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Greenwashing

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Greenwashing

Unread postby fastbike » Fri 28 Jan 2005, 07:43:17

This weekend our city is hosting a "Future Living Expo".

Today, I was there helping set up a stall today for a local company, who produce a solar hot water system.

Other worthwhile exhibitors include a company selling pellet woodstoves, the local Green party (very innovative), a company with a thermal building block etc.

However, the booth that took the prize for "taking the piss" was a company with a Honda hybrid taking pride of place (and a couple of bicycles hidden in the corner) calling itself "Greenfleet".
This appears to be a blatant example of greenwashing. This company is skimming profits selling an over rated vehicle while doing absolutely nothing to reduce dependency on personal motor vehicles. Worse, by promoting to the public the idea that the solution to serious climate change/peak oil problems is as easy as dropping in a new technology (hybrid vehicles/hydrogen vehicles etc) as a substitute for our current fleet of gas guzzlers, it is discouraging investment in alternatives such as public transit and cycling. In other words, its pretty much business as usual but with a superficial green tinge.

Do people who have taken the time to understand that the problem goes a whole lot deeper than mere technology substitution (e.g. refer to Monte's excellent threads on debt based money), agree that these greenwashing exercises are counter productive.

I'd be interested in hearing you views.

BTW, I'll be manning a stall there on Sunday so I might do some "research" and feedback to this site the types of responses I encounter.
Let's hope the next generation have a sense of humour ... our generation will need it.
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Unread postby MikeB » Fri 28 Jan 2005, 11:36:10

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Last edited by MikeB on Fri 18 Feb 2005, 11:41:40, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby No-Oil » Fri 28 Jan 2005, 11:49:44

There is nothjing wrong with Hybrid vehicles, the options & the future are open to many interpretations. But if someone is in the market for a new car, because their situation todays demands they have transport, then it is preferable that they aquire the least polluting form of transport they can. So buying a Hygrid will reduce the users CO2 production, the very technology of the vehicle will limit its use. It takes no more energy to produce an energy efficient vehicle than a normal gas guzzler, so it is an overall saving.

The more people converting to Hybrids, the bigger the interest in the problem will become. The biggest problem at the moment is total lack of knowledge or apathy in the general public. The more their awareness can be improved, the better things will be in the future. The Hybrid is not the answer, but it is part of the solution !

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Unread postby Frank » Fri 28 Jan 2005, 12:36:48

Hybrids are definitely part of the solution. Most people want to "help the environment" and everyone wants to save money. Obviously PO is still a problem but if everyone drove hybrids we would cut our gasoline use in half, no? Seems to me that would smooth things out a bit. Anything that gives us more time is good. If nothing else, reducing fossil fuel consumption rate will help environmentally (pollution/global warming).
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Unread postby bart » Fri 28 Jan 2005, 20:44:30

fastbike wrote:This company is skimming profits selling an over rated vehicle while doing absolutely nothing to reduce dependency on personal motor vehicles. Worse, by promoting to the public the idea that the solution to serious climate change/peak oil problems is as easy as dropping in a new technology (hybrid vehicles/hydrogen vehicles etc) as a substitute for our current fleet of gas guzzlers, it is discouraging investment in alternatives such as public transit and cycling. In other words, its pretty much business as usual but with a superficial green tinge.

You pretty well summed up the phenomenon, fastbike. It's the old debate between Reform and Revolution.

I'd go farther and extend your analysis to much of what is currently labeled "green," such as hydrogen power, organic food produced by large corporations, and recycling.

I don't think I'd call the phenomenon "greenwashing." Greenwashing implies the perpetrators understand the real situation and are cynically hoodwinking the public. On the contrary, most people involved in hybrids and light-green solutions are sincere and, to some degree, idealistic.

In my mind, the challenge is: how does one deal with people with whom one disagrees?

One solution is MikeB's idea of peeing on the Honda's tires. Alternately, one can confront the others and denounce them publicly.

These tactics were used extensively in the 60s and 70s. Having lived through that period and done those things, let me assure you that they get very old very quickly.

For one thing, no matter how green or left you are, there will always be someone who is greener and lefter. Self-righteousness and impulsive actions poison the atmosphere. People stop listening and leave.

I've become a fan of what the Buddhists call "skillful means." For example: listening deeply to other people, trying to find areas of agreement, avoiding stereotypes and rigidity. I would not say that I have mastered these skills, but I notice that the more I use them, the better I feel about myself.
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Re: Greenwashing

Unread postby dinopello » Wed 02 Apr 2008, 15:21:23

Since there was aready this short thread on greenwashing, thought I'd add this example

Marylands new inter-county connector project (highway)

Even the website is green.

Check out how they are so carefully [s]hunting [/s]relocating even the turtles.

Photo gallery
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greenwashing

Unread postby coyote » Wed 29 Apr 2009, 19:53:37

... In other news, Reuters has changed the name of its "Environment" news section to: "Green Business."

Green Business

[smilie=XXpuke.gif]

Related: If I see one more industrially produced petroleum plastic product labeled "eco-friendly," I'm going to start the goddamn revolution.

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Re: green

Unread postby dinopello » Wed 29 Apr 2009, 20:16:55

I think this is on topic...

So, I'm on business travel and last week I bought a bottle of water at Starbucks. I've been using the bottle ever since at my temp office, refilling it at the water fountain. So someone comes by today and asks if that water is 'good'. I had recently read the bottle label and how it explains that by drinking the water, it helps little kids get water...

Oh, I should mention that it is Starbuck's Ethos-brand water, and they donate money to some projects when you buy the water.

So, I told the girl that it tasted kind of like every other water and the water in it wasn't actually the water I bought several days ago, but that original water helped some little kids get water but the water I had in there currently wasn't helping anyone but me. She backed away slowly...
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Re: greenwashing

Unread postby pup55 » Thu 30 Apr 2009, 14:52:57

For awhile I was doing some travel into "developing" nations. The people in those nations really like the convenience and purity of bottled water. It's much better than the liquidy stuff that they have coming out of their tap, if they have one....

Those guys have not gotten the message yet on why it is not the best thing in the world to open up your back door and throw the bottle out into the backyard, or into the nearest body of water, and forget about it. It's pretty common to be on the modern train system over there, and go past some of these places out in the countryside where there are a lot of people living, and see some little houses with big piles of plastic containers sitting outside the door.

The net result is, in some of these crazy little lands, every body of water big enough to step across, and then maybe even some, has one or more of these bottles floating in it. Every rainstorm brings a new wave of these plastic bottles--- every beach, every river, every lake. They don't have the resources really to get someone to pick them all up and recycle them.... so they just sit there.

Someone will have to tell me if this is still the case. This has been a year or two.

So Starbucks can do what they want, and of course there are some health benefits of this packaging for places that do not have the resources to have nice water like we do..... so it's a bit of a dilemma. I suppose that polyethylene is ultimately processible into something that approaches crude oil, so at some point, the deposits will be "mineable"....

Millennia from now, the archaeologists will be digging these plastic pits up and wondering how we could have been so stupid.
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Re: greenwashing

Unread postby Ludi » Thu 30 Apr 2009, 15:00:15

pup55 wrote:For awhile I was doing some travel into "developing" nations. The people in those nations really like the convenience and purity of bottled water. It's much better than the liquidy stuff that they have coming out of their tap, if they have one....



It's also a fabulous business opportunity for water bottlers and bottle-makers.

They could instead be given a solar water distiller or taught how to build them, and solve the waste problem. But that wouldn't be as profitable for someone.

http://solarcooking.org/plans/
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Re: Greenwashing

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 06 Feb 2017, 12:00:15

Longer article along with graphs and picture at link below the quote.

Absolution, Deceit and Renewables

It’s been a while since the Automatic Earth featured an article from Energy Matters, the site run by our longtime friend Euan Mearns, Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Aberdeen, and his co-conspirator Roger Andrews, a British engineer/geophysicist, semi-retired in Mexico. But I read a piece by Roger yesterday that I like, because it allows me to rant against all the false claims emanating from countries and companies about the share of renewable power in their total energy consumption.

Roger focuses on the railway system in the Netherlands, run by NS, which recently claimed that it operates on 100% wind power. This is of course, if you know anything about electricity generation and the grid, a preposterous claim, and that the company has the guts to make such a claim can only serve to prove how little the general public knows about the topic. Or they wouldn’t dare. Green is still so sexy in certain circles, and actual knowledge so poor, that companies like the NS feel no scruples about stretching their ‘greenness’ into absurd theater territory.

Google does something similar. And you might be inclined to think that the topic is so important for both the companies and the people they seek to please with their claims that grossly exaggerating the numbers would be out of the question, but not so. Instead, “Google announced that it will purchase enough renewable energy to match 100% of its operations in 2017”. And that is not the same as running on renewables, which is what is being suggested (in carefully cherry-picked terms). I like this assessment by electronicdesign.com:

Is Google’s Renewable Energy Plan What It Seems?
“Essentially, Google is contracting for green energy from places that can never reach its data centers. If it were as simple as Google claims, it would be easy to build a renewable power sector. New York City could execute a massive number of contracts with wind farms in upstate New York because they are on the same grid.“ [..]

Google is promising to buy—on an annual basis—the same amount of megawatt-hours (MWh) of renewable energy as the amount of megawatt-hours of electricity that it consumes for its worldwide operations. This approach will benefit the renewable energy market even though it is still generating the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions with or without its 100% renewable energy purchasing plan.


Google ‘buys renewable energy’ in various places around the world, but its servers don’t run on it. It’s exactly like companies buying carbon permits from poorer nations; an excuse to keep polluting. As both the permits and the renewables are traded in markets where prices are low and/or heavily subsidized. As for the scale involved, “In 2015, Google consumed 5.7 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, which is nearly as much electricity as the city of San Francisco.” And don’t forget it keeps consuming ever more as the company grows. That’s a lot of fossil fuels. The medieval ‘principle’ of absolution inevitably comes to mind.

As for the Netherlands’ railways, Roger concludes below, after explaining why, that “the Netherlands’ electrified railways continue to be powered dominantly by fossil fuel electricity. The “Harried Dutch commuters” who are “travelling on one of the most environmentally friendly rail networks in the whole of Europe, if not the world” are being sold a bill of goods.”

I would like to add that because of continuing issues related to intermittency and baseload, which are nowhere near being solved, the very grid itself that is used to deliver the ‘renewable’ electricity couldn’t exist without fossil fuels. Or, in other words, if there were only ‘green’ sources of electricity, there would be no grid. How much can be moved towards ‘green’ sources is still somewhat debatable, but just like solar panels and wind turbines cannot build themselves but need fossil fuels to be produced, there is a limit far far below the 100% both Google and the Dutch railways are (deceitfully?) toying around with.

Do The Netherlands’ Trains Really Run On 100% Wind Power?

This question generated a number of comments in the last Blowout so I thought I would take a quick look at it. I find that the electrified portion of the Dutch railway network (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, or NS) runs on grid electricity that comes dominantly from fossil fuel generation (natural gas and coal). NS claims 100% wind power because it has a contract with various wind farms to produce enough energy to power its rail system, but this is just an accounting transaction. Only a small fraction of the power delivered to its trains actually comes from wind.

First some details on the Netherlands’ electricity sector. As shown in the table below installed capacity is dominantly fossil fuel, with natural gas making up 61% of total installed capacity and coal 15%. Wind contributes 4,117MW, representing 13% of the capacity mix.


No details on the current generation mix are readily available, but as shown in Figure 1 gas and coal supplied around 80% of the Netherlands’ electricity between 2000 and 2013 and it’s likely that this percentage still applies.

How much of the Netherlands’ electricity is supplied by wind? According to Cleantechnica
wind power in the Netherlands generates 7.4 billion kWh (7.4TWh) of electricity annually, and according to BP the Netherlands’ total electricity generation in 2015 was 109.6TWh. However, wind power consumption in the Netherlands in 2015 was 12.5TWh, indicating that about 5TWh of wind power was imported during the year. So while wind contributes about 7% to the Netherlands’ electricity generation it contributes about 11% to the country’s electricity consumption. Either figure comfortably exceeds the amount of electricity NS uses to power its electric trains, which is variously quoted as either 1.2 or 1.4TWh/year.

The Netherlands imports wind power basically because it’s falling behind its EU renewable energy targets. But how does NS know the power it imports is wind? Because Eneco, which contracts to supply NS with wind power, gets a “Guarantee of Origin” from the exporter under which the exporter confirms that the power came from wind and assigns the rights to it to NS. As Cleantechnica puts it: “the GoO system allows for the transfer of the rights to call electricity green from those who actually generate renewable energy to those who don’t but want to classify their power as such. The actual amount of green energy produced is unaffected.”

There is, however, a problem. For NS to use only wind power from wind farms to power its rail system the wind farms must be connected directly to NS’s railways. (Figure 2: Note the dotted lines showing non-electrified track. According to LJ Electrical only 2,231km of NS’s total 3,223km of track is electrified):

And of course no such connections exist. The two Dutch wind farms that have contracted to sell power to NS (Noordoostpolder and Luchterduinen) are both connected directly to the Dutch grid, along with all the other power plants in the country, and NS draws its power from the grid:

When wind power is fed into a grid it becomes inextricably mixed with all the vibrating electrons from other generation sources to the point where there is no way of knowing where any power taken from the grid came from. Grid power in fact reflects the overall generation mix, which in the case of the Netherlands is dominantly gas and coal with only a small contribution from wind. How much wind? Over the course of this year the average will be around 11%, equal to wind power’s share of the Netherlands’ annual grid electricity consumption.

And only half of the wind power NS has contracted for comes from the Netherlands. The other half comes from “newly built wind farms in …. Belgium and Finland”. Wind power now supplies about 10% of Belgium’s electricity, so power imported from the Belgian grid will be about 10% wind. Wind power from Finland can be discounted. Only about 2% of Finland’s generation mix is wind, and by the time it passes through the Finnish, Swedish and German grids on its way to the Netherlands it will effectively have disappeared. Imports from the German grid, however, will contain about 14% wind power, although not wind power that NS has contracted for. Putting these numbers together indicates that only 10-15% of the electricity consumed annually by NS’s electric trains will come from wind, with the rest a mixture that includes mostly Dutch gas and coal plus a small amount of Belgian and German coal, nuclear and lignite – and maybe even a little German solar.

The supply of wind power to the Dutch grid will also not be constant. I have no wind records for the Netherlands but P.F. Bach supplies data for Belgium, which should be a close analogy:


https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/ ... enewables/
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Re: Greenwashing

Unread postby Plantagenet » Mon 06 Feb 2017, 14:18:25

Greenwashing operates at the national and even international level.

Look at Obama and the Ds---did they pass a carbon tax as promised when they controlled the Congress? NO.

Did O and the Ds sign and ratify the Kyoto Accords? NO.

Did they stop "drill baby drill" as they promised? NO. In fact the O and the Ds presided over the largest "drill baby program" in the history of the US, with 5 million more barrels of oil being produced each day.

And yet they run around proclaiming themselves to be against climate change….. :o

And at the international level we've got all the nations of the world signing onto the UN climate change treaty process. Did they produce a global climate treaty that requires CO2 reductions? NO. Instead they gave us the "paris accords" that promises to keep global temperatures below a 2°C increase…..and without any required CO2 reductions or cutbacks in fossil fuel use.

Thats not only Greenwashing----Thats "magical thinking!!" :lol:
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Re: Greenwashing

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Mon 06 Feb 2017, 15:03:45

fastbike wrote:This weekend our city is hosting a "Future Living Expo".
However, the booth that took the prize for "taking the piss" was a company with a Honda hybrid taking pride of place (and a couple of bicycles hidden in the corner) calling itself "Greenfleet".
This appears to be a blatant example of greenwashing.

Or you're (and many people like you) making the imperfect the enemy of the good.

Greens should be welcoming things that are better for CO2 production, like greener cars.

It's not like a car company can magically wave a wand and make there be no more need for cars, now is it?

This kind of attitude reminds me of when liberals (who rightly are mad at conservatives for AGW denial) THEN won't vote or pursue CO2 taxes, which are the ONE practical short term thing we could do to really put a big dent in CO2 production.

Example -- prop 732, which the liberals in Washington state defeated Nov. 8th. (Over idiotic left wing idealism like tax neutrality or the magnitude of the tax).

I think it's absurd when greens, for example, whine about PHEV's, which can be incredibly efficient, when EV's aren't yet viable to replace anything REMOTELY like the entire ICE fleet.

But then again, I prefer math and data and paying attention to real world issues like physics over pretending like by wishing it were so, we could suddenly get rid of all ICE cars.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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