"Fossil" fuels do a lot more than generate electricity. They are part of most modern products
They CANNOT be phased out
************************************************
More Brands Are ‘Greenwashing’ to Make Consumers Think They’re Being Eco-Friendly
Data suggests that environmental consciousness in the United States is at an all-time high. In other words, more people care about protecting the planet than ever before, with more than half of the US population now thinking it's more important to safeguard the natural world than to grow the economy.
This growing environmental awareness has a significant effect on the decisions people make in their everyday lives, such as grocery shopping. As a result, consumers in the United States are increasingly pressuring retailers and manufacturers to find greener methods of production.
Sadly, there will always be some companies who choose expediency over ethics, even if it means misleading their consumers. Some businesses prefer to greenwash. They virtue-signal about their eco-friendliness, but when you look more closely, you find their statements don't hold up.
In the American marketplace, greenwashing has become a serious problem. Consumers are left under false pretenses and their faith in companies' green credentials plummets as a result. Regrettably, it's on the rise, as more shoppers than ever before pay attention to the long-term viability of the goods and services they buy in an effort to reduce their impact on the planet. More and more businesses are making dubious claims about how environmentally friendly their products are in their marketing.
Questionable statements about green issues abound on the packaging and promotion of consumer goods like food. Accusations of greenwashing can do serious damage to a brand’s reputation. The FTC concluded in 2022 that a number of goods sold by Kohl's and Walmart, which had been marketed as ‘made from bamboo’, did not actually contain any bamboo. A classic case of greenwashing, caught out in this case by a regulator. The retailers were fined a total of $5.5 million. In another case, Hefty's Recycling Bags suffered an embarrassing episode when allegations emerged that their bags are not, in fact, recyclable.
The marketing of products containing different vegetable oils is a hotspot for greenwashing. Manufacturers of all manner of products increasingly use the phrase ‘palm oil free’ to advertise their products as ‘environmentally friendly’. Research shows that a disproportionately large number of people (41%) view palm oil as 'environmentally unfriendly,' compared to those who feel the same way about other vegetable oils (such as soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, and olive). Unfortunately, that negative sentiment (stoked by brands) is not reflected in the reality.
Palm oil is much more land-efficient than those other oils. That means if a brand switches away from it to another oil – say, sunflower oil – they suddenly have to chop down a lot more trees to get the same amount of product. So, when a company boasts of having gone ‘palm oil free’, they are almost certainly causing more deforestation than they were before. Yet, they still use the ‘palm oil free’ label as a tool for greenwashing, suggesting to consumers that by sacrificing palm oil, they are somehow helping safeguard the natural world.
Some firms take this kind of greenwashing to extremes. Iceland, a UK grocery chain, collaborated with Greenpeace to create a TV ad depicting a cartoon orangutan whose jungle habitat is devastated thanks to deforestation in order to promote their palm oil boycott. Since then, Iceland has reversed its 'palm oil free' stance, and the commercial has been removed from screens for being too political.
Instead of virtue-signaling with orangutan images and hoping consumers don't question their claims, businesses should be transparent about the environmental credentials (or otherwise) of their products. They get nowhere by pandering to eco-sensitivities and jumping on the latest bandwagon without thinking too hard about the real-world consequences, because it is only a matter of time before their claims are called out. Consumers are more perceptive than some brands assume, and they reward manufacturers who go out of their way to make a real difference in their supply chains and genuinely help roll back deforestation (which doesn't always align with what we might first think are the most environmentally friendly methods).
The increased interest in and concern for environmental concerns is being closely monitored by most large companies. As more customers insist that businesses make changes to better safeguard the environment, many have begun to do so. This means that businesses who engage in "greenwashing" in an effort to avoid the responsibility of providing sustainable products and services to their customers are doing themselves harm.
To make a genuine impact and safeguard the longevity of their business models, corporations must be considerably more forthright about the choices they make throughout production and across their supply chains, as well as the effects those choices have. If the present surge in environmental consciousness continues, it will soon be next to impossible for corporations like Walmart to engage in green virtue signaling without being called out.
Rather than waiting until the situation becomes urgent, because customers discover they are being misled and start abandoning the offending brands en masse, they would be better off setting aside the environmental virtue-signaling and investing now in serious reforms to their supply chains if they want to make bold environmental claims. Greenwashing might seem like a great short-term fix to some companies, but is not profitable in the long term.
*********************************************
Canada’s CBC Falsely Claims ‘Climate Change’ Threatening Vineyards
CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, published a confusing article that claims Canadian vineyards are suffering due to ‘climate change’, and that genetic engineering is going to be needed in order to help certain grape varietals survive in Canada
While it may be true that certain popular types of grapes struggle in the cold and damp of Ontario, where many Canadian vineyards are, the past hundred years have had no measurable effect on Canadian grape production.
The article, “With climate change threatening Canadian vineyards, is genetically engineered wine on the horizon?” admits right away that many people believe that global warming will aid the Canadian wine industry by making winters milder in the southern parts of the country.
The CBC’s “science communicator,” Darius Mahdavi, who wrote the piece, asserts that Canadian winters “are milder on average, but still experience drops to extreme cold” that “could actually be worse for vineyards.”
Researchers interviewed by Mahdavi say that sudden cold snaps during a winter that started off mild can catch grape vines off guard, and damage them more readily than normal hard winters.
At the same time, Mahdavi admits that Canada’s southernmost wine-producing regions have already benefited from the naturally milder zones around the Great Lakes.
Luckily for grape growers in Canada, there is no data that shows arctic outbreaks are more frequent or common, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that instances of extreme cold should continue to decline as the Earth modestly warms.
This means there will be fewer crop-endangering cold snaps in general, not more, alongside the milder start to winter.
The article also discusses how Canadian growers like to stick with European varieties that are not normally very cold tolerant and suffer from diseases in Ontario’s environment, despite the fact that other grapes, like those grown in Germany, or regionally developed hybrids, can be hardier and produce more regularly.
Wine made from a hybrid grape cannot be honestly labeled as a Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or other specific grape varietals.
In this case, it seems Canadian wine producers’ main problem is not ‘climate change’, but rather some vintners’ insistence on attempting to produce wine from varietals of grapes not well suited to cold regions, where sudden freezes and heavy snow are common.
The article goes on to describe how gene editing could allow scientists to remove genes from European grape varieties that make them prone to disease, without needing to hybridize.
If Canadian vintners stubbornly cling to the desire to produce certain types of wine not normally grown in colder climes, rather than growing grape varietals and producing wines more suited to the climate, it might make sense to use gene editing to make something like a Chardonnay grape more capable of surviving normally unfriendly regions of the world.
But this has nothing to do with ‘climate change’. As Climate Realism has discussed previously here, here, and here, for example, grape production varies regionally from year to year.
Some years will have unfavorable weather conditions for grapes in one part of the world, whereas others will see bumper crops.
Canada is neither a major producer of grapes nor wine, especially compared to the large wine-producing countries and regions around the world.
Despite this, data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that amid the normal year-to-year ups and downs of crop production during the recent period of modest warming, since the 1990s both grape and wine production have increased in Canada: grape production has grown by more than 86 percent, and wine production increased by more than 97 percent.
There is no evidence ‘climate change’ has or will hamper Canadian wine production. Indeed, slightly warmer weather should make the region more suitable for growing the types of warm weather varietals some Canadian vintners seem insistent on producing.
The CBC could have produced an interesting story about the difficulties of producing homegrown wine in Canada and how genetic engineering may be used to make grapes heartier and more resistant to cold and diseases.
Instead, the public broadcaster attempted to link one more non-existent threat to ‘climate change’.
As is true with so many stories hyping the “climate crisis,” there is no actual evidence to back up the CBC’s claims that weather is making Canadian wine production harder.
As such, CBC did a disservice to Canadian growers and the wine-consuming public. The good news is the future of wine production in Canada appears to be safe and even growing.
https://principia-scientific.com/canadas-cbc-falsely-claims-climate-change-threatening-vineyards/
***************************************Greens off on another planet: Today’s Australian Greens make their predecessors look sensible
Judith Sloan
It was the formidable Labor finance minister, Peter Walsh, who first described the Greens as akin to fairies at the bottom on the garden. He held their idealistic and unrealistic ideas in complete contempt. In his view, the Greens’ way was a highway to penury, particularly for those on the lowest incomes.
He was also suspicious of their environmental methods, claiming, for instance, that the failure to maintain national parks by clearing, weeding and regular burn-offs would simply lead to devastating bushfires and an extraordinary loss of environmental benefits.
Fast-forward through the intervening decades and it would seem that the Greens have moved on from the bottom of the garden and are now flying in an entirely parallel universe where the practicalities of running a government completely elude them. Indeed, from today’s perspective, former Greens leader, Bob Brown, appears almost sensible; OK, at least he was living on Planet Earth when he was in parliament – at least most of the time.
Today’s cohort of Greens parliamentarians has less connection with the environmental movement – saving forests and endangered species, etc, (although they are obsessed with climate change) – and more connection with hard-left political stances. They support big government, high taxation, anti-capitalism and favourable treatment for all minority groups. Sadly, most of them can’t even spell freedom.
The Greens are now led by the unappealing Adam Bandt who comfortably holds the seat of Melbourne, home to woke types, students and some doctors’ wives. There is no prospect of Labor wresting this seat from the Greens and the adjoining ones are always at risk of being lost to some former teacher turned climate activist.
Of course, it’s been great sport watching the antics of Lidia Thorpe, former Greens senator for Victoria. For those in the Greens party room, it must have been like having a rabid dog running around, incapable of being controlled. Even though Bandt assures us he did everything he could to keep her in the party, one suspects that there were a few sighs of relief when she decided to quit and become an independent senator.
Even so, she probably continues to inflict damage on her former party through her opposition to the Voice on the basis it doesn’t go far enough – truth-telling and treaties are the only road for her – and her antics at the recent Pride March in Sydney.
What is the point of lying on the road and stopping the procession of a float? It escapes me, although she was evidently making a point about the brutal and discriminatory behaviour of the police force. Luckily, the attending police officers had no hesitation moving her on.
Thorpe has zero chance of being re-elected to the Senate as an independent, but she will be in office for some time still, creating mayhem and damaging the Greens – maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
But let me get back to the chasm that the Greens deliberately create by advocating much higher government spending while calling for all sorts of perverse measures, up to and including the banning of coal and gas projects. Without these projects, there is no prospect there will be sufficient revenue to fund their over-the-top spending aspirations.
The Greens’ wish list is close to endless: free childcare, free TAFE and university, free dental care, higher dole, higher rental assistance, more public housing, more public transport, more spending on government schools, more foreign aid and on and on it goes.
Unless you believe that government spending is costless and never-ending – OK, for a while the crazy advocates of Modern Monetary Theory held sway until the ugly face of inflation reared its head and the interest payable on government debt began to rise – the Greens cannot escape that perennial political question: how are you going to pay for it?
But here’s the thing: the main reason Australia is not completely in the fiscal dog-house is the surging company tax revenues from mining companies and high commodity prices. Now I know some Speccie readers are a little bit allergic to numbers, but bear with me if I point out a few simple facts.
Take iron ore, which is a mainstay of our budget. For every $US10 increase in the price of iron ore per tonne, there is a lift of $600 million in company tax receipts. The high prices of coal, both thermal and coking, as well as liquefied natural gas, have similarly led to rapid growth in company tax receipts.
At the time of the election last year, the Treasury expected company tax revenue for 2022-23 to come in at a tad over $90 billion. It now expects it to be $127 billion – a jump of nearly one third. Company tax revenue is now at an historic high which, in turn, is mainly because of the surging tax being paid by the mining companies so reviled by the Greens.
Talk about contradictory: it’s not just having your cake and eating it too; it’s about having the whole bakery. This underscores my conclusion that the Greens are now living on a different planet rather than partying at the bottom of the garden. They want to shut down most of the resource sector but think that government spending can be jacked up big-time.
And let’s not forget here that federal Labor already has substantial spending plans. Next financial year, it expects to spend $666 billion and in 2025-26, the figure is $729 billion, an increase of over 9 per cent in real terms. The Greens’ ambitions are in addition to this increase.
Don’t get me onto some of the other proposals from the Greens. The geniuses in the party think that imposing national rental controls is the answer to our housing rental crisis. The fact that the attractiveness of residential real estate for investors has declined is regarded as neither here nor there by them. And this is before the full impact of the higher cost of investment loans.
They also want to achieve net zero by 2035, think that the ambition of B1(Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen) to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 is woefully inadequate and want 100-per-cent renewable energy by the end of the decade. In Bernie Sanders’ style, they think that ‘taxing the billionaires and big corporations’ will release oceans of revenue and a 6 per cent annual wealth tax is the way to go.
Walshy must be spinning in his grave; he would surely conclude that the dotty Greens of his era were sensible pragmatists compared to today’s loopy lot.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/greens-off-on-another-planet/
**********************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment