2008 Woodie Awards
Re-tooling our Vocabularies for the Greenspeak Era
Francis Eanes
Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: Opinion
The airwaves and internet superhighways are awash in a tidal surge of political and industrial "green" rhetoric, advertisements targeting the planet-conscious consumer. Marketers in almost every sector have a new-found obsession with "greenspeak"- the concept of selling goods and services to people (based on the assumption that they care about "the environment") via images and ideas associated with a "clean," "green" world.
Also called "greenwashing," this relatively young strategy has taken on a legitimate, global appeal alongside of growing concerns about anthropogenic climate change. What began as companies advertising "natural" food products, for example, has now become a full-fledged effort to dupe people into buying "environmentally friendly" products. Yet such nomenclature as "natural," "green," "environmentally friendly," and "clean" (just a few in the myriad of such terms) is rarely defined and almost always ambiguously inconcrete. Does a "green" product use less energy than another? Does it pollute less? Waste less? Use fewer materials in its production? Travel a shorter distance from its place of manufacture to the site of retail? Make obsolete the use of a less-efficient product? Can it be used again?
While such ambiguity is commonplace in almost all marketing, the consequences of greenspeak are potentially pernicious. Numerous television advertisements and billboards, for example, purport "clean coal" as the future supplier of American energy, billing coal the solution to "our dependence on foreign oil" (a popular slogan in this election season). But does clean coal even exist beyond its apparent contradiction in terms? Or is it just a fanciful notion proffered by the coal industry itself, a sort of half-truth about limited efforts to capture some of the SO2 impurities from the flue stacks, while sequestering portions of CO2 emissions? After all, independent analysts and realistic stakeholders in the coal industry itself acknowledge that such technological possibilities are some 10-15 years away. But even if emission stacks could- right now- filter and store most of the impurities emitted from burning coal, mining companies cannot procure coal indefinitely (just like oil), and especially cannot do so without imputing significantly adverse effects upon the ecosystems containing exploitable veins.
Also called "greenwashing," this relatively young strategy has taken on a legitimate, global appeal alongside of growing concerns about anthropogenic climate change. What began as companies advertising "natural" food products, for example, has now become a full-fledged effort to dupe people into buying "environmentally friendly" products. Yet such nomenclature as "natural," "green," "environmentally friendly," and "clean" (just a few in the myriad of such terms) is rarely defined and almost always ambiguously inconcrete. Does a "green" product use less energy than another? Does it pollute less? Waste less? Use fewer materials in its production? Travel a shorter distance from its place of manufacture to the site of retail? Make obsolete the use of a less-efficient product? Can it be used again?
While such ambiguity is commonplace in almost all marketing, the consequences of greenspeak are potentially pernicious. Numerous television advertisements and billboards, for example, purport "clean coal" as the future supplier of American energy, billing coal the solution to "our dependence on foreign oil" (a popular slogan in this election season). But does clean coal even exist beyond its apparent contradiction in terms? Or is it just a fanciful notion proffered by the coal industry itself, a sort of half-truth about limited efforts to capture some of the SO2 impurities from the flue stacks, while sequestering portions of CO2 emissions? After all, independent analysts and realistic stakeholders in the coal industry itself acknowledge that such technological possibilities are some 10-15 years away. But even if emission stacks could- right now- filter and store most of the impurities emitted from burning coal, mining companies cannot procure coal indefinitely (just like oil), and especially cannot do so without imputing significantly adverse effects upon the ecosystems containing exploitable veins.
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