for that idea. Instead, each month brings us thousands of new ways for us all to consume our way to a better planet.
the topic of “greenwashing” has been a hot one lately, particularly around whether large chain “green” stores like Whole Foods, who are still marketing to their consumers like crazy and shoppers end up buying all kinds of over-priced “natural” products they don’t really need but they feel good about it because it’s “eco – something”. how green and sustainable is that, really?
Filed in environment | Tagged with greenwashing | Comment (0)whole paycheck
It’s a terrifically benign kind of evil, really. As one friend puts it, it’s the kind of place that makes you feel like you need to change your whole lifestyle — for the better, mostly — just to sync up with it. This is, quite obviously, both wonderfully enticing and violently annoying…
…here’s the thing: While it’s terribly easy to accuse the joint of being the very embodiment of pseudo-progressive ideals wrapped in pitch-perfect marketing that goes so far beyond a mere grocery store, so far beyond the place you need to dash into to grab some sour cream and a pack of condoms, there is indeed something more to this joint’s existence, something that, in the age of bloated Wal-Marts and tract homes like a cancer and a president with a fifth-grader’s vocabulary, is actually worth celebrating.
I mean, my God. Merely skimming the company’s own press releases, reading up on its various foundations, its commitment to transparency in how it does business and the issues it faces as a so-called “do-gooder” company, its current No. 5 ranking in the Forbes list of the 100 best companies to work for, its surprisingly progressive positions on supporting local farmers and promoting sustainability and humane animal treatment, its commitment to community, its overall dedication to minimizing chemicals and additives and all the mountains of toxic crap our country swims in like a noxious river, well, it’s tough not to sit back and go: Wait, if they can do it, why the hell can’t this be the way of American business overall?
In other words, I don’t care that Whole Foods isn’t for everyone. I don’t care if you think it’s unbearably snooty or too white or subconsciously pretentious or that it caters only to a certain upscale clientele or that you can’t buy giant bags of Doritos and four-gallon drums of Diet Coke there. Blind cynicism, in this case, is just way too easy.
Curse Whole Foods’ apparently genuine concern for the quality of your entire food experience all you want. The bottom line is fairly irrefutable: We should fall on our all-American gluttonous knees right this minute in a devout collective wish, a giant wail of hope that more corporations follow in Whole Foods’ footsteps. — full article
if i lived somewhere where Whole Foods was my only option for buying organic and otherwise non-toxic food and healthcare items, i would certainly shop there, because, really, i don’t hate the place, but besides being so expensive, it’s just so…..polished. and perfect. and that feeling Morford describes is for some indescribable reason “violently annoying”. why is that? i don’t know. perhaps because a lot of the packaging of the products they sell and the marketing they use seems a lot like greenwashing (and making you pay more for it), but it’s probably more due to my aforementioned resistance to such overt signs of bourgeois west coast hippie-com-yuppiedom as seems to be outright celebrated in that store. but as it is, i live in a place where i have a local supermarket chain that carries the same items (Andronico’s) as well as the Berkeley Bowl and numerous farmers markets and an organic produce service that delivers directly to my office, so, i avoid the place. but, still, i have to agree with him, in the grand scheme of things, despite the critics say, you can’t argue that it would BAD if more companies operated in such a way as opposed to the big box toxic food dealers of the world like Safeway.
Filed in food, health & vegetarianism | Tagged with greenwashing | Comments (4)excuse me while i puke
The Enlightenment Visa Reward Card was founded on the idea that money is energy and if used with positive and integrative intention, can have the power to affect change in our lives and the world.
the site goes on to talk about all the wonderfully enlightened things you can do with the points you earn while contributing to america’s debt crisis, and fails to mention that Visa, the company who profits most from your activity, is evil, just like all credit card companies who are funded by large banks and reap the benefits of careless compulsive spending by consumers and take advantage of those with financial problems or weaknesses (like college students). that phrase “supports my conscious lifestyle” is totally misleading – sure, it supports the cardholder by providing funds for all the over-priced products and services (have you BEEN in a Whole Foods?) needed to create a “conscious lifestyle”, but how in the world could any credit card actually support a GLOBALLY “conscious lifestyle”? it simply can’t. credit cards and sustainability don’t mix. Visa earning hundreds of dollars a year in interest and transaction fees (every time you use your card, Visa collects money from the merchant) because of your activity is not “putting your money where your heart is”.
i mean…ack. just like with all the current greenwashing going on in ads (like THIS toxic crap being marketed as “natural”), corporate use of popular spiritual and social values to market products that are only pretending to be aligned with those values in order to make money off of that demographic makes me totally ill. i mean, i know that’s what marketing *IS*, but it seems to be getting more and more Orwellian as the days go by.
~ via social-creature, who also notes an interesting concept in robotics psychology that plays into marketing (and, i would argue, perception of art): the more something approaches who we really are, the less appealing it becomes (e.g., the reason that Visa ad is so repulsive is because it’s so fucking spot on in terms of our actual culture) until it fully assimilates and becomes unrecognizable as an ad, such as the guerilla marketing done by some agencies wherein you don’t even realize you’re being marketed to, and then it becomes favorable and we like it.
humans are weird. as smart as we are, we are also totally dumb and utterly impressionable. our cultural evolution has included the nurturing of this tendency to accept things which are naturally illogical because they are presented to us by what have been established as ruling forces/sources of life, even if they’re totally negative. it’s as though we’ve lost any innate ability we might have had to use logic to foresee negative consequences, and now even the smartest of us still mostly just listen/respond to what we’ve been taught. sure, the marketers have to get more and more creative to keep us fooled, and i’m sure it took a lot of work on the part of whoever created that ad above to find a way to market credit cards to the so-called “enlightened” consumer American. or, maybe not.
Filed in culture and random linkage, environment | Tagged with dystopia, greenwashing, orwell | Comment (1)time to hit the pedals
leaving a party last night a little after 4am, jason, who’d left a few minutes earlier, called me to say that there was a truck explosion on the macarther maze – the web of freeway exchanges in west oakland that connects the bay bridge to the rest of the east bay and pretty much the U.S. via I-80 – and we might have to take a different route home. as we approached the scene, indeed there was a huge plume of smoke and a fire several stories high. i wondered aloud how much heat it would take to bring down the freeway. apparently, it only takes one fuel tanker, because we woke up this morning to this:
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