messaging

Deactivated cylinders

The competition to own the biggest truck on the block has finally reached its zenith. The Detroit News tells us that pickup truck sales continue to "crater."

GM and Ford Motor Co. announced plans to cut North American vehicle output in the third quarter to pare their stocks of unsold [pickup] trucks.

"That market is sitting back a bit," said Gary Dilts, senior vice president of sales at DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler Group. "But the core of the truck business -- a very large percentage -- will remain, because they need that kind of vehicle."

Garbage in = garbage out. A small percentage of people who buy these trucks actually need them.

Guilt tripping

The Tyee is running an interview with University of British Columbia professor and sustainability guru John Robinson, with some sage advice on how to coax us out of cars:

"We should stop guilt-tripping people, stop telling them that they are putting three tons of carbon a month into the air with their cars when they live 40 kilometers from work and there is no transit. That actually makes them more resistant to change. The way you get behaviour change is through integrated programs aimed at behaviour, not just people's heads. There is a lot of work in health promotion -- in anti-obesity campaigns and breast-cancer screening and anti-smoking campaigns -- that shows the way to much successful behaviour-modification programs. We should learn from those." [Emphasis added.]

That seems just about right to me. Ultimately, guilt isn't motivating; it's just dispiriting.

The CEI ads

OMFG, so, I finally went and watched the TV ads to be aired by the Competitive Enterprise Institute a week before An Inconvenient Truth is released.

I'm not sure what I expected, but these things are genuinely funny. They look like nothing so much as a parody produced by Saturday Night Live. The tag line -- the last line of the ad, read dramatically as a little girl blows a dandelion -- is: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life."

It's a pro-CO2 ad. Seriously. It turns out, we breathe CO2 out. And plants absorb it. It comes from animals! And oceans! Who could hate it?

As though there were a huge cabal of people out there who viewed this particular molecule as intrinsically evil.

Obviously, I'm not in the target audience. But I can't imagine anyone being persuaded by something so self-evidently absurd. I guess we'll see, though.

(One thing to note: It's "some politicians" and "global warming alarmists" making these claims about global warming. Not, say, scientists.)

Update [2006-5-17 15:48:57 by David Roberts]: Oh, I also meant to draw attention to a classic interview with CEI founder Fred Smith, from which this amazing passage is drawn:

The barnstorming band that’s changing the world, one campus at a time

Singing a new song: Guster rocks out for eco-awareness. Photo: Ian B. Johnson.   After welcoming some 1,500 fans to a concert at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., last week, Ryan Miller — the curly haired front man of pop/rock band Guster — asked the audience if they had noticed that he […]

Rebranding “global warming”

As reported in the most recent Daily Grist, a New York-based marketing firm announced that it will help with the rebranding of global warming. As we're all armchair marketers from time-to-time, how would you rebrand "global warming"?

Share your thoughts in comments and we'll send them to the experts.

Media Shower: Another weekly roundup

Well, I'm off to the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival soon for a weekend bonanza of green films. I don't have much time to write, so here's another weekly recap:

A positive environmental program that can (almost) fit on an index card

Without further ado, here's the first draft of my index-card manifesto. It turned out to be two index-card manifestos, with five points each: one for stuff I consider immediately urgent, and a second for what I consider longer-term goals. Feedback is welcome -- nay, requested. (I'll discuss the whole project more in a subsequent post.)

WHAT A GREEN WANTS: IMMEDIATE PRIORITIES

Energy efficiency: Proven techniques can get the same amount of work with 50% of the oil.

Tax/subsidy shifts: Markets should tell the ecological truth. That means shifting subsidies from industries and practices that harm us to those that help us -- and doing the reverse with taxes.

Diverse clean energy: Our economy must move from reliance on a single concentrated source of energy (oil) to reliance on a distributed array of small-scale, renewable energy sources appropriate to local conditions. That means staying within our solar budget, using wind, solar, biothermal, and hydrodynamic energy.

Electric vehicles: Flex-fuel and plug-in hybrid automobiles are necessary transition technologies, but in the long-term we need vehicles that run purely on electricity, stored either in hydrogen fuel cells or advanced batteries.

Smart grid: The electric grid should be agnostic (accepting inputs from any source of any size), intelligent (able to apportion based on shifting demand and supply), transparent (providing data on price and supply to all consumers), and scaleable (capable of building out, or degrading, gracefully).

Umbra on hyped-up verbiage

Dear Umbra, Surely you must have noticed that ubiquitous cliché of environmental reportage: the alarming rate. Forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, coral reefs are being destroyed at an alarming rate, global warming is increasing at an a.r., and so forth. Clearly, the use of “alarming rate” is itself growing at an alarming rate. […]

How enviros can tap the video game market

I'll echo Dave's sentiment that he expressed in his post "Reaching the hipsters":

What about the hipsters? What about the semi-affluent, college-educated, tech-savvy, media-saturated twenty-somethings with artfully disheveled hair? They are, like it or not, apt to be central players in our culture in coming years ("the next generation," blah blah).

They have no tolerance whatsoever for the kind of earnest, soft-focus appeals most enviro-groups pitch. They are, let's face it, a tad self-absorbed, but they are attracted to all that is innovative, cool, and cutting-edge. Cool hunting is practically a genre unto itself on the net these days. And lots of stuff that's going on in the green world these days fits the bill.

As I've written before, enviro groups might want to consider how they can introduce green themes into television shows and film, as well as develop campaigns to cultivate the emerging phenomenon of participatory journalism. One other unlikely medium that has significant potential is the world of video games.