The dubious joys of the infomercial

Last night I almost fell off my chair I was shouting so hard at the TV. I was watching a programme on the National Geographic channel, a channel that I quite like despite its heavily American slant and style, when my enjoyment of a programme putting forward a rather dubious (in my opinion) version of the Stonehenge story was ruined by an infomercial sponsored by Panasonic heralding their successful links with UNESCO World Heriatge Sites programme. It wasn't just that the infomercial was fronted by a rather strange looking Sarah Brightman, whose environmental credentials are by no means clear. It wasn't just that a major contributor to the consumer driven growth that is seriously threatening our planet was indulging in the worst sort of greenwash. It wasn't even that UNESCO had seen fit to allow this use of their name and logo for advertising purposes. It was more the blatant lack of credible science being presented, and the half truths and part stories being pushed as fact.

I take a keen interest in environmentalism, and in ethics, and I am quite reasonably aware of the flaws in the current range of proposed solutions, but to run through them one at a time, and bearing in mind that Panasonic are rated at number 8 out of 18 globally by Greenpeace amongst electronics companies for their environmental impact, we can start with the assertion in the infomercial that solar power is a sustainable way forward for energy production. This is clearly nonsense since reports are now being published showing that the materials used in the manufacture of solar panels are far from sustainable, particularly the rare earth elements that are not only finite in quantity but are also rather damaging in terms of excavation and production. This is before we move on to the manufacturing of the batteries required. For quite some time there have been debates over the environmental impact of manufacturing batteries for hybrid/electric vehicles, and the same applies here.

Moving on to the claims of conserving precious water, certainly I am aware that Panasonic, along with many oth global companies are working to imprve water quality and cleanliness around the World as part of their community development programmes, but this is largely being done in the same way that 18th and 19th century industrialists arranged accomodation and sanitation for their workforce primarily to ensure that they still had a workforce despite the horrendous conditions their factories produced. Even the feature on sustainable building techniques talking about recycling stone roofs used images of limewashed houses in southern Spain, limewashing being an incredibly environmentally damaging building technique given the manufacturing process involved in creating the lime mortar.

Not a particularly useful or accurate infomercial then, and certainly not one that addressed perhaps the most important issue in building a sustainable global economy, the need for all of us to consume less. But of course, what global manufacturer is going to say that?