brandon james allen

I’m really tired of the pop culture green movement.

Buying “green” items has become so cool, that everything is now being marketed as environmentally friendly. The current landscape of over-emphasizing the environmental benefits of products feels a lot like the trans-fat marketing blitz from a couple of years ago.

Every product on the market put a label on its box that said “no trans fats.” That’s all fine and good, but most people shouldn’t be eating most of those foods anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s probably a really good thing that trans-isomer fatty acids are entering the bodies of fewer Americans these days. Let’s just not kid ourselves into thinking these doughnuts are OK to eat because they don’t have trans fats. Maybe the label should be more like, “this doughnut won’t kill you with trans fats but the saturated fat and refined sugar sure aren’t going to help.”

The “green” movement has taken a very similar path in that many products are labeled as environmentally friendly regardless of their actual toll on the environment. The recent example that prompted this little tirade is the new Studio Hybrid desktop from Dell:

Dell’s most unique, stylish, and conscientious desktop PC. Designed to fit into your environment while protecting the environment. [from Dell’s website]

Really? Protecting the environment?

That’s ridiculous. A Studio desktop may be less harmful to the environment, but it’s certainly not protecting the environment. Analogous to the doughnuts, I think that buying computers that have lower power requirements is very important as the number of computing devices in our daily lives increases, but — once again — let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that we’re saving the environment by purchasing a computer with a bamboo sleeve.

P.S. I was very surprised to find that Chevrolet barely even mentions the environment in talking about their reduced-gasoline initiatives. Instead they refer only to the high prices of gasoline and how they are working to bring cars to the road that get us to a “gas free” situation.