You already know I despise marketing, advertising, and the people involved in it. The reason is simple, as I have said before: in order to do advertising you generally have to promote something as being better than you know it to be.
This is a perfectly loathsome example: [guard]
Fossil fuel companies and firms that work closely with them are among the biggest spenders on ads designed to look like Google search results, in what campaigners say is an example of “endemic greenwashing”.
The Guardian analysed ads served on Google search results for 78 climate-related terms, in collaboration with InfluenceMap, a thinktank that tracks the lobbying efforts of polluting industries.
The results show that over one in five ads seen in the study – more than 1,600 in total – were placed by companies with significant interests in fossil fuels.
Generally, I don’t see ads – even my google searches are filtered through an ad-blocker. Ads are always unattractive interruptions to whatever else a person is doing, a crafted attempt to inject a little bullshit into your attention-stream.
Remember when Google’s founders used to say “don’t be evil”? Look how long that lasted, melted away in the blast-furnace of capitalist greed. The founders were too naive to understand that, once they took the capitalists’ money, the evil was de rigeur because it’s endemic in the system they had just joined:
ExxonMobil, Shell, Aramco, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs were among the top-20 advertisers on the search terms, while a number of other fossil fuel producers and their financiers also placed ads.
Jake Carbone, senior data analyst at InfluenceMap, said: “Google is letting groups with a vested interest in the continued use of fossil fuels pay to influence the resources people receive when they are trying to educate themselves.
That’s the worst part of it, speaking of evil. Attempting to get upstream in someone’s educational journey, so as to taint everything that flows from it – if that’s not evil, the word has no meaning.*
The simple answer would be that Google needn’t carry deliberately deceptive ads. It’s a corporation – it does not need to extend free speech rights to advertisers that are working against humanity’s interests. But, that would make Google “self-hating advertisers” I suppose, since they are also working against humanity’s interests.
*I actually go with “the word has no meaning” because I’m skeptical about human moral systems and our ability at a non-individual level to declare something to be “evil” or not. The best I can get is 99 out of 100 people we polled agree, except the remaining 1% probably works for a marketing firm and is not answering honestly. I have wanted for years (seriously) to do some postings about nihilism as a form of skepticism, but – ugh – it’d take several days of focused attention to do the careful writing it would require.
I mentioned this in a comment over at Affinity; it’s a thing I’ve known about for some time (I think I learned it from Nima and Adam over at Citations Needed) but the notion of “carbon footprint” is a creation of fossil fuel polluting companies – specifically British Petroleum – who wanted to create a marketing campaign to draw people’s attention away from what they are doing, and focus it on our individual actions. Our individual actions, largely, don’t let us significantly impact the climate anyway – the leverage would be to stop governments from subsidizing oil extraction and burning huge amounts of fuel with their militaries – but let’s get people worrying about what kind of grocery bags they use, while the global elite continue flying to Davos and breeding up new generations of global elites that will inherit their yachts and mansions. Your personal carbon footprint is miniscule compared to Kim Kardashian’s, but by all means feel guilt instead of rage. Neither will affect the fossil fuel companies’ behavior, or Kim’s in the slightest.
At around 10 minutes into this, George Monbiot calls this “micro-consumerist bollocks”.
Guilt instead of rage? What about hopelessness? A person can be angry only for a limited period of time until they become tired, hopeless, and give up on the naive idea of humanity’s future.
@2 Andreas Avester — And from hopelessness to the grim realization we’ve been doomed since we learned to start our own campfires.
I am not entirely decided if this is good news or not.
World’s largest coal port to be 100% powered by renewable energy
@Andreas Avester:
Hopelessness is also fearless and free, since it has nothing left to lose. The rage of the hopeless may be helpless but it can still be felt.
I often ponder that liberals and skeptics try to create moral systems based on mutual benefit or kin selection but they ignore that benefits can also be negative – punishment or retaliation. People who feel that their life has been circumscribed by those who benefit from fossil fuels seem justified, to me, to make sure to take an oil pipeline exec or two along with them as they go to hell. It seems reasonable, to me. Social breakdown may be justice.
I have long had a visceral loathing of cheerleaders. Male and female. On the surface there is a lot to like; youthful bodies well formed, bubbly enthusiasm, energetic optimism, acrobatics, athletic strength and endurance. And all that on-call and entirely free of loyalty or commitment. Every bit of it synthetic. The more professional the cheerleaders the more completely detached they are from who or what they cheer on.
I had the situation explained to me by the head of the squad that manufacturing, or faking, enthusiasm is a skill. That they can cheer one team today, and cheer their rivals the next. At the time I was reading a book by Elie Wiesel and momentarily pictured the pretty cheerleaders lending their enthusiasm to the arrival of a train at a death-camp. The skirts flipping and acrobatics and … they spell out WELCOME … and finish with a enthusiastic GO-JEWS. The squad leader being Jewish just added to the poignancy of the thought.
Sophistry.
Lawyers, cheerleaders, people involved in marketing and advertising. They are minds and attitudes for hire. The lack of genuineness, the rejection of normal and healthy affinities. All of it made subordinate to a job and money. Entirely disconnected from the morality or humanity of the outcome.
I can see one (potential?) justification for individuals to worry about their own, personal, carbon footprint:
Companies tend to avoid actions which don’t make money. If large numbers of people avoid buying products whose manufacture involves excessive carbon emissions, companies will start to reformulate their product lines to reduce the carbon emissions in their manufacturing processes.
This is not a particularly efficient means of nudging companies away from making global warming worse… particularly cuz of idiots who “roll coal” and suchlike… but it’s not nothing. In the absence of effective governmental action to force companies to get their shit together and stop the fucking carbon emissions, is it really a bad thing to have individuals doing what little they can to achieve that end?
…buy up the companies who make the competing products and raise the prices of those products well beyond the reach of the well-meaning consumer. Or greenwash the production processes and claim to be the good guys. Or simply lower the prices of their products to the point their profits are merely healthy, rather than as at present obscene, and price out the competition.
I mean, reformulating to lower carbon emissions MIGHT happen… but only if not doing becomes expensive, and that can only happen if governments properly regulate carbon emissions, which, well, we all know where we’re at with that.
You can vote with your wallet until it’s empty, but unfortunately the vast majority of people don’t have that luxury (and a lot of them don’t care, anti-vax Trump-supporting Brexit-voting flat-earth creationist fuckwits that many/most of them are) and will go right on buying the cheap stuff, which is cheap because it’s fossil-fuelled. By all means source your hand-knitted yoghurt locally from some hippy with a hobby, but don’t kid yourself it’s ever going to make a difference.
Off topic for this post but on topic on other mjr points:
The US is demonstrably and obviously gearing up and preparing to win a nuclear war by executing a first strike. There’s not really any other explanation for their pattern of defence spending. If all it was about was guaranteeing jobs in politicians’ constituencies, they could as easily spend all that high-tech pork money on space exploration, which would have the additional benefit of being WAY cooler and inspirin an shit.
What occurred to me was: against whom, and when, and why? And the answer came to me from something I used to say about 20 years ago: it’ll be something of a relief when all the oil runs out, because then we can stop all the boring, interminable pussyfooting around Israel and the middle east (where all the oil is). Once the world has fully (or almost fully) transitioned to a carbon-neutral, renewable economy based on nuclear, solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydroelectric and orbital mirrors or whatever, there will be no adverse geopolitical consequences (at least, none that anyone in power cares about) to simply reducing large swathes of the middle east to a pool of black glass, starting with Mecca and Jerusalem.
Seriously – imagine how quiet the world would go if everything between the eastern shore of the Med, the south edge of the Caspian Sea, and the gulfs of Aden and Oman just… disappeared. And why isn’t it done? Oil. A finite resource, with (if you take the long view) an end in sight. The US may be gearing up for that.
Obviously there’d be a lot of wailing, but there was about the invasion of Iraq. Obviously it’d be a war crime, but don’t make me laugh, as if the US ever cared about war crimes beyond inventing new ones. Obviously there’d be strong international condemnation and environmental consequences, but arguably lower consequences than NOT doing it and allowing the region to drag the last few drops of oil out. and carrying on shooting at each other and threatening nuclear war if Iran ever got a nuke.
I’ve been hearing about the plight of the Palestinians my entire life. I think the US may be planning to end their plight permanently. I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. It might even fulfil some of the prophecies about the end of days or whatever, and I wouldn’t bet against that swaying some minds. You just need someone crazier than Trump to become President… and again, I certainly wouldn’t bet against that.
@9
How can you say that? Only last week they got together with the other big boys and promised they wouldn’t fight a nuclear war…
sonofrojblake @9:
Oil isn’t going to “run out” in any conventional sense. There are still going to be billions of barrels left in the ground. Even if you don’t believe in Gold’s claim that oil is still forming and at a rate likely to make a difference. I have no doubt about the first part. Bogs and swamps are, where plate tectonics mandate it, are still being sucked down.
Outside artificially imposed production limits, not entirely a bad idea, the oil will just cost more to bring up. Which is okay because oil is pretty handy stuff to have around even if you aren’t burning it. Plastics, paints, lubricants, quite a few medicines, and useful chemicals typically start out as crude oil or gas. Oil companies and oil aren’t going anywhere.
As for the nuclear thing; WTF ?!?!
I must have missed it. Can you cite any sources confirming a desire, by anyone, to have a nuclear throw-down?
I must lack imagination because I can’t think of any group that would benefit. Yes, there are some overgrown kids too media saturated and romantic to know better. Some even imagine a post-nuke landscape as an appropriate background to highlight and prove their manliness and fitness but any mature adult who has thought it through is going to fall into the “Hell, Fucking, No” column.
Broken treaties, stealth bombers, new weapons developed. I don’t know if that translates into a desire to nuke people, but it certainly translates into a desire to have the option.
Well, there’s your problem.
Only last week they got together with the other big boys and promised they wouldn’t fight a nuclear war…
And you can tell they are lying because their lips are moving.
These are the same nations that signed (and threatened/forced most other nations into signing…) the NPT. Which they immediately violated and continue to violate. [Note, the NPT only says “we promise to try really hard not to nuke nations that agree to this treaty. It doesn’t say “no first use” or anything like that, which is also irrelevant given how the very first clause of the treaty has been totally ignored by the signatories who wrote that first clause and agreed to it.]
@lorn:
I know that perfectly well. Oil specifically under control of governments in the middle east, however, is what I’m actually talking out.
Bogs and swamps are, where plate tectonics mandate it, are still being sucked down.
Hang on just a few tens of millions of years…
The word “just” is doing a LOT of work in that sentence.
I got my chartership as a chemical engineer about 20 years ago, so, er, yeah, I know.
People still use horses for transportation. That does not, however, mean that the companies that ran horse-drawn public transport haven’t gone anywhere.
I’m guessing you haven’t been reading many of the posts on this blog, where the topic comes up reasonably regularly.
Clearly.
Consider: what is the best model for a deterrent nuclear arsenal? Answer: submarines. Aka, the only kind of nuclear weapon held and deployed by, e.g. the UK.
What is the best model for a first strike capable nuclear arsenal? Answer: a mixture of light-tactical, aircraft-deliverable nukes, and the planes to deliver them, from high altitude, cruise missiles to lob them in from relatively close range, and the ships to deliver them, and strategic ICBMs. Aka, the profile of the nuclear arsenal of the USA. They’re not merely deterring, they’re gearing up to hit first and win, and the arsenal is specifically designed that way. It really doesn’t take that much imagination.
@11 etc
I read about 5 Nuclear Powers saying Nuclear warfare cannot be “won” at a site called Countercurrents.org.
It seems to be(?) India based, and how reliable it may be is anyone’s guess. Link:
https://countercurrents.org/2022/01/five-nuclear-weapon-states-issue-a-joint-statement/
Not seen it anywhere else.
PS I’m not sure how I got to that site, but felt it was worth bookmarking.
It makes sense in a way, great, and not so great powers, can still do quick strike, limited regional wars for advantage. Taiwan? Ukraine? Cuba?
enkidu@#15:
I found that statement, too, and planned to post on it, but it only makes sense to talk about in the context of the NPT, which is … uff – a huge topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/03/five-nations-pledge-avoid-nuclear-war
was the link I emailed myself pm 1/4/22
Briefly, I see no reason to believe any of it. In fact it may just be the nuclear powers’ gentle way or reminding everyone that they can’t win a war against eachother but you other guys ought to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. This is all happening with Iran being browbeaten over a nuclear program that they are completely within their rights to pursue, except that they’re not because Israel and the US say so.
There is also another issue, which is NATO and Ukraine and Russia. My suspicion that what is going on there is that the people who announced “a nuclear war is unwinnable” are specifically playing across the path of their own teams, which are making loud war-noises to the press. There is a giant history there that needs to be unpacked honestly, but it’s not going to be in the US media. I have been meaning to do a posting about that topic, too, but it’s really complicated to write it fairly.
I don’t think that there is a specific plan to win a nuclear war by the US. But the desire for survival couples with imperial aggressiveness to cause a sort of emergent conspiracy to manipulate perceptions to the point where it is possible to fool the US into building war-winning tech on the sly. For example, I don’t think Donald Trump demonstrated any of the properties of a master strategist of secret-keeper; in fact he basically blurted out that the US had been cheating on the medium-range ballistic missile treaty and was cheerfully blaming Russia and China for doing the same thing we did. Cheating on weapons control regimes is not the action of nations that are maturely acknowledging that a nuclear war is unwinnable. Of course it’s “unwinnable” as in: nobody gets out of it unscathed, but there are people whose jobs it is to soberly and thoughtfully arrange so we can come closer to “winning” than the other guys. Basically, when they say it’s “unwinnable” they are saying that a first strike will not get away unscathed. The question is: “how scathed”? I don’t think any president would trade Los Angeles or New York for a foreign policy win in Ukraine. That’s what “unwinnable” means: the political goals that might motivate a country to start a nuclear war are not safely achievable by that method.
If that makes anyone feel any better, I think the situation is not well understood.
@lorn:
Can you cite any sources confirming a desire, by anyone, to have a nuclear throw-down?
I don’t think that anyone wants to or is planning to have a nuclear throw-down, but the US is preparing for one because they have convinced themselves that they have to, on the basis that the Russiand and Iranians and North Koreans are as crazy and evil and imperialist as we are, therefore we have to be ready for them to do what we’d do if we were them. See how that works? Nobody “wants” to have a nuclear war but the US war machine is oriented toward winning one, in that unfortunate circumstance.
Remember: the US maneuvered Japan into an economic/technological corner, from which they had to convince themselves they needed to come out swinging. From then on, everything that happened to them was their own damn fault, right? An “unfortunate circumstance.” That’s how the US does things. You know, like how the one-sided slaughter inflicted on Iraq was totally justified by their, uh, non-existent weapons of mass destruction that somehow menaced the greatest arsenal of WMD on the planet. Americans actually fall for this shit.
I see the problem, semantics and the equating of the regular updating of weapons to maintain constructive ambiguity, with an actual desire to use said weapons in an actual nuclear war. All the sides keep stirring the pot. The Russians mess with hypersonic technology and we feel the need to do the same. The B-2 is shown to show up on obsolete longer-wave radar, ironically still in Chinese inventory, and so we mess with it. Is the B-21 going to avoid this issue?
Are the Chinese hypersonic missiles all they claim? There are more than a few engineers who say they, by way of the physics of friction and fluid dynamics, usable in only a narrow window of situations. In Example: Any maneuvering, even small changes, are going to eat up a range very fast. And those shifts really need to be very small to keep the dynamic forces from ripping the warhead apart. Particularly at lower altitudes.
The point is to keep everyone guessing. We depend on uncertainty to keep everyone honest, even as none of the player are honest,
Everyone gets to play. Russia started the “bomber-gap” by simply cycling bombers around Moscow and changing their tail numbers. Within days we knew it was a ploy but by then we were off to the races. Defense contractors wanted to build bombers and the relatively new Air Force wanted toys. It didn’t take a lot of persuasion to make it a ‘necessity’.
All the major powers are playing this game. It is a game … but one which deserves a good bit of respect. We have, by hook and crook, and no small amount of luck, avoided a direct major power conflict for better than 70 years.
Yes, pretty much all the serious analysts before WW2 knew Japan was going to strike. We had cut both oil and steel supplies to Japan. The game between the US and japan was logistically a probable loss before Pearl harbor. Germany complicated things. But not as much as they might. Hitler declaring war was a massive mistake. Thank-you Mr. Hitler.
Nothing evil about US actions. Japan was plundering China and, in propaganda, laying claim to SE Asia and pretty much everything East of Pakistan. We would prefer Japan not plunder China or claim those territories. We could have delayed the war by supplying Japan with oil and steel. But why? They wanted to be a power the way the western nations were players. I don’t see any advantage in indulging that dream when we were pretty sure to have to face off against them eventually. Better to cripple their efforts early on. Before they could realize their dreams of a larger fleet that was flush with oil.
Was it a trap? Sure was. But it was a trap caused by Japanese ambition and a failure to listen to their own planners. Yamamoto knew that the US industrial capacity was huge. It has been suggested that the Japanese should have secured the oil before getting stuck so deep into China. Less warning would have made a difference. I always had my doubts about how much Japan benefited from plundering China. They got tin, coal, and lumber (as I remember it) but it seems iron and oil were more vital.
More widely, I’ve never thought of the US as uniquely virtuous. Or particularly evil. We have interests. It isn’t bean-bag. Not for us; not for other nations. Mistakes are common. Nobody knows, for sure, what to do. Things get messy. Hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, die. Fortunately, we are billions. And occasionally we learn. Often the wrong lesson. But we go on. Muddle through. It isn’t as if we have a choice.
Yes, we spend Trillions on defense. Much of it undoubtedly wasted in some sense. But here again, what is the price of a all-out major power conventional war? What are prices like for a few hundred years rent on an earth-like planet if we get carried away and go balls-out nuclear.
If we wish to limit human misery and suffering we need to do better. But it’s damned hard to know what to do. The authoritarians always know what to do and their desired result. It always sounds very rational and reasonable. It typically involves them having more power and their backers more money. The long-term results are always horrible, but terribly well organized. They seem to have a knack for formations and torches.