Misleading truths

Hi All,

This week's New Yorker magazine included a glued-in 
16-page green-washing advertisement from Chevrolet,
the largest-selling car brand in the USA. There are lots
of pretty pictures and not a whole bunch of text. The
first text page says, in full, "Five things Chevy is doing
right now to help us all do more and use less."

Then there's a page on "Better Fuel Efficiency". Chevy is
bragging about it's high-efficiency models, some of which
get an amazing 30 MPG, which is slightly better than the
fleet average... of 25 years ago. For those of you who
think in liters per 100 km, 30 MPG is 7.8 l/100km, which
is nothing to brag about. (A VW Lupo diesel gets 3/100.)

Then there's ethanol, followed by hybrids (somehow, Chevy
only manages to get 25% better economy using hybrids),
followed by the Chevy Volt, not yet in production, which 
"will use zero gasoline and produce zero emissions".
Then we have fuel cells.

The pamphlet closes with "Some things we can all do 
right now to help the planet." Most of these have nothing
to do with driving, like not taking a receipt from the ATM,
which is held to save some extraordinary amount of paper.

It's related to "recycling" in the USA. Lots of people
separate their newspapers and cans and bottles for
"recycling" (although quite a lot of it is then just
dumped in with the rest of the trash by the waste-
haulers). "We recycle," therefore we're being environmentally 
responsible, even though we drive two hours each way to work.

Chevy must have paid a fortune to publish this pamphlet.
I don't know how widely they will publish it, but it's
symptomatic of the reactions we'll be seeing from car makers
as environmental concerns mount.

We need to figure out an effective strategy to counter this.

Regards,

Joel



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J.H. Crawford                                         Carfree Cities
[email protected]                           http://www.carfree.com