greenwash | ukwatch.net

Propping up Propaganda

eddie — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:44:10 +0000

Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public.

In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/ images/journals/lancet/ s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science:

“Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg.” (Email, September 15, 2005)

In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org /iraq/iraqdeaths.html; ‘Update on Iraqi casualty data’, Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88)

In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:

“What a lot of balls … do you read the paper old friend? ... ‘Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street…’ my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?” (Email, February 14, 2003)

Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere “lobby”, but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:

“because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others – and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were” (Email, October 15, 2008)

The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless “blog-o-bots” (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, ‘Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit’, December 5, 2005; www.rabble.ca), launching “an attack of the clones” (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment’s thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to expose methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.

Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media ‘analysis’ props up a brutal propaganda system in which “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”, as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.

Swooning Over The British Press

Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in “fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph” which “looks quite handsome”. Glover also liked the “much-improved Times”, while the “revamped Independent” positively “crackles with energy.” (Stephen Glover, ‘It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press’, the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of “the teleogens of Tharg”, Glover asked innocently, “Am I starry-eyed?”

Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq:

“I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.” (Stephen Glover, ‘Press were wrong on Iraq’, August 11, 2008)

But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, ‘No mea culpa from the British press’, August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849).

The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five.

The two Westerners who knew Iraq best – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the “genocidal” sanctions – were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, ‘A Different Kind of War’, Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm)

The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the “supreme international crime”. If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery.

It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and “vibrancy” of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath.

At the Guardian’s website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote:

“... ‘the media’ is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers.” (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent)

As this paragraph suggests, Greenslade has mastered the art of saying very little. He could have observed that news operations, the BBC and Guardian very much included, operate as platforms for established interests in society: corporations, business investors and warmongering Western leaders. But such obvious, real-world facts are not allowed to intrude. He added:

“Despite its scant resources, The Independent has played, and is playing, a part in keeping the media honest.”

It is a bold judgement, one that can be made only by ignoring the actual content of the Independent’s media coverage. More crucially, it also overlooks what the paper reports, and does not report, in its news and business sections. In the age of the internet – when honest, non-corporate news sources are readily accessible – it is becoming ever harder to ignore the evidence before our own eyes.

Green Alliance – A Spin Profile

This Alice-in-Wonderland quality extends to the publicly funded BBC whose output regularly contravenes its own guidelines on “impartiality”, “balance” and a stated commitment “to reflect a wide range of opinion.” Consider a recent BBC online piece which proclaimed:

“Green groups have welcomed the creation of a new energy and climate department in Gordon Brown’s government reshuffle.” (Mark Kinver, ‘Greens welcome new climate department’, October 3, 2008;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/sci/tech/7650669.stm)

Which “Green groups” were these? Well, the only group cited was the Green Alliance, which describes itself as “an independent organisation” but which, in fact, has close links with both government and big business. (Source Watch; http://www.sourcewatch.org/ index.php?title=Green_Alliance)

The BBC report quoted Green Alliance director Stephen Hale:

“Hallelujah. A department of energy and climate change, and not before time… The new department puts climate change where it belongs, with its own seat at the cabinet table.”

The BBC was here taking us deep into Orwell territory. Hale was a special adviser to Margaret Beckett when she was Secretary of State for the Environment. The most recently available accounts indicate that Green Alliance has received funding from a range of sources which include government departments: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the Department for International Development. (Green Alliance Trust accounts for year ending 31 March, 2007; http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/ uploadedFiles/About_Us/FinalAccounts0607(1).pdf)

Funding and support for Green Alliance have also come from centres of green activism like BP, Glaxo, Lever Brothers, Shell, the BBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tarmac and the privatised utilities. (SpinProfiles, http://www.spinprofiles.org/ index.php/Green_Alliance; website to be launched in November 2008)

As the excellent new online resource SpinProfiles says: “Green Alliance looks like an enormously powerful corporate lobby heavily connected to the political forces that have reshaped the globe since the late 1970s.” (Ibid.)

In his BBC report, Kinver did also cite the Sustainable Development Commission. But this is hardly a “green group” as readers would normally understand the term. After all, as Kinver noted, it was set up by the government to which it reports.

All of this makes a nonsense of the headline, leading paragraph and thrust of the BBC piece about environmentalists supposedly applauding the creation of the new department. The BBC’s analysis, as ever, failed to mention the small matter of the government’s lamentable record in tackling the climate crisis, and that this latest initiative has as much substance as previous government assertions of “joined-up thinking.”

Lack of space cannot account for failures of this kind: they occur too consistently right across the BBC’s copious broadcasts and webpages. When asked, “Why can’t the BBC do better than this?”, Mark Kinver responded:

“I did contact the main green groups in the UK (Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF) for their reaction to the news of the formation of the new department. All welcomed the move by Gordon Brown to use his reshuffle to bring the energy and environment portfolios under one departmental roof.

“However, I did not include direct quotes from these organisations because I balanced the left-leaning Green Alliance’s views with the comments from the free-market think-tank, Policy Exchange (their positions were illustrated by the direct quotes I used in the story).

“Because the reshuffle was a change within the Whitehall village, rather than a change of government policy, I felt that the most appropriate comments were from organisations that operated within that sphere – hence quotes from the Green Alliance, Policy Exchange, CBI [Confederation of British Industry] and SDC [the Sustainable Development Commission].”

Longstanding readers of our alerts may recall that we have sometimes highlighted the moribund state, and lack of radical vision, of the main green groups, notably Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace (e.g. ‘Silence is Green’, February 3, 2005).

And we have truly gone down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole when a BBC journalist can describe the Green Alliance as “left-leaning.” The editorial commitment to “a wide range of opinion” is equally surreal when quotes are restricted to elite groups within the “sphere” of “the Whitehall village.” Finally, the BBC’s notion of “impartiality” is exemplified in the “balance” in the piece between the corporate-leaning Green Alliance and the even more rabidly corporate “free-market think tank”, Policy Exchange.

Readers can cast their minds back to New Labour’s ascension to power in 1997 when there was similar optimistic talk of “joined-up” government. Back then, John Prescott’s “super-ministry” was sold to the British public as a great innovation taking responsibility for transport, environment and the regions of the UK. The Independent told its readers that Prescott, a “blunt Northerner”, “regards himself as a moderniser and a man with ideas. He is restless for power, and is likely to turn his office into one of the engine-rooms of the Blair government.” (‘Blair’s magnificent seven: the new cabinet takes shape’, The Independent, May 3, 1997; no byline)

The Observer’s Patrick Wintour assured us that Prescott was a “policy wonk” who was “willing to address policy challenges without prejudice. His record in campaigning on green issues stretches back to long before they became fashionable.” (Patrick Wintour, ‘Five challenges to forge a better Britain: action on the environment’, The Observer, May 11, 1997)

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott announced breathlessly in the early days of the New Labour regime:

“The first fortnight of the Blair administration has proved one thing: Labour may not be as red as it once was, but it is one hell of a lot greener. One of the beneficial spin-offs of modernisation is that the obsession with growth at all costs has been ditched.” (Larry Elliott, ‘Labour’s moral mission: going from red to green with a pollution solution. Environment has moved centre stage in a new government that sees protecting the world as good business and good politics’, The Guardian, May 19, 1997)

More than a decade later and we are supposed to perceive the latest recarving of Whitehall departments as a bold move that will really get to grips with the terrifying threat of climate chaos. We are supposed to believe the prime minister will perform a massive U-turn away from corporate priorities, as the Guardian insists he must:

“Mr Brown must now prove that he is prepared to treat an ailing climate with an injection of political capital to match the vast dose of financial capital he was so willing to invest in the banks.” (Leader article, ‘The greening of Brown’, the Guardian, October 20, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/oct/20/ leader-climate-carbon-gordon-brown)

The required suspension of disbelief is truly farcical. Meanwhile, the world’s life-support systems are continuing to collapse under rapidly escalating global financial and industrial exploitation.

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Stephen Glover, media commentator, the Independent
Email: scmgox@aol.com

Roy Greenslade, media commentator, the Guardian
Email: roy.greenslade@mac.com

Mark Kinver, BBC reporter
Email: mark.kinver@bbc.co.uk

Helen Boaden, director of BBC News
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk

Please send a copy of your emails to us
Email: editor@medialens.org

This media alert is archived here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/081022_propping_up_brutal.php

The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. For details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here:
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

Please consider donating to Media Lens: http://www.medialens.org/donate

Please visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org

We have a lively and informative message board:
http://www.medialens.org/board

Guardians of (coal-fired) power

Tim Holmes — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:46:47 +0000

A few days from now, on 16th of July, the Guardian is set to host a variety of high-profile guests for “The Guardian Climate Change Summit 2008”. With the lowest entry prices for this event around the £350 mark, it is likely to attract a rather exclusive clientelle. But for most of those in attendance, such costs are hardly likely to be a big deal. The event’s lead sponsor is E.ON, better known as the company behind the proposed Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent (the target of this year’s Climate Camp), whose successful lobbying ensured that the plant would be given the go-ahead without even the formal requirement that it captured and stored its carbon emissions. To put this in perspective, NASA’s James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has recently pointed out that, if the current headlong rush into the arms of the most polluting fossil fuel is not stopped, “there is little hope of avoiding the climate tipping points, with all that implies for life on this planet” – a position also backed by the Royal Society, perhaps Britain’s most prestigious scientific institution.

Also sponsoring the event is BMW (yes, that BMW – condemned in scathing terms by Friends of the Earth last year for a “joint lobbying offensive designed to water-down and delay the mandatory CO2 emission reduction targets proposed by the [European] Commission after voluntary targets were not met”); and among its “Marketing partners” is a body called the Energy Institute – a pretty innocuous-sounding name, perhaps, though it includes among its corporate membership “all the major oil companies”.

So what does the summit hope to achieve? According to the Guardian’s site, attendees are granted the opportunity to “[u]nderstand how leading organisations are working with individuals for business and environmental benefits”. “Leading businesses realise that now is the time for collaboration” on the issue of climate change, we are assured – “with each other, with government, with NGO’s and individuals.” The summit will be a “must-attend event” for, among others, senior executives from “corporate social responsibility” and “communications” departments.

The summit, in other words, looks set to be a festival of greenwash, allowing a number of companies to spruce up their reputations while swapping a few tricks of the P.R. trade. Self-regulation is the order of the day: with talk of the wise nodding heads from enlightened companies “realising” the need for action, of fulfilling their “corporate social responsibility”, it’s easy to forget just how little the corporate world actually cares about the issue – the world’s biggest companies, in fact, ranking it “far down” their priority list, and Britain’s biggest companies in particular, according to a survey taken last year, placing it “bottom of the priority list”.

Nor is this the first time that the Guardian have collaborated with the fossil fuel industry in this way. According to its own website, for instance, the paper has “worked closely with Shell to push the debate on how business needs to react to climate change”:

“Shell was the lead sponsor of the Guardian’s Climate Change Summit in June [2007] which was attended by business leaders, NGOs and senior civil servants. An eight-page supplement [in the Guardian itself] and microsite on guardian.co.uk followed, which covered business issues around climate change and highlights of the summit.”

Shell, we are also informed,

“has been very keen to show how it is engaging with business and government to cut CO2 emissions and use new technologies to combat climate change.”

Not, you might think, the most remarkable phenomenon: a company whose whole business model is a fundamental driver of climate change, which has itself estimated, according to New Scientist, that functional carbon capture and storage technology is at least 42 years away, is quite keen on publically announcing just how green it is. Jaws must indeed be hitting the floor at that revelation. But the good old Guardian was there to provide them with publicity for their efforts, “[t]he whole programme”, the paper reports, having “stirred up a lot of interest”. In fact, as it states elsewhere, “[t]his is a growing sector for Guardian Professional and the Guardian as a whole, and we are planning new publications online and in print. We welcome proposals from interested partners” – suggesting that its latest venture, in the form of the “Climate Change Summit”, is building on the success of its previous partnership with Shell.

So far be it from me to condone anything outwith the bounds of British law, if you happen to be in and around the area of the Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, Islington, London, N1 0QH next Wednesday, carrying a mop and bucket of green paint (or what you will), it probably doesn’t matter too much if you happen to be a little bit clumsy with it. The corporations’ “greenwash” is flowing thick and fast in the direction of the general public; it’s high time we started returning the favour.

UPDATE: The Greenwash Guerrillas, bless ’em, are already on the case. Here’s wishing their action every success!

FURTHER UPDATE: And here they are, in all their glory (courtesy of The Coal Hole):

Beyond Propaganda

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:02:57 +0000

Oil giant BP Greenwashes Alberta Tar Sands

In 1997, after British Petroleum publicly acknowledged the harmful effects of global warming, it quickly became known as the oil company with environmental virtue.

While other oil corporations argued that climate change didn’t exist—most notably Exxon Mobil, which funded around 40 public policy groups that disputed the scientific grounds for global warming—BP was investing in emission reductions, going so far as to support the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement established to curb greenhouse gases, which took effect in 2005.

In 2005, BP Alternative Energies announced it would manage an investment program in solar and wind technologies, one that could amount to $8 billion over seven years. The company also marketed itself as an environmentally friendly oil corporation dedicated to moving “beyond petroleum.”

But a recent change in corporate policy threatens that green-friendly image. It’s a policy that Greenpeace calls “the biggest environmental crime in history.”

The policy involves BP breaking its long-standing, self-imposed ban on the production of crude oil from tar sands—which are a combination of clay, sand, various minerals and bitumen—found in the Canadian wilderness.

The process of extracting and refining tar sands—also known as Canadian crude—involves strip-mining a 50,000-square-mile span of forest (approximately the size of Florida) located in the western Canadian province of Alberta. The region contains an estimated 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

BP’s decision to tap into the Canadian wilderness is “based on addiction, not reality,” says Ann Alexander, senior attorney at the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit environmental group. “Tar sands crude oil is dirty from start to finish. It’s bad enough that [BP is] fouling our natural resources here in the Midwest, but it’s completely destroying them up in Canada. There are good sources of energy we can turn to that don’t involve turning entire forests into a moonscape.”

For oil corporations hoping to extract crude from the area, access is often a major hurdle. Bitumen is thick, which means tar sands can’t be pumped from the ground the same way traditional oil is. Tar sands need to be mined, and the deeper they are beneath the earth’s surface, the more difficult—and harmful—the extraction.

In Alberta’s case, nearly 80 percent of the oil lays so deep underground that it needs to be either injected with steam or put through a “fireflood” process, which introduces compressed air to the bitumen and burns the oil for better flow. To extract a single barrel of bitumen from tar sands requires an energy input of 250 cubic feet of natural gas.

The first step, then, involves razing vast amounts of wilderness for open-pit mining—meaning that small plants, trees and topsoil must be extracted by the ton. And because five barrels of water are typically needed to produce a single barrel of crude, surrounding rivers must be routed to the pits, then re-routed to man-made lakes of toxic sludge.

But the leveling of the Canadian wilderness is only the beginning. Once the forest and wildlife are out of the way and the pits have been dug, the raw process of extraction requires substantial manpower, heavy machinery (some of which can be up to three stories tall and weigh as much as a jetliner) and an incredible amount of energy. And that’s to produce only a single barrel of unrefined crude oil from two tons of tar sands.

Also, because of the machinery involved, tar sand extraction generates up to four times more carbon dioxide than conventional drilling. Over the next seven years, global warming pollutants released into the atmosphere from tar sands oil production are projected to quintuple to 126 megatons, up from 25 megatons in 2003, according to the Pembina Institute, a nonprofit environmental group based in Canada.

What’s more, the tar sands industry consumes enough gas in a single day to heat approximately 4 million American homes, according to the NRDC.

Yet none of these estimates has deterred BP from going forward with a plan to produce 200,000 barrels of Canadian crude per day over the next 15 years.

Tar sand boom

One of the biggest hurdles in combating the Albertan tar sand boom is Canada’s lack of environmental standards and regulations. Canada doesn’t have a Clean Air Act like the United States does, only guidelines. And even the guidelines the national government has in place can be circumvented by powers granted to each province. The Albertan government, in fact, has openly stated that it is not in line with the Kyoto Protocol, a direct rebuff to Canada’s national pledge.

The question then raised, says Melanie Nakagawa, attorney for the NRDC’s International Program, is “should the provinces have authority over global warming emissions?”

Currently, 16 percent of American oil imports comes from Alberta. And with corporations such as BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon already committed to investing $125 billion in imports from Alberta over the next 20 years, that percentage will only increase. Of the 1.25 million barrels extracted daily from the sands, 1 million of it goes directly to the United States. By 2020, that number could be as high as 5 million, according to the NRDC.

“Canadian crude is simply the absolute wrong direction,” the NRDC’s Alexander says. “If you look at the new technology we have regarding much cleaner resources, we should decide what is best. That is not Canadian crude. It’s destructive on every level.”

Perched along Lake Michigan

Once crude is extracted from the tar sands, it still needs to be refined before it can be used. For the most part, that refinement takes place in the United States—and creates another set of environmental hazards in the process.

In Whiting, Ind., where one of BP’s refineries is perched along Lake Michigan’s shores, the company is undergoing a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow it to refine crude oil originating from Canadian tar sands. The expansion, which will be completed by 2011, will allow BP to refine 260,000 barrels of Canadian crude per day, triple its current capacity.

Canadian crude contains more sulfur and carbon than traditional oil. According to Simon Dyer, oil sands program director and policy director for the Pembina Institute, this means that the process of refining heavier oil has the potential to release up to four times more greenhouse gases.

In a Nov. 30 statement, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alleged that the BP refinery in Whiting made equipment modifications that resulted in a significant increase in sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and carbon monoxide emissions. All are ozone-depleting chemicals that BP, according to its website, is working to reduce “before it is required by international and national obligations.”

The EPA stated that in 2006, BP made modifications to the fluidized catalytic cracking unit at its Whiting plant. Developed in 1942 by Exxon, this unit converts heavier oil, such as crude, into lighter, more valuable products like gasoline and naphtha (a mixture used as feedstock for producing high octane gas).

These allegations come at a time when the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) is reviewing the company for an update to its air emissions permit. (BP has sought higher thresholds in the amount of pollutants it releases.)

The review has drawn comparisons to the controversial water permit that IDEM issued to BP in summer 2007. According to IDEM Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Air Quality Dan Murray, as was the case with the water permit, the air permit renewal is a reflection of the Whiting expansion.

BP has already withdrawn from IDEM’s proposed Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit, which would have forced BP to take expensive steps to reduce emissions. If BP had accepted the PSD permit, it would have been required to install the latest pollution control technology and prove that its upgrades would not harm the environment.

The NRDC’s Alexander has seen these methods before. The water permit that IDEM granted BP made Indiana’s anti-degradation laws almost meaningless, she says. And backing off the PSD permit could mean BP has some new tricks up its sleeves.

“It’s in BP’s interest to get around the need for a PSD permit,” Alexander says. “They can potentially accomplish that either with real emissions reductions or with funny math.”

Tar sands extraction isn’t just another hurdle for environmentalists to combat. It merely reveals a simple truth: when it comes to “being green,” even the most publicly boastful of the oil corporations—such as BP—will keep their promises only as far as their bottom line allows. Without action, it’s empty rhetoric.

As the world continues to crawl toward environmental sustainability, tar sands extraction, says Nakagawa, is “scraping the bottom of the barrel to get our energy needs.”