#greenwashing

[baltears]

drag queen and environmental activist pattie gonia is being sued by clothing company patagonia for "trademark infringement" over using a name that predates both of them by 500 years.

[sweaterkittensahoy]

Your regular reminder that any actually crocheted items you see in stores like Target are 100% being made for terrible wages even taking into consideration average incomes in the countries where these things are made. This bag is 14 rows of plain double crochet, 22 (I think) rows of double crochet, ch 1, double crochet, 2 more rows of double crochet at the top, then a strap that Target calls "braided" but looks to me like double crochet and slip stitches.

Absolutely 0% of this bag can be made on a machine. So, this was hours of work of someone only using their own hands and body to make a bag. This was NOT someone being able to set the rules on a machine and let it run with minimal physical work on their part.

So, $30 is a fucking travesty.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE!

WHAT'S THIS?!

I've never heard of Nest. Let's go to their website! Oooh, what a pretty non-profit website about helping handcrafters make real wages! What criteria must a company meet to get the pretty sticker???

OH! THERE'S A VALIDATION PROCESS!

Who's doing the validating?

"...validators independently conduct validation of their production process and receive confirmation of handcrafted."

So....the companies seeking to claim their products aren't produced in horrendous conditions for sub-par wages are validating their own products are totally handmade and that their employees are totally not being exploited?

And this bag that would take several hours (I stitch faster than you; it takes several hours) still only costs $30???? REALLY?!

Oh, but here's a whole explanation of how Nest identifies handcrafted items, including lists of tools that may be used.

Let's see what they say about knitting/crochet:

Oh, wow! A whole list of supposed crochet machines! That could, if real, benefit crocheters by allowing them to create crochet with the use of a machine that would take some of the stress of the artform off of their bodies! That's neat! Let's duckduckgo these, shall we??

The Crochet Galloon Machine patent info. Which does not describe crochet. Nothing described here is crochet. It's just using hooks to pull yarn where it wants. That doesn't make it crochet. This is a knitting machine creating knit warp (or warp knit? I'm not sure on the lingo, I admit).

Okay, let's try this "Multi-Needle Crochet Machine." First link is an amazon listing for "crochet machine":

The crochet hooks ARE for crochet, but everything else is a knitting machine. So, NOPE!

For the Raschel Crochet Machine? How about this blog debunking that it crochets at all. Whoopsie, doodle. An excerpt:

"Here’s the short answer: there is still no commercially deployed, fully automated machine that makes hand-crochet stitches the way a human does, stitch by stitch, with one active loop and a single hook. The fabrics you see marketed as “machine crochet” are almost always warp-knitted on Raschel or crochet-galloon machines, or they’re other kinds of needlework (like chainstitch embroidery) that visually imitate crochet. They are not hand crochet, and the stitch geometry (the topology of the loops and their interlacing) is different."

This is important because the point is that to get ACTUAL HAND-CROCHETED ITEMS LIKE THE BAG AT THE TOP, YOU CANNOT REPRODUCE THE LOOK WITH A MACHINE.

So, again, $30 for a supposedly ethically sourced tote that takes hours of work to make with ONLY YOUR BODY.

Moving, on the embrodiery-crochet combination machine?

None of these crochet. And, if you go back to the previous link about the Raschel machine, that post includes an explanation of how embroidery machines can make stitches look crochet-ish but aren't actually crochet at all.

We all know how this is gonna end, but let's see what lace crochet machine brings up:

Knitting. Knitting. Lace maker that is NOT duplicating crochet lace. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Lastly, let's look at what Nest considers to be non-handcrafted crochet items:

::seventeen minute sigh::

Let's just start with if you use a knitting machine, then it's not crochet, so that takes bullet point 1 and 3 off the list.

And now let's remember none of these so-called crochet machines Nest has listed actually crochet or even come close. So, that's 2 and 4 removed as well.

So, in short, Nest knows nothing about crochet and appears to be making bank allowing companies to greenwash their terrible labor practices by letting them or their suppliers be their own validators on whether or not their work is 1) handcrafted and 2) done in a way that does not abuse the skilled laborers who are making them.

600+ bags bought, if you look at that first photo again. Each bag crafted by hand by a person who cannot use a machine to lessen the amount of work/effort/stress on the body to create it. For 30 fucking dollars.

Fuck Target and every other fast fashion place that does this shit knowing full well they're harming workers and trying like hell to cover it up with a sticker from a non-profit that clearly doesn't care.

[wewantclimateactionnow]

Jail climate criminals now before it's too late. They are really not this dumb.

[luxmundi-i]

🌲 From the Nakba 76 years ago all the way up until today, the Jewish National Fund has been using "environmentalism" and tree-planting to greenwash Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

[Source: Mondoweiss]

[hersheysmcboom]

Protect Water: #NestlePledge and #StarbucksPledge

Join the movement to #BoycottStarbucks, #BoycottNestle, and boycott all of their products.

[skeletonmob]

Transcript & Alt ID: Poster labeled 'Israeli Propaganda' that details various types of propaganda tactics, each with a color coordinated label.

Greenwashing - Israel appeals to environmentalism in order to deflect attention from or mask its harmful practices. EX: JNF tree-planting campaigns of invasive species.

Redwashing - Israel appeals to the image of progressive politics on order to deflect attention from its harmful practices. EX: Historic exclusion of non-Jewish workers from unions

Bluewahing - Israel uses humanitarian aid campaigns in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices. EX: 'Water infrastructure upgrades' that divert 6x more water to settlers than to Palestinians

Pinkwashing - Israel appeals to LGBTQ+ rights in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices. EX: blackmailing queer Palestinians into being informants under the threat of being outed to their communities. (transcriber's note: I don't feel this is a good example of pinkwashing, I think that mentioning that Israel has a habit of promoting itself as a safe haven for LGBT+ folks, and promoting Palestine solely as homophobic, in order to justify their actions is a more appropriate example)

Purplewashing - Israel appeals to women's rights and feminism in order to deflect attention from its harmful ideals. EX: Israeli Occupation Force drafts woman to military service by law to participate in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Faithwashing - Israel appeals to interfaith dialogue in order to deflect attention from its harmful practices. EX: conflating Zionism and Judaism in order to accuse all criticism of Zionism as anti-semitic.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greenwashing set Canada on fire

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.

At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their mills.

I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/wildfires-treeplanting-timebomb.html

Cameron's summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned "penalty" for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).

Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they're heated. They're so flammable that firefighters call them "gas on a stick."

Cameron and her friends planted under brutal conditions: working long hours in blowlamp heat and dripping wet bulb humidity, amidst clouds of stinging insects, fingers blistered and muscles aching. But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!"

Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.

It burned.

The climate emergency's frequent droughts turn black spruces into "something closer to a blowtorch." The "pines in lines" approach to reforesting was an act of sabotage, not remediation. Black spruces are thirsty, and they absorb the water that moss needs to thrive, producing "kindling in the place of fire retardant."

Cameron's column concludes with this heartbreaking line: "Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day."

The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario's north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you're a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.

That scam never ended. Today, we're sold carbon offsets, a modern Papal indulgence. We are told that if we pay the finance sector, they can absolve us for our climate sins. Carbon offsets are a scam, a market for lemons. The "offset" you buy might be a generated by a fake charity like the Nature Conservancy, who use well-intentioned donations to buy up wildlife reserves that can't be logged, which are then converted into carbon credits by promising not to log them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

The credit-card company that promises to plant trees every time you use your card? They combine false promises, deceptive advertising, and legal threats against critics to convince you that you're saving the planet by shopping:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#greenwashing

The carbon offset world is full of scams. The carbon offset that made the thing you bought into a "net zero" product? It might be a forest that already burned:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing

The only reason we have carbon offsets is that market cultists have spent forty years convincing us that actual regulation is impossible. In the neoliberal learned helplessness mind-palace, there's no way to simply say, "You may not log old-growth forests." Rather, we have to say, "We will 'align your incentives' by making you replace those forests."

The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" video deftly punctures this bubble. In it, a detective points his finger at the man who committed the locked-room murder in the isolated mansion. The murderer cheerfully admits that he did it, but produces a "murder offset," which allowed him to pay someone else not to commit a murder, using market-based price-discovery mechanisms to put a dollar-figure on the true worth of a murder, which he duly paid, making his kill absolutely fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

What's the alternative to murder offsets/carbon credits? We could ask our expert regulators to decide which carbon intensive activities are necessary and which ones aren't, and ban the unnecessary ones. We could ask those regulators to devise remediation programs that actually work. After all, there are plenty of forests that have already been clearcut, plenty that have burned. It would be nice to know how we can plant new forests there that aren't "thousands of blowtorches."

If that sounds implausible to you, then you've gotten trapped in the neoliberal mind-palace.

The term "regulatory capture" was popularized by far-right Chicago School economists who were promoting "public choice theory." In their telling, regulatory capture is inevitable, because companies will spend whatever it takes to get the government to pass laws making what they do legal, and making competing with them into a crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/13/public-choice/#ajit-pai-still-terrible

This is true, as far as it goes. Capitalists hate capitalism, and if an "entrepreneur" can make it illegal to compete with him, he will. But while this is a reasonable starting-point, the place that Public Choice Theory weirdos get to next is bonkers. They say that since corporations will always seek to capture their regulators, we should abolish regulators.

They say that it's impossible for good regulations to exist, and therefore the only regulation that is even possible is to let businesses do whatever they want and wait for the invisible hand to sweep away the bad companies. Rather than creating hand-washing rules for restaurant kitchens, we should let restaurateurs decide whether it's economically rational to make us shit ourselves to death. The ones that choose poorly will get bad online reviews and people will "vote with their dollars" for the good restaurants.

And if the online review site decides to sell "reputation management" to restaurants that get bad reviews? Well, soon the public will learn that the review site can't be trusted and they'll take their business elsewhere. No regulation needed! Unleash the innovators! Set the job-creators free!

This is the Ur-nihilism from which all the other nihilism springs. It contends that the regulations we have – the ones that keep our buildings from falling down on our heads, that keep our groceries from poisoning us, that keep our cars from exploding on impact – are either illusory, or perhaps the forgotten art of a lost civilization. Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity – and that may not have happened at all.

Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review. In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question – "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" – with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.

The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.

But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie. There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.

But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit. They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.

When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover isn't inevitable. We can – and have, and will again – fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups. Knowing things is possible. It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.

The thing is, corporations don't always lie about regulations. Take the fight over working encryption, which – once again – the UK government is trying to ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/24/signal-app-warns-it-will-quit-uk-if-law-weakens-end-to-end-encryption

Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist that the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:

https://twitter.com/JimBethell/status/1699339739042599276

They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go nerd harder! You'll figure it out."

Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of eminently possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite. Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.

While they're not lying about encryption, they are lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service tells the same lies – and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.

Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What is the best way to remediate our forests," the companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with actively harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.

Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of what people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's how we decide what to believe. It's not beliefs, it's epistemology.

Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making that determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.

Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions every day. Our regulators – corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations – are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting epistemological chaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.

The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "vaccine passports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

But as Klein points out, it's not good that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. The nihilism of liberalism – which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" – leads us to despair.

By contrast, leftism – a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action – offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We can have nice things. The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/#pulped-and-papered

[finance-scam]

Patrick Dovigi and GFL Environmental: A Green Giant Under the Microscope

Patrick Dovigi, once a professional hockey player, transformed himself into the founder and CEO of «GFL Environmental Inc.», a major North American waste management and infrastructure corporation valued in the billions. While GFL has marketed itself as a leader in sustainability and environmental responsibility, recent investigations suggest a far more complicated picture behind the brand.

Debt Concerns and Financial Transparency

In recent years, GFL Environmental came under financial scrutiny after a prominent hedge fund released a «short-seller report», criticizing the company’s «highly leveraged debt structure», its «aggressive acquisition strategy», and the «lack of transparency» regarding off-balance sheet liabilities. The market reacted swiftly, with shares taking a noticeable hit — signaling waning investor confidence.

Links to Criminal Activity and Public Safety Concerns

Serious allegations have surfaced linking GFL to individuals with criminal backgrounds. Several «violent incidents» and security concerns have been reported in the vicinity of GFL-managed sites, raising «questions about corporate oversight, site safety, and leadership accountability». These reports have amplified calls for tighter regulations and increased monitoring of the company’s operations.

Reputation Management and Legal Pressure

According to multiple reports, GFL has employed aggressive legal tactics — including «strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs)» and coordinated «online takedown campaigns»— in an apparent attempt to «suppress critical coverage and protect its public image». Such actions have triggered concerns among journalists, watchdogs, and transparency advocates.

Environmental Claims vs. Operational Reality

While GFL promotes itself as an eco-conscious company, some environmental activists and analysts have questioned the «true environmental impact» of its operations. Critics point to insufficient emissions data, weak recycling performance metrics, and inadequate public disclosures — casting doubt on the company’s self-proclaimed green credentials.

For further insights, refer to independent analyst reports and regulatory filings for GFL Environmental Inc.