Wow… if you think that the Malaysian Palm Oil Council’s advertisement (see Stan’s Post) is atrocious, check out the intro video at Malaysian Palm Oil Board’s website. Amazing, huh? The Malaysian Palm Oil Board’s mission is to “enhance the well-being of the Malaysian oil palm industry through research, development and excellent services”… which is exactly [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Here’s an old GE Video I recently stumbled upon. It’s a 2005 recipe to sell “clean coal” from General Electric’s “Eco-magination.” 1. Dress some super-models up like coal miners 2. Oil their bodies up and set them loose in an underground mine 3. Co-opt a traditional anti-corporate anti-mining folksong, Sixteen Tons. 4. Throw in some [...]
Continue reading...Friday, November 16, 2007
This week Bank of America subsidiary MBNA launched their new Eco-Logique MasterCard credit card for Canadian consumers. What makes the new card so special? Well, everytime you make a purchase you earn points, but instead of using the points to get airline tickets or electronics, MBNA buys carbon offsets. The more stuff you buy, the [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Thanks to the good ole San Francisco Chronicle for once again calling my attention to an oil company just begging to win our Greenwash of the Week award. Alright, Chevron, your new online video game Energyville is our big winner. The basic idea is that they give you city and you get to decide how [...]
Continue reading...Friday, August 31, 2007
This week’s greenwash is a double-whammy: greenwash meets astro-turf. If you’re not familiar with that last term, it refers to a “grassroots” organization that’s actually the phony creation of a powerful, moneyed interest group. As reported by the good people over at PR Watch and the Asbury Park Press, Exelon, a New Jersey nuclear power [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, August 8, 2007
So we’re starting a new feature on the Understory: the Greenwash of the Week. If you’re not familiar with the term, which comes from “whitewash,” it refers to companies trying to make their products or activities appear environmentally friendly even when they are not. It didn’t take long for corporate PR departments to figure out [...]
Continue reading...Monday, August 6, 2007
Lately this blog has been featuring story after story about how big companies are trying to cash in on the public’s growing environmental awareness. We’ve discussed carbon-offsets, plug-in electric vehicles, agrifuels, and how big lumber companies want us to eat trees for dessert.
Continue reading...Sunday, May 13, 2007
Earth Day was last month and magazines made the most of it by making April their “Green Issue”. Here’s my favorite, and least favorite, of the bunch.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008
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