The ACCC weighs in on the great greenwashing 'zero emissions' lie!
The Australian car industry has officially been put on notice about making false or misleading claims and greenwashing their shiny, resource-intensive products. But governments are doing this too: here’s how…
In this report I'm going to show you how the Victorian government in Australia is more misleading and deceptive on environmental claims than any business could ever hope to be, even a car maker.
I'm going to use the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's new document as a litmus test, of sorts, for the kind of bullshit conduct governments just take for granted these days.
The document in question is called Environmental and Sustainability Claims, it’s downloadable here >>, and it’s 39 whole pages.
This one of the key examples of misleading and/or false statements that is akin to greenwashing in the car industry:
There must be a thunderous belting of keyboards in the corporate offices of carmaker marketing departments, currently underway. Because the ACCC wouldn’t be putting out a document such as this if there wasn’t a need to - it takes governmental organisations long enough to get anything done, so it must be about time, in their eyes.
If greenwashing marketing bullshit wasn’t already rife among carmaker advertising material, particularly on their websites, then the ACCC wouldn’t be advising them to:
Of course that means senior executive accountants and marketing geniuses will have to go back to school and actually pay attention this time, because ‘lifecycle’ is a fundamentally grown-up concept.
It includes, of course the raw materials, the components, the manufacturing processes, where that manufacturing happens, the waste and the by-products, the packaging, the end-use, end-of-life and disposal - plus the overall environmental impact - and not just cherry pick.
If you consider all of these things, EVs actually start to look a bit poor on legitimate environmental credentials, but you can't just claim your electric car is a ticket on the express to Fully Charged Utopia because it doesn’t emit in the same way other vehicles do.
It's also inconveniently packed with toxic cobalt mined by children, in the Congo and when you're done with it the battery's probably just going to go into landfill.
These are kind of inconvenient truths. Learn more about Greenwashing by businesses in Australia here >> using the ACCC’s definitive guide. They even approve of that term, hilariously enough.
In theory policing this kind of environmental nonsense is a very good idea because that particular term, “zero emissions vehicle” it's an intelligence test: if you actually buy into that crap you are a fool.
We went from external combustion like the steam engine, in which the combustion occurs externally to the working fluid, and then we moved to internal combustion where the working fluid and the combustion are essentially the same thing. And now we're moving to EVs or ‘remote combustion vehicles’, as they should more properly be known. That's where the combustion happens hundreds of kilometres away, as coal and or gas is burned to make the electricity on which they run.
Carmakers need to stop hiding the truth:
Every marketing manager in the nation just took three little steps closer to the defibrillator. This is such a foundational aspect of marketing suddenly under attack.
If they can't hide behind those disclaimers in three-point Helvetica extra-fine, the gig is up:
not a children's toy
battery is not included
individual results may vary
limited time only
each item sold separately
individual shoppers named Trev only
some assembly required
only while stocks last
at participating retailers only
this treatment might result in nasty side effects
may not be a real product
Still, of all the environmental claims ever, ‘sustainable’, ‘net zero’, ‘carbon neutral’, ‘recyclable’, it never ends, does it? But of all the nauseating, self-righteous bullshit claims, ‘zero emissions’ takes the absolute cake.
The only zero emissions product, of course, is the one that you don't make. How can anyone can say ‘zero emissions’ of a vehicle made of steel, aluminium, plastic, rubber, glass, fabrics/textiles, paint and of course, with a 400 kilo battery pack that's just jammed full of rare earth materials.
How you could say ‘zero emissions’ is absurd. If you can say it with a straight face, you’re just kneeing reality in the epistemic nuts.
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WHY VICTORIA IS BLOWING SMOKE ON ENVIRONMENTAL VIRTUE
You'd have to be an A-grade nutcase to make such a claim, or a wilful bullshitter, or a state government in Australia - specifically Victoria. They are weapons-grade environmental bullshitters, in Victoria.
This delightfully uplifting 88-page document is a monument to the art of environmental untruth, entitled ‘Victoria's Zero Emissions Vehicle Roadmap. It's online right now at Energy.vic.gov.au, or you can download it here >> to follow along.
That statement in particular is attributable to the honorable Lily D’Ambrosio, minister for energy, environment, climate change, solar homes.
So let's get a few things straight, shall we?
According to the ACCC, you are being misleading and deceptive, right there. This is a bad look, even for a politician.
If a house uses 15 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, according to Lily's own Essential Services Commission, it's emitting 5.8 tons of CO2 equivalent every year, because that's how this works.
If there's an alleged filthy CO2 belching SUV, like a Kia Sportage diesel perhaps, in the driveway, that vehicle is going to emit 163 grams per kilometre, according to the combined cycle scientific test. If you multiply that by the 11,100 kilometres driven annually, on average by passenger vehicles, according to AusStats’s latest survey of motor vehicle use, that equals 1.8 tonnes of CO2.
There's a conclusion here and the powers-that-be really don't want you to crunch these numbers: a Victorian house is roughly 3.2 times filthier on CO2 equivalent emissions, compared with an allegedly filthy diesel SUV. Why? Answer:
So how about governments just get their priorities straight and stop bullshitting the public on the stuff that really matters, if you want to cut greenhouse.
If you parked two diesel Sportages in front of such a house and then you vox pop the average passes by on what is actually filthier, the house behind or the cars in front, which way do you reckon most of those interviews would go? Not the way reality says, I'm sure. But in reality, cars are just a climate sideshow.
Enough. That's just being vexatious now. This whole piece is missing the point: the grid is the problem. If I were the Victorian government, I would stop being misleading and deceptive. Just stop.
Apart from the fact that this absurd document still spruiks the EV purchase incentives that the Victorian government just canned, that misleading, deceptive term, “zero emissions” in relation to vehicles is bandied about roughly 1000 times on those 88 pages. On this page right here:
…which is Lily's foreword, a monument to deception, that hateful, deceptive term “zero emissions” appears on 14 occasions (including the ‘ZEV’ abbreviation).
Not even Toyota, the national misleading and deceptive automotive gold medallist for six years in a row from 2015 to 2020 inclusive, could hope to compete with the Victorian government in the greenwashing marathon.
This so-called road map is a solid alternative to toilet tissue, but it just represents one case of a broader societal problem which is actually quite serious and that problem would be the complete collapse of trust in institutions, and you can't blame the public for that.
How can you trust a government that would make these kinds of batshit claims? You read that document and even if you don't have any scientific training, you know something is a bit off.
The ACCC has something of an uphill battle on its hands, clearly, because the biggest bullshitters in the climate space are not businesses at all - they're governments. As you have just seen, the Victorian government is handing you this big fat bullshit sandwich and they're clearly going to be offended if you don't accept it, despite the fact that if they were a corporation, the ACCC would be laying into them, so to speak.
The Victorian government, at least in the application of the terms and conditions outlined by the ACCC, is being repeatedly, excessively misleading and deceptive about their so-called zero emissions.
“Zero Emissions” and its bastardised sibling “Net-Zero” are one of the biggest, most widespread lies of the modern age. Actually achieving that would be horrendous: millions of people would die, and those who remain after that apocalypse, would all be going back to the stone age, because: thermodynamics.
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