It’s easy to get wrapped up in the holiday season. We’re taught from the time we can walk to look forward to giving and receiving gifts. There is a certain joy that comes this time of year and one need look no further than a child’s face to see what the power of giving can do. Sheer unfiltered happiness.

What we give our children matters on many different levels, not the least of which is in the messages that accompany our gifts. I’m not talking about the ‘From’ and ‘To’ sections on the hallmark cards or the little bows stuck on top of presents (reuse, please!). I’m talking about the deeper values we’re instilling. Are we giving our children safe toys? Free of toxins and dangerous components? Are we showing our children what truly matters isn’t the gift itself but the love embedded in the act of giving?

Certainly, nearly all parents will automatically answer ‘yes’ to all of the above, whether they really know the answers or not. Family values have always been a top priority and living within our means is being discussed over family dinners more regularly now than in recent years. Yet, as non-profits like teensturninggreen.org and healthychild.org help us learn more about the potential consequences of toys laden with PVC and BPA, we also should consider the long-term costs to our kids from companies – including toy manufacturers and the retailers who sell them – that aren’t adequately addressing their impact on climate change.

The toy companies scored by ClimateCounts.org have enormous supply chains using energy and creating waste – much of it petroleum-based plastic – that have climate impacts that can’t be viewed as insignificant.

For a multi-billion dollar industry that will generate a large portion of its annual revenue this holiday season, isn’t it time we demand climate action to protect our children’s future? Wouldn’t this send the right message to our children?

Send a message to the world’s largest toy companies telling them you’re ready to see them hitting their stride with their approach to climate action!

This holiday season, ClimateCounts.org is making sure you spend your hard-earned dollars with companies who care about the climate change. Join the Striding Shopper Campaign to give the gift that keeps on giving: companies that care about climate change as much as you do.

Mark Harrison is the Campaign Coordinator at ClimateCounts.org and can be reached at mharrison@climatecounts.org.

The Striding Shopper Campaign is supported by these great organizations: TckTckTck.org, ICCR.org, Kids vs Global Warming, and Brighter Planet.

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As the holiday shopping season heats up and in anticipation of the release of its updated company scores during the first week of December, ClimateCounts.org is announcing its ‘Striding Shopper Campaign’ to help consumers use their holiday dollars to support companies taking climate action.

ClimateCounts.org and partnering non-profits, TckTckTck.org, ICCR.org, Kids vs Global Warming, and Brighter Planet, will use the ClimateCounts.org scores to show their followers what companies are actually doing (or not doing) about climate change.

“If consumers support the higher scoring companies when they shop and tell lower scoring companies they want to see more climate action, companies will listen.” –Mark Harrison, Campaign Coordinator, ClimateCounts.org

Over the next five weeks, ClimateCounts.org will run the Striding Shopper Campaign to help consumers realize the climate action or inactions of 150 scored companies representing over 3,000 brands. The goal of the campaign is simple: to make the connection between consumers and companies making good climate choices and to raise the collective consumer voice through e-mail and Twitter to companies not getting the message.

Join the Striding Shopper Campaign to give the gift that keeps on giving: companies that care about climate change as much as you do.

Follow the campaign on Facebook & Twitter and be on the lookout for new ClimateCounts.org scores in early December www.climatecounts.org.

Mark Harrison is the Campaign Coordinator at ClimateCounts.org and can be reached at mharrison@climatecounts.org.

The Striding Shopper Campaign is supported by these great organizations: TckTckTck.org, ICCR.org, Kids vs Global Warming, and Brighter Planet.

About ClimateCounts.org:
Climate Counts is a non-profit campaign that scores companies annually on the basis of their voluntary action to reverse climate change. The Climate Counts Company Scorecard — launched in June 2007 — helps people vote with their dollars by making climate-conscious purchasing and investing choices that put pressure on the world’s most well-known companies to take the issue of climate change seriously. Launched by organics pioneer Stonyfield Farm, Climate Counts believes everyday consumers can be the most important activists in the fight against global warming. Climate Counts has currently evaluated nearly 150 companies in sixteen major consumer sectors with plans to expand the number of companies and sectors. Climate Counts’ work has appeared in many of the world’s leading media outlets, among them the New York Times, National Public Radio, The Economist, BBC World Service, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, and the Harvard Business Review. The organization launched its free iPhone app and its Climate Counts Industry Innovators (i2) program in early 2010.

Famously, Michael Pollan has offered the mantra that the key to our nutritional, agricultural, and environmental quandaries may be as fundamental as eating less while spending more on the food we do consume. It’s a useful rule of thumb that fits nicely into the need for most of us to see the world in simple, concrete terms.

Nutritionist Kate Geagan reminded me of “Pollan’s law” while a group of us tried to make sense of the impressive body of research being presented at a unique international gathering of passionate, inspiring scientists working on solutions to our growing human, agricultural, and environmental crises, being held this week in Greece. As deeply complex data are discussed among peers that add dimension to human understanding of the interactions between nutrition, genetics, food chemistry, and lifestyle, it becomes the job of nutritionists and dieticians (and those like Pollan) to absorb, analyze, and then distill pertinent information for a mainstream, food-consuming public that, especially in the United States, seems programmed for black-and-white oversimplification: low-fat diets, high-protein diets, high-fiber diets, French diet, Greek diet, nuts, chocolate, red wine, and so on. We seem only able to process silver bullets – which seem to change with mind-blowing frequency – making the job of the popular nutrition community impossibly daunting.

While the world is never that simple, there is general agreement, fortunately, on the keys to good health. Good, whole food with key nutrients and regular exercise – with a lucky dose of good genes – is a reasonable guide for the lay public. But it doesn’t diminish the need for healthy scientific inquiry about how to understand connections more clearly and how to think about the future of nutrition in a world with complicated food production challenges, climate zones, and resource realities. Consider the fact that a primary source of the Omega 3 fatty acids that so many scientists believe is an essential part of a healthy diet is fish. A panacea? Perhaps, but only if you are able to see beyond dramatic collapses in fisheries worldwide or the economic cost to consume that fish in the first place.

It’s not difficult to see how these same issues present themselves when we think about climate change. We’ve chosen not to want to understand the complexity of climate change or the interactions between very real human impacts and very real natural cycles. We believe it’s happening or we don’t. We believe it’s human-induced or we don’t. We believe the only way out of the problem is massive expansive of nuclear energy or we don’t. We want quick answers to questions that truly can’t be framed that way. As with nutrition, we want to know the one thing that will save us from ourselves. We can’t handle complexity, nor the behavior change that could address it.

Rather than engage the public in a dynamic discussion about improving urban design to boost physical activity, investing in transportation choices, expanding organic and local food production, motivating consumers to assert real influence on corporations, and vastly diversifying the way we produce energy at all scales, advocates for climate protection are forced to perform like nutritionists. We’re asked to offer oversimplified views of the world. If we don’t seem to support single, large-scale approaches to the problem, we’re dismissed. If we don’t prescribe to political compromises that are designed to create limited accountability for business, utilities, or individuals, we’re pushed to the fringe.

The fact is that a multi-faceted response to the climate crisis can create elegant solutions to so many of the issues we seem unable to connect efficiently. Certainly, there are the national security and domestic job creation benefits of climate-friendly energy policies so many have talked about. But what about climate-friendly land use that shortens the distances to schools and downtowns and jobs and gets people out of cars, on their feet or on bicycles, and in better health? What about incentives that improve nutrition and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging people to produce their own high-quality foods or support local producers? No number of silver bullets can be nearly as beneficial to our communities or to ourselves.

Still, the urge to find them remains. Physician Ole Faergeman offered one on climate change in his keynote address to launch the conference: “Eat plants, plant trees, and leave the coal in the ground.” It’s probably not that simple, but as in nutrition, it certainly makes the point.

Wood Turner is the executive director of Climate Counts and is currently posting from Greece from the Stonyfield Farm-sponsored Inaugural Conference of the World Council on Genetics, Nutrition, and Fitness for Health. He and others are tweeting from the conference at @climatecounts using #greekhealth, and also on Facebook.

With apologies to another ancient Mediterranean civilization, is it useful — when in Greece – to do as the Greeks might have when it comes to addressing climate change? In other words, with a crisis that demands such urgent and widespread human action, do we have time to be philosophical?

Dr. Ole Faergeman, a renowned Danish cardiologist and co-chair of a groundbreaking international conference on the intersection between sustainable agriculture and land use, human nutrition, and climate protection opening this week in Olympia, Greece, has invoked Aristotle when trying to make sense of ongoing challenges to mobilize people globally on climate change. Certainly, Aristotle had no concept of global warming, but some of his ideas may help us with our own.

In addition to the political, journalistic, and economic challenges that have shaped our unwillingness to acknowledge the current and future impacts of climate change on our lives, persuades Faergeman, we may also be confounded by a certain “giddiness” as we stare into the abyss of time, both past and future. Climate scientists have shown again and again the alarming rates of atmospheric greenhouse gases today versus not only other times in human history but also prehistoric time. But does science’s ability to help us see eons into the past and to project decades, even centuries into the future hurt us more than it helps us?

Does climate modeling make us dizzy with our insignificance in the grand scheme of things? Does it render us powerless? It must be the only reasonable explanation for why we seem incapable of doing things like reach a meaningful international target for emissions reductions (a la the frustrations of COP15 in Copenhagen) or pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation in the US. One can almost imagine aging members of the Senate attributing “no” committee votes on cap-and-trade (or any other bill attempting to reduce climate impacts) to the clear futility of human existence.

In addition to being mercifully oblivious to the impacts of the future industrial age on the environment, ancient Greeks also had no concept of “deep time,” no sense of where time was going or where it had been. The result was a fixation on the personal, rather than the global, not only in terms of the quest to find meaning but also of the role and ability of human beings to affect events. As a result, they seem to have lacked the paralysis that too many of us bring to enormous global challenges like climate change. For Aristotle and other thinkers of his time, the choice of pathways was simple: logos or tragedy? The implications of a tragic trajectory – like our current one – are clear.

But logos implies a rational, even optimistic approach to dealing with catastrophe. Aristotle and his fellow Athenians might have first acknowledged the obvious effects that fossil-fuel burning humans have on the atmosphere, if for no other reason than for the way those effects would affect human quality of life – even the pursuit of happiness that so motivated founding Americans. They might have then said, “Conditions are changing that are affecting the safety and health of human communities, as well as our ability to produce and source food, so we must simply use common sense to fix the problem, whether through behavior change or technology.” Interestingly, the ancient idea of logos is not terribly different from a rational human view in aspects of our modern world, for example, a market economy, but it is largely missing from our collective response to climate change.

Some will inevitably argue that being philosophical about something like global climate change is the definition of absurd. But perhaps existential philosophy is precisely what has been missing from our response to climate change so far. As Faergeman urges, it’s time to be like the Greeks and think big thoughts about what we are going to do – for our own satisfaction and sense of accomplishment – without worrying too much what the universe ultimately has in store for us.

Wood Turner is the executive director of Climate Counts and is currently posting from Greece from the Inaugural Conference of the World Council on Genetics, Nutrition, and Fitness for Health, made possible with support from Stonyfield Farm. He and others are tweeting from the conference at @climatecounts using #greekhealth, and also on Facebook.

As a culture, Americans discard more than 25% (approximately 25.9 million tons) of all the food produced domestically (U.S. Department of Agriculture). 4,000 miles east, nearly 8 million residents of Niger (more than half the country’s population) are facing hunger and starvation due to the droughts and flooding that have ravaged their food crops. In the 21^st century, when we can move information around the globe in milliseconds, the juxtaposition between a country fighting obesity and a country fighting starvation in a world fighting climate change should leave an emotional emptiness in all of our stomachs.

Americans consume too much while developing nations don’t have enough. If you’ve made it through grammar school, you’ve heard this before. Making climate-conscious consumer decisions like eating the right portions, marking healthy choices, and supporting local organic food producers are all changes we can make in our own lives that impact our bodies and the amount of food waste we generate. As a culture we’re beginning to connect the dots between healthy food and healthy lives. Organizations like SlowfoodUSA.org and TeensTurningGreen.org are promoting more localized, healthier meals and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution won an Emmy this year. But we’re missing the bigger dots.

Natural disasters are happening with more force and frequency, think about this year’s Tennessee flood, Russian wheat crisis and flooding in Pakistan – all of which happened in the span of six months. As our climate changes more rapidly we are we’re running out of time to take the necessary steps to save our planet. We need to connect the bigger dots and start changing the priorities of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters: multinational corporations.

Let’s put this in context.

We all realize Americans waste food. What we often don’t realize is how much energy goes into the production of the food we throw out. More energy is wasted in the perfectly edible food discarded by people in the US each year than is extracted annually from the oil and gas reserves off the nation’s coastlines. That’s larger than the BP oil spill, much larger…

And that’s not even the most interesting part.

Almost all of the packaging around our peanut butter, our cereal, our bread and most of the other food products we buy comes from cardboard sourced from trees and plastics derived from fossil fuels. More striking, the energy used to make the packaging around our food is merely one link in a long chain to your stomach. The entire cycle from harvesting the ingredients, to shipping the ingredients, to modifying the ingredients, to trucking finished products to your supermarket (where more often than not we drive to pick them up) is riddled with inefficiencies, wasting energy and releasing a huge quantity of greenhouse gases. But even the immense amount of energy lost in getting millions of peanut butter cans, cereal boxes, and loaves of bread, to our homes pales in comparison to the power consumers have to change the way multinational corporations serve up our meals.

What they skip in grammar school is that we can change business as usual. By educating ourselves on what companies are doing (or aren’t doing) about climate change, we will know where to spend our dollars and to which companies we should raise our voices. There are clear differences in how Kraft and General Mills or Unilever and Nestle or Coca-Cola and Pepsi address their climate impacts, and the Climate Counts scores show you how big those differences can be.

So remember, when you look around at American super-sized meals which take super-sized journeys before they reach our plates, there are companies harvesting, modifying, packaging and distributing that food, our food. But, if you know that Unilever – think Dove, Hellmann’s, Slim-Fast and more – scores an 80/100 on the Climate Counts scorecard or that ConAgra Foods – think Healthy Choice, Chef Boyardee, Swiss Miss and more – scores a 31/100 and that there are nine other companies in the food products sector with scores you should check, then you’ll know who’s taking climate change serious and who’s not. The bottom line: if you speak up, they’ll listen.

Mark Harrison is the Campaign Coordinator at ClimateCounts.org, he is currently running Back-2-Cool, a campaign focused on alerting consumers about the climate actions (or inactions) of the companies behind back-to-school shopping ads. Back-2-Cool is supported by these great organizations:

Teens Turning Green - Green Music Group - 350.org - Kids vs Global Warming - DoSomething - Alliance for Climate Education

Of the 310 million people in the US, almost all of them have watched TV, spoken on a cell phone, or typed on a keyboard, and the rest of the world is catching up quickly. The 6.8 billion people on Earth are linked to roughly four billion cell phones. That’s a lot of texting, talking and surfing that wasn’t even thought about twenty years ago. But cell phones aren’t the only piece in this societal shift. The past four years were full of indications of the pace at which the entire electronics industry is affecting our lives.

Every cell phone, mp3 player, and TV requires plastics which derive from fossil fuels, metals extracted from the earth with great impact, and incredible amounts of cardboard and plastic packaging. And the companies pushing out these products are anything but oblivious to the impacts they’re having on climate change. But how does a consumer who cares about climate change, know the difference between IBM and Apple or HP and Dell? How do these companies compare in their commitments to climate action?

At Climate Counts, we track many of the world’s largest consumer-facing companies on their climate action (or inaction). By using only public information in our 0–100 point scorecard, Climate Counts exists as a lever to drive greater corporate transparency so that climate-conscious consumers can see the true climate action of the brands they buy. Specifically, we look at whether or not companies are reviewing and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, the positions they’re taking on climate and energy legislation, and their clarity in reporting climate information.

Even amidst all of this positive news, we’re still looking at astronomical amounts of waste from an $822 billion industry that is constantly rushing to beat out its competitor to the newest sleekest gadget. Compare that number to the 2.3 million employees in the electronics industry, the countless number of smaller companies supplying parts, the number of trips to ship products across the globe, the amount of energy used to mine the conductive metals and you’re staring at an industry capable of changing our climate all on its own. Overwhelming, to say the least.

Now step back and imagine what would happen to this entire system if we decided to base our consumer choices on corporate climate action. Imagine if these twelve companies committed to educating their 2.3 million employees about climate change. Imagine if they dedicated their $822 billion in revenue to onsite renewable energy rather than fossil fuels. Imagine if they gave every one of the thousands of companies supplying metals, plastics, and transportation for their products a choice: Address your climate impacts, or we’ll find other companies to do business with.

Feeling inspired? Now imagine if you could tell all of these companies directly via a two-click email or Twitter message that corporate climate action matters and you’re paying attention to the climate steps companies are taking before you buy their products. Would companies then take action in order to protect their brand reputation? Absolutely.

This year before you start your back-to-school shopping for cell phones, computers and MP3 players, help bring our planet Back-2-Cool. Find out who’s behind the products you’re buying and let them know that “Climate Counts.”

Mark Harrison is the Campaign Coordinator at ClimateCounts.org, he is currently running Back-2-Cool, a campaign focused on alerting consumers about the climate actions (or inactions) of the companies behind back-to-school shopping ads. Back-2-Cool is supported by these great organizations:

Teens Turning Green - Green Music Group - 350.org - Kids vs Global Warming - DoSomething - Alliance for Climate Education

Most of us start our days the same way. We smack our alarm clock, wish it were Saturday, and get dressed. The scary thing is, the clothes we wear today reflect the votes we make for or against our climate’s future.

Every purchasing decision we make is a vote. Think about the number of socks, underwear, t-shirts, and jeans you’ve purchased over the years. If you are a parent, think about how many times your kids have tapped into your wallet for those same items. The numbers are staggering. MSN Money estimates that the average-income, dual-parent household, will spend over $170,000 on toys, education, food and clothes on a child from the time she is born until 17 years of age. In 2010, it is estimated that the average two-child family will spend over $1,200 on back-to-school shopping alone. Multiply this by the number of US families, and we’re looking at billions of dollars of revenue for clothing companies.

Amidst this segment of annual consumption cycle, two things are happening: first, kids are being told by huge corporations what is cool and green before going back-to-school shopping, and second, our planet is getting warmer – significantly in fact. Last year, NASA determined that the previous decade was the warmest on record, with 2005 the hottest year in recorded history, and it’s a record well on its way to being broken. According to the National Climate Data Center, we just experienced the warmest April, May and June on record. All of our driving, eating, flying, and shopping is having an impact on our climate. Feeling guilty? Hang in there — it gets worse before it gets better.

The bad news. Even if we scale back as much as possible and try to remove ourselves from the cycle of consumption, we’re still living on a warming planet. We can’t stop the greenhouse gases emitted in previous decades from trapping more heat.

The good news. We cast votes every day for our future. Every pair of shoes, every shirt, every dress, every hat is a choice, choices that can be turned into votes for climate action and yes, maybe even revived interest from Congress in moving on climate legislation that will ease the management of greenhouse gas emissions for businesses and communities.

Companies track our consumer choices and then live or die by the money we spend. If we as conscious consumers really care about climate change and sustainability, we’ll pay attention to the climate actions (or inactions) of companies and make more informed choices.

Climate-conscious consumers will take heed of companies like Timberland and REI which have shown self-motivated commitment to engaging consumers on the ways they are trying to tackle climate change (both are charter members of Climate Counts’ Industry Innovators program). They’ll notice Timberland’s climate nutrition label which outlines the environmental impacts of a products packaging, chemicals, and the amount of renewable energy used to manufacture their products. They’ll notice REI’s investment of over 860 kilowatts of on-site energy generation. And, they’ll flex their consumer muscles by telling VF Corporation (parent company of The North Face, Nautica, Wrangler and more) they appreciate it’s finally gotten the message that corporate climate action matters.

Before you start spending on back-to-school clothes this year, think about where your dollars are going and tell those companies you’re paying attention to their climate change actions…if you say something, they’ll listen.

Mark Harrison is the Campaign Coordinator at ClimateCounts.org, he is currently running Back-2-Cool, a campaign focused on alerting consumers about the climate actions (or inactions) of the companies behind back-to-school shopping ads. Back-2-Cool is supported by these great organizations:

Teens Turning Green - Green Music Group - 350.org - Kids vs Global Warming - DoSomething - Alliance for Climate Education

As the summer heat breaks and you begin to gear up for the 2010-2011 school year, what do you know about the companies that get all your back-to-school shopping dollars? Which ones are actually working to bring our planet Back-2-Cool? In 2008, the top 100 brands spent over $100 billion dollars on US advertising alone, and the back-to-school season was second only to the holiday season in revenue generated (US Census Bureau). Companies use these advertising dollars to promote products that require energy, packaging and transportation – all of which contribute to climate change. The question is, what can you do to affect the way these companies do business and help bring our planet Back-2-Cool (B2C)?

The answer: Become an engaged climate-conscious consumer and find out what these companies are actually doing (or not doing) about climate change. If these companies truly want your attention and your money, shouldn’t they know how much you care about the climate crisis?

Of course they should. But you have to tell them. Join the Climate Counts Back-2-Cool Campaign as we shift the back-to-school momentum away from business as usual and towards strengthening corporate climate action.

Over the next ten weeks, Climate Counts will take a close look at the Back-to-School ads from scored companies in the Apparel, Electronics, Food Products, and Internet/Software sectors (which combined had over $1.2 trillion in 2009 revenues). The goal of the campaign is simple: to inform you about the climate action (or inaction) of the companies behind the ads, encourage you to make informed choices, and finally, urge you to raise your voices both to the companies and to your friends.

If you want to tell companies that you believe corporate climate action matters, be part of the B2C Campaign and help us change business as usual! Please join us at Back-2-Cool.

Mark Harrison is the Campaign Coordinator at ClimateCounts.org and can be reached at mharrison@climatecounts.org.

Join our campaign here and follow our campaign on facebook & twitter!

B2C Campaign is supported by these great organizations:

Teens Turning Green - Green Music Group - 350.org - Kids vs Global Warming - DoSomething - Alliance for Climate Education

Are CEOs greener than we think? And if it’s true, what’s holding them back from moving the market towards a sustainable future? In a recent survey conducted by Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact, 93% of nearly 800 CEOs saw sustainability as important to their company’s future success and 81% stated that sustainability issues are now fully embedded into the company’s strategy and operations. Compare that to the mere 50% in 2007 and it doesn’t take much to realize sustainability is being talked about in board meetings.

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But what’s driving this eco-shift in the corporate mindset? The answer is actually quite simple: You. 58% of CEOs identified consumers as the single most important factor driving sustainable business. That’s right, you, the climate-conscious consumer, are driving this marketplace revolution, beating out company employees (45%) and governments (39%).

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As the greatest driving force behind corporate climate action, your consumer choices and voices are felt in revenue streams and heard in corporate board rooms worldwide. Companies spend millions of dollars fine-tuning their brand perception to match consumer wants and needs. 72% of CEOs identified strengthening brand, trust and reputation as the strongest motivator for taking action on sustainability issues. Yet, a disparity exists between the actual sustainable activity of brands, and consumers’ sustainable perception of brands. So how can climate-conscious consumers fix this? Easy. Say something.

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In order to keep these CEOs on their toes, consumers must exercise their muscles and let CEOs know that “climate counts.” Visit www.climatecounts.org to email and tweet companies directly and have your messages land on the table in the next board meeting.

Follow our work on Facebook and Twitter and share our work with your friends.

The devastating and escalating events in the Gulf of Mexico underscore an amazing collection of problems: reliance on polluting energy, absence of a coherent national energy plan, the problems with lax government oversight, and dozens of others. Perhaps most clearly, it shows the gulf we should have seen years ago between the image of BP and the reality of BP.

This spiraling disaster might literally have never happened if BP had made a real and deep commitment to changing more than its logo. Almost 10 years ago, BP – the largest corporation in the UK – spent an extraordinary amount of money and resources on a now infamous rebranding effort ($125 million a year, according to the New York Times) to show its commitment to a world “beyond petroleum.” Branding experts would certainly argue it was money well-spent; for a time, the company became emblematic of the environmental transformation that could occur even within the largest of the world’s businesses and of the ROI that could result when the marketplace rewarded those changes.

Consumers were promised a cultural shift and, to a large degree, bought it. The company was going to remake itself. It was going to become a very high-profile example of how a company with the resources and know-how to profit from 19th-century energy solutions was perfectly positioned to do the same in a 21st century where the realities had changed. The company could be a leader in renewable energy and even transition away from the business of oil extraction. The company could even be positive voice for corporate climate action from an industry sector with a vested interest in increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

It was all a façade.

Unfortunately, the BP case illustrates a glaring example of the disconnect between cynical rebranding efforts designed to shore up the dollars of a growing and loyal green consumer segment and the cold, hard realities of global business. Consumers didn’t get the culture shift they thought they were buying. It’s now clear they saw a company paying the worst kind of lip service to sustainability — while still polluting heavily, while still profiting from the extraction of fossil fuels, while still cutting major corners on safety, while still promising the moon to communities where they did business, while still pouring huge dollars into political campaigns and lobbying designed to win powerful friends of fossil fuel expansion in Congress and in statehouses around the country. BP had played a game of smoke and mirrors. There was no corporate culture shift in “beyond petroleum.” It was cultural disdain. Essentially, the company said, “Who needs to invest in 21st century solutions when people will give us credit whether we’re really leading or not?” The company realized the consumer could be hoodwinked into not asking the hard questions.

When a disaster like this happens, it’s sometimes reassuring to try to find the potential good that can come from it. There is more and more evidence that neither the White House nor the Congress will be using this disaster to issue the necessary clarion call for the new energy future we so desperately need. If we’re lucky, maybe the impact will be largest in deepening both consumer savvy and consumer scrutiny of corporations so that their programs to “go green” have both measurable depth and staying power. Otherwise, we’ll never be far away from being duped again.

Quick note: As an organization annually scoring well-known companies on their efforts to address climate change, Climate Counts made the conscious decision when we launched in 2007 to NOT to score oil & gas companies and automobile manufacturers. In trying to help consumers make more climate-conscious choices when they spend their money, it seemed almost absurd to evaluate companies that had such an inherently profound impact on the climate crisis. Would it really be reasonable to suggest to a consumer, as they drive down the road in a vehicle produced by one of the numerous car makers who’ve fought vehemently against increased fuel efficiency standards, that they are truly more responsible by choosing to buy gasoline from Shell vs ExxonMobil vs Chevron vs ConocoPhillips vs….BP? We chose to opt out of that fool’s errand.

Wood Turner is the executive director of Climate Counts and the founder of the Climate Counts Industry Innovators program.