Greenwashing at its finest

Oh, Coke. You’re trying so hard.

This billboard is Coke’s attempt to do the right thing and remove some pollution from the air. It’s made of plants, you see, so it will absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful things, giving the citizens of the Philippines cleaner air to breathe.

Here’s the thing, Coke. You don’t save the planet by putting up billboards. On the original GOOD post where I saw this, an astute commenter did some math based on data from Coke’s own website. People buy 1.6 billion bottles and cans of Coke per day. According to this commenter, each bottle has a production footprint of 0.5 lbs CO2, which doesn’t count distribution. Meanwhile, this billboard can absorb 46,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, which is less than one day’s worth of Coke’s carbon footprint from production alone. To offset their production footprint, they would need 5.8 million billboards.

I haven’t checked this guy’s math, and I’m not going to because it doesn’t matter. The numbers on the billboard’s own absorption are from Coke, and even if my anonymous commenter is completely overstating the carbon footprint of making a Coke bottle, the underlying point is still completely valid. Sexy green billboards aren’t going to save the world. They’re not going to make a dent. They’re absolutely useless when it comes to actually changing anything.

Which would all be fine, except for the fact that Coke is using this to play up their green street cred. So in case anyone thinks for a moment that Coca-Cola is a company which cares about people or the planet, I’d like to set the record straight. Coke has been repeatedly accused of taking over water supplies in developing countries, particularly India, and pumping them dry, leaving local people with no access to water. In 2001, Coke’s bottler in Colombia was accused of hiring paramilitary death squads to intimidate, torture and kill union leaders and organizers at their plant (these accusations were verified by an independent, US-based research team). Similar accusations have surfaced more recently in Guatemala.

Even without the water rights and death squads, there’s a more mundane problem with Coke. Their product is sold in disposable containers, which are sometimes re-used (glass bottles in many developing countries) or recycled (in developed countries), but often thrown away. Growing the corn needed to make Coke is incredibly environmentally destructive and pesticide-intensive. The life cycle of a Coke beverage, from cradle to grave, releases tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, creates a large amount of waste and contributes seriously to poor health, diabetes and obesity. As far as I can tell, the only benefit of the entire company appears to be that it provides jobs to people (no word on how well those jobs pay) and a lot of money to a very select few.

Coke is not a green company, and it never has been. There is no amount of “offsetting” Coke can do that will make up for the environmental damage it’s caused. If Coke is truly concerned about the health of our planet, the best thing they could do would be to go out of business.

In defense of capitalism, I think

This year, I've read a lot and tried to pay attention to the news. And everywhere I look, capitalism appears to be responsible for a seemingly endless list of atrocities. It's the economic system that brought us Bhopal, the military industrial complex, Superfund sites, sweatshops, the financial crisis, climate change and the Gulf oil spill.

Right now, we're witnessing what seems like the Last Days of capitalism. Every passing day brings new evidence that this system is unsustainable, exploitative and killing the planet. As our economy crumbles around us, people are taking it as evidence that the entire philosophy of capitalism is wrong. And though it might make me unpopular in some circles, I want to defend the core tenets of capitalism. Not because I don't agree with every single criticism people have made of the way our system operates, and not because I don't think we need radical change. Not because I'm harboring some illusion that our political system is capable of fixing the world's problems, and not because I'm defeatist and think we have to accept the current system and be "realistic". There's nothing realistic about pretending that changing our lightbulbs and waiting for Congress to pass an even more flawed version of Waxman-Markey will stop climate change.

Here's the thing: I think the core idea of capitalism--individuals coordinating their desires and abilities through a market--is actually a really good idea. On its most basic level, capitalism is about matching up someone doing or making something with someone willing to pay them for it. Capitalism encourages research and innovation--for drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, for alternative energy sources, for better water infrastructure in developing countries. Capitalism provides rewards for people who provide goods or services that meet needs. And I don't think there's another economic system that does that.

Where capitalism becomes problematic is when it gets large, global, industrialized and values maximizing profit at the expense of everything else, including human life or ecological health. Some people would argue these problems are inherent in the system, but I disagree. A woman in Ghana running a sewing business which makes traditional West African clothing for customers is still a capitalist enterprise, and one which, I would argue is fundamentally different from the likes of Dow Chemical or Monsanto. We need a system which will preserve those enterprises--the independent bookstores, clothing makers, hippie juice bars, creative dance teachers and farmers--without allowing corporate behemoths to commit state-sanctioned murder.

How do we get there? I'm not sure. I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of our political system to create change, especially on the scale we need in the time we have. I think overturning both Citizens United and its underlying precedent--corporate personhood--would be a good start. Holding corporations legally accountable for their actions would be better. That's a change that won't come from our legislative or executive branches, but a few rogue judges could get us somewhere. And if courts in the US won't hear it, we need to drag Coca-Cola, Nestle, Dow and anyone else we can think of in front of the International Criminal Court.

More than anything, I think we need to break the cycle of materialism and consumption. As Adbusters loves to say--"When you cut off the flow of oxygen to a person's brain, their brain dies. When you cut off the flow of nature to a person's soul, their soul dies. It's as simple as that." We need to get everyone in the developed world outside, starting at a young age. We need to resist media intrusion into our lives. We need to take down billboards, and any other ads that we're forced to look at. We need to remember how to value nature, and how to see ourselves as connected to it. We need to learn to be happy with what we have. We need to remember how to be people.

All of that's going to take a while. And it's not everything we should be doing, by any means. We need people sitting in front of bulldozers. We need people who won't come down from trees. We need anger and outrage and giant posters of people killed by methyl isocyante paraded in front of every single politician in this country. We need to find a way to take our government back, and I'm not talking "helpful tips" like calling your elected officials to tell them what you think. But when we get there, if we get there, and we get to re-write our world, I think capitalism should stick around. I don't mind paying someone to grow my food, as long as I know who they are and how they're growing it.

How many times...

...can a corporation betray us before we question its right to exist?

That was the heading for a very well-done page in the last issue of Adbusters, and it really got me thinking. If you look at the track record of any major American corporation (and I don't care how socially conscious it claims to be) you're going to find some pretty evil shit buried beneath the smiling pictures of their "diverse" group of employees.

We, the Socially Conscious Youth of America, know large corporations are bad. We know they're owned by Satan. We sit around and discuss this in Starbucks coffee stores wearing shirts we bought at Target with Nike shoes. We believe this to be true, but we rarely act. And that, to me, is the single biggest failure in youth activism today. Too few people are willing to walk the walk.

Let's look at some of these companies. Starbucks, which seems to be regarded as the not-so-evil corporation based on the numbers of young, hip people I see there all the time, definitely has some labor issues. For one, although they claim to support third world producers, only 6% of the coffee they buy is fair-trade certified, and fair trade in itself doesn't guarantee a fair or even a better deal for third world coffee growers. (Fair trade also puts a cap on business growth, doesn't allow growers to roast their own coffee, and defines a fair wage as the minimum wage for the country of origin for the coffee.) Starbucks is noted for providing part-time employees with health insurance and other benefits. Good, right? Sure, except that the cut-off for part time employment is 20 hours a week, so Starbucks gets around this by having a lot of employees who work 19.75 hours a week and are denied benefits. So much more cost effective.

Then there's American Apparel. Yes, their average wage is $12 USD/hour. But they're definitely not a union-friendly company. They were accused of union busting in 2003 and since then have refused to disclose information about worker unions at the company. Three sexual harassment lawsuits have also been filed by former employees against Dov Charney, the CEO. And socially progressive as they brag to be, with their "never retouched models", I don't see them promoting any new or different beauty standards from the rest of the fashion industry.

And of course, where would we be without hating on some oil companies? Exxon-Mobile has three lovely black marks against it (that I'm aware of; I'm sure there are many more). Number one: In the 1980s, the company, along with several other oil and gas companies, gave money to a Christian missionary organization working in Columbia. The deal? The missionaries would convince the indigenous people they were working with to move off their land onto reservations and become "civilized"; in return, Exxon and the other companies had first rights to the petroleum-rich land the people had been living on. Number two: I'm sure we all remember hearing about the disastrous Exxon-Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989--the one that spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil, the one that environmental scientists in the area predicted would take approximately 30 years for the ecosystem to recover from. The official cause? The skipper was drunk and hit a reef, causing the tanker to spill its oil. The real story? Exxon had been faking safety reports and did not have proper safety equipment turned on--equipment that would have allowed the ship to see and avoid the reef. The reason? The system was determined too expensive to operate. And then number 3: Exxon has also been behind some of the organizations that have been turning up "scientific" studies denouncing global warming. They pay scientists to say that it's fake, the scientists do so, and we get more bullshit studies calling the single largest threat this planet has ever faced a fraud.

Pepsi and Coke each have their own issues--both have been accused of contaminating local water supplies in India with DDT, pesticides, and other carcinogens. Coca-Cola admitted to killing and intimidating workers in Columbia to prevent a union from forming, and they've also been accused of human rights violations with workers in Guatemala. And both of them are such large companies--PepsiCo owns Frito-Lay, which makes just about every major brand of chips. Also on the large-companies-who-own-hella-stuff front, you have ConAgra, which owns dozens of smaller food companies and is the largest manufacturer of processed food in the country. They also have a beef processing plant in Greely, Colorado which has been investigated numerous times amidst allegations of safety violations, workers rights violations and employing illegal immigrants. And they're one of the big guys that's contributing to industrialized agribusiness that's making the smaller farmers go out of work.

I would also like to point out that although Nike has been accused of workers rights violations and running sweatshops, a) they have improved dramatically since these charges were first leveled, and b) Adidas and Reebok both have much lower scores in terms of social responsibility and working conditions.

Fortunately, this isn't black and white. You're not either with us or with the capitalists. You can't boycott every business on the evil list, and you probably don't want to. So start small. Maybe cut one or two coffees a week. Get your next pair of pants used. And most importantly, know what you're buying. Be educated. Know your facts. Only when the majority of people are aware of things like this will real change ever occur.