Bob and his flashlight

A couple of weeks ago if someone had told me that I was going to be blogging about Bob Costas I would have assumed that it would be about my longstanding distaste for the man. Let’s face it – he takes himself way too seriously. Costas has almost single-handedly made prime-time Olympics unwatchable for the past twenty years, and he leads a football highlights show that is laughable and frustrating and light years behind the other networks’ products.

It was about a year ago to this day that millions of people across the US and Canada joined me in lambasting smug little Costas. That was the day that Bob and his NBC colleagues decided to try one of the most blatant and embarrassing examples of greenwashing that I have ever seen. In order to promote the launch of their 2007 Green Week, Costas and his crew of Sunday Night Football commentators did their half-time show in a darkened studio (save for a few romantic candles). While they pledged that they were conserving energy by turning off the studio lights, they forgot to deal with the vast array of video monitors surrounding the set that were lit up like Christmas trees. Viewers were even treated to the fun of watching Costas play around with a flashlight with his fellow commentators.

And to top it off, they went for a special report to Matt Lauer who was stationed somewhere near the Arctic Circle for a piece on global warming. There was Lauer, surrounded by husky dogs in a bright generator-fed spotlight on the frozen tundra. I was left thinking – how much jet fuel, generator fuel and other resources were wasted so that we could have three minutes of Matt Lauer reporting an incredibly weak and uninformative report?

With that lengthy introduction, now you can imagine my surprise as I was watching Costas and friends announce their 2008 Green Week and it was actually well done! I usually ignore the NBC halftime crew for all of the reasons mentioned above, but I perked up this past week when I heard them go into their Green Week talk. How could I not after last year’s debacle? I was actually hoping that they would do the show in total darkness so that I would not have to see Costas and his friends. Alas, for this year’s Green Week they worked in a fully-lit studio, but the panel discussed the choices that they have made in their own lives to make a positive impact on the environment. This was actually interesting and informative. I think it is awesome that Jerome Bettis’ family washes their clothes in cold water – hopefully a lot more people do it now too. Usually Keith Olbermann is difficult to stomach, but it is great that he told America that he has stopped drinking from disposable water bottles.

NBC’s Green Week 2008 helped to promote the message that my wife Jenni and I have been trying to spread through our blogs and the upcoming Kuzuka website – that small manageable steps can make a difference. So this week I tip my cap to my old nemesis Bob Costas and his crew. They have a difficult time putting together a quality football broadcast, but they seem to be getting the hang of how to do an informative and fun Green Week show.

A couple of weeks ago I finally towed my 1974 VW Beetle from my dad’s garage to my house a couple of hours away. The old VW has been sitting in dad’s garage for well over ten years so we are very excited to have it back - now I just have to get it running again!

I rented a tow dolly from U-Haul to get the VW back to my place, and I was exposed to an interesting marketing gimmick that U-Haul is using to jump on the ‘green bandwagon’. There was a sticker on the tow dolly that said “Towing Reduces Carbon Emissions”. I question this claim for a couple of reasons:

• A lot of towed cars are disabled, like my VW. If a car is disabled, the tow dolly is not responsible for reduced carbon emissions. Emissions are reduced because the vehicle is disabled, which is temporary in most cases

• If a towed car is not disabled, often it is being pulled by a massive RV on a cross-country trip. The car is unloaded to zip around more easily at the various stops along the way. If the tow dolly is used for this purpose, should they really be claiming to be reducing emissions? The much better way to reduce emissions in this scenario is to leave the RV at home and take the car on the road trip instead.

There is actually a new word for this kind of questionable marketing - greenwashing. While greenwashing doesn’t have an entry in Merriam-Webster’s yet, it is defined in Wikipedia as “… a term that is used to describe the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.”

And don’t think that U-Haul is the only company guilty of this - they just happen to be one that I had a direct interaction with recently. In reality there is so much greenwashing occurring out there that I could probably fill a thick book with different examples. Just be aware of the trend and make your own judgment call as to whether a company or their products are really as green as they claim to be. Here are a few other websites that can help you out:

http://www.greenwashingindex.com/

http://www.greenwashing.net/

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sustainability/greenwash/