I loved this photo taken by Desmond Louw on his iPhone in Cape Town and posted to Instagram:

Click here to follow Desmond on Twitter.

Click here to view his Instagram photos online on Webstagram.

The definition of greenwashing, from Wikipedia:

“Greenwashing (a portmanteau of “green” and “whitewash”) is a term describing the deceptive use of green PR or green marketing in order to promote a misleading perception that a company’s policies or products (such as goods or services) are environmentally friendly. The term green sheen  has similarly been used to describe organizations that attempt to show that they are adopting practices beneficial to the environment.”

For a good account of this being used to its absolute maximum, have a look at Popular Mechanics October 2010 issue:

Nice one Total.

Do you really think readers of Popular Mechanics are that stupid? What is green about petrol again?

Dax from Relax-With-Dax posted a little something on Twitter today that I replied to, saying that this whole Chevron campaign was just corporate bulls%&t. Because let’s be honest, it is.

We always hear about oil companies and car companies going green, and I see it a lot with BMW. They have their Efficient Dynamics or whatever they’re calling it, but anyone driving a BMW will tell you that it is hardly fuel efficient. Sure on the open road it might do decently, but then again, most cars do pretty well on the open road. The fact is, you don’t drive from Hermanus to Cape Town to work every day, in perfect conditions with no traffic. You drive from within Cape Town, or whichever city you live in, and you get stuck in monumental amounts of traffic. A Smart car does well in these conditions.

A BMW? Hardly fuel efficient. A Mercedes? Hardly fuel efficient. Even with their ‘Blue Efficiency’ program. Remember, if you want to make something eco-friendly, just add in nice colors like blue and green and SHAZAM! You’re saving the world…

Look at the blue and green, look how eco-friendly it is!

And even when they are fuel efficient (compared to past models), they’re actually not fuel efficient. That’s like a fat person of 200kg’s saying they’re thin when they drop 50kg’s to 150kg’s. They’re still fat. In the same way that cars are still fuel guzzlers.

And these companies don’t care. If they REALLY cared, they’d stop selling sedans with 3L engines that basically need their own oil well pumping to sustain them. If they really cared they’d sell their cars with much smaller engines. But they don’t care. Well actually they do care…about profits. I want my car to be fuel efficient in that it uses 4-5litres per 100km’s around town. That would mean something to me. These other marketing scams can please just leave me alone, I’m not stupid. And nether are all of you.

The corporate world always strikes me as odd…with all the billions of dollars that they make, they never seem to make great inroads into improving the world. Because they’re too busy improving their small little bubble of a world. It is always up to the mavericks and the entrepeneurs to come in and make real change. Take Elon Musk as an example.

(On a side, don’t mention this name to anyone as STANDARD BANK CAVENDISH SQUARE. I was there last week asking for a verification code from PayPal on my statement. The teller had absolutely no idea what PayPal was. Astonishing)

Elon Musk is a South African born entrepreneur, who set up PayPal. He sold that and made a good few million dollars. He set Up Space X (Ok, not quite the most planet friendly move) and also Tesla Motors who are way ahead of anyone else when it comes to electric cars. If big oil companies like BP and Shell really wanted to change the world, they could invest some of their billions in electric car technology. They could, but they don’t care.

Because electric cars don’t run on their energy source. And in the future they may not even run on coal fired power stations, they may run on wind energy. And this is not oil, their business.

So they don’t care.

So whatever you read anywhere, in TIME magazine (Where oil companies love taking out adverts) or anywhere else, don’t believe it. Fuel companies tell you that their fuels are cleaner and more efficient, and car companies tell you that their cars are efficient.

Do your homework, because it’s a corporate world, designed to make you feel good (I’m going green!) while sweeping the real issues under the mat (The environment is dead, the oil is running out)

If oil companies really cared, they wouldn’t be pumping oil. They’d be building wind farms and solar plants.

Simple as that.

And no, it’s not because I don’t care about the environment, it’s because I’m sick and tired of hearing opinions and ideas from stupid people.

Do you want to know something? Some 113 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf Of Mexico (According to THIS). At 42 gallons to the barrel, I believe this to be 269000 barrels of oil (Seriously correct me if I’m wrong, my maths is horrendous!)

You want to know more? Yesterday the world consumed some 85 million barrels of oil. Today we’ll do the same. Tomorrow we’ll continue. For the rest of our lives we’ll be consuming this, maybe more if we can, until we run out of oil. So we stress about spilling oil into the ocean, but we’re completely fine with burning our way through 85 million barrels of oil.

EVERY.

SINGLE.

DAY.

Its classic of the human race, to want to blame somebody, instead of admitting to being part of the problem. We’re suddenly forgetting about all the other petroleum companies wasting the environment away. We forget that every aspect of our lives is dominated, and run by oil. We forget about all the plastic and chemicals we pump into the environment. We forget that the synthetic dyes from our clothing gets washed into the environment. Things like thinners, turps, paint…when painters are done, what do they do? Wash it down the drain. Into the land and sea.

We’re as much to blame as BP. No one is in the clear. We’re all the problem.

And what pisses me off the most is the celebrities coming out to boycott BP. Like we care what some stupid person with lots of money has to say. FFSakes, it’s an environmental crisis, not a marketing opportunity. Shut up and do something about it. Don’t use your name, I don’t care that you’re Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber. You know nothing about the real problems in the world, because you’re so consumed by your fake world.

You want to know something else? All that plastic and shit you throw in the street, you know where that ends up? In the ocean, killing wildlife, but the press don’t care about that too much. They don’t care about it, because no one can see it. It’s not visible as a dirty black oil slick covering the wildlife so it can’t be bad. Google “North Pacific Gyre” and you will see what I mean. Or we can have a quick look at this video:

The quality isn’t great, but it gets the message across. Also read THIS piece on Greenpeace to explain it a little more.

Also, a couple of Google searches landed me at a nice round number. One billion. Around 1 billion tons of pesticides are used every year. Oh wait…that’s only in the US.

So while it is great that every single tool on the planet is blaming BP, I think we really need to take a look at the situation, and realise that it’s not important. Our opinions don’t matter, because the environment can’t hear us. The only time it will hear us, is when we stop abusing it.

So stop using the BP oil spill to blame someone, and stop using it to promote your brand.

Stand up, get out, and do something. Until then,  kindly shut up.

UPDATE: In response to this being retweeted, please also support the ROSE Foundation who collect used oil. Never, ever throw used motor oil down the drain, because then you’re doing the same as BP…and what’s the point in that?

Click here for the ROSE Foundation website.

Let’s all turn off our lights tomorrow, it’s just for an hour and the awareness raised is phenomenal. Every bit helps.

Just click the banner on the right to find out everything you need to know.

Because the planet needs more love!

You always think that a website like Treehugger, owned by Discovery and getting 10 million pageviews per month and 3,500,000 unique visitors per month, would be run by some automated dudes. But they’re real! Check what went down on Twitter between me and them:

Rad! Showing some humour there from the green brigade, I like that.

I was reading this site called SuperEco right now, and was on an article about SIGG bottles actually containing something called Bisphenol-A which is apparently bad for you. It can’t be as bad as the shots of brake fluid we used to do back in college. Anyway.

As you know, Google ads are focused around what you are writing about and pick up on keywords and stuff like that, so a site like SuperEco would obviously only like eco things to be advertised. They’re saying that this Bisphenol-A stuff is bad, and yet they’re advertising it!

The ad says “Looking for bisphenol? Visit our marketplace”

Awesome!

So let’s say you were running a Christian website, talking about pre-marital sex. The chances are Google would pick up on ‘sex’ and start advertising whores.

Nice!

Me and Julio, smoking crack down by the church yard.

Check out that post over here . Chances are the ad will show for you too.

Now you must understand how I chill. I’m not one of those guys that is all like “Yeah I’m chilling” when he writes an sms, but meanwhile back at the ranch he is sitting down to a meal with the bird. No…that’s not me. I’m the lone wolf and I will do whatever I want, whenever I want. When I say I’m chilling, I am maxing the hell out to an insane level of sickie woo-ness.

So I’m chilling drinking coffee that is scorching hot. I like it scorching hot because I drink it naked, and the possibility of hot coffee spilling on me jewels makes me a little bit more aware of my surrounding which helps with ADD. It helps me focus.

So if your kid has ADD, then make him/her/it drink hot coffee naked. It’ll do wonders.

The other benefit of drinking coffee naked is that, should a model suddenly walk in, you’ll already be kit off, and the caffeine will give you the necessary boost. And you can rub the sugar on her tits, if only to call her sugar tits.

I find it semi to fully arousing the way I start writing on something and then lose my way and end up down the path, sometimes ending up on the landing strip.

So I’m stirring my coffee with my johnson and then suddenly, you know, a few hours have gone by and I cannot for the life of me recall why I started to write this in the first place. The title reads “Refillable pens for the planet”

I’m always weary of mentioning myself naked, because I always get undesirables approaching me asking if I can go to dinner with them, or they can just buy me a drink, or just sleep with me. This riff-raff does not fit in with the lifestyle, because to approach me, you must have at least clocked in 4 hours of exercise and no carbs in a day. No easy feat even for your average bulimia/anorexia patient.

Ok so there we were, on the subject of pens.  It amazes me how many people complement me on my handwriting (It’s neat,but does have some days off) and I put that down to the fact that every day of my life, I do some sort of writing that does not involve a computer. I’ll write in my diary, scribble notes, ideas and scenes in pencil, write stories in pen and generally take a bit of time to be away from the electronics.

I’ve always found something personal in writing, like an artist painting with a brush, or a songwriter actually sitting down and writing a song, and not simply playing with buttons on a computer. If you read old letters from a war, or from any important point in history, the words on those pieces of paper convey as much of the message as the state of the paper. The watermarks, dirt, the way it was written, the emotion penned into each word. This is something that we will never capture on computers.

We have future generations growing up without really knowing what it’s like to receive hand written letters. They will never know what it’s like to receive that hand written note, steeped with feelings and personality.

So where possible I try to keep a bit of an old school vibe to my writing, using pencils and fountain pens.

The Lamy Fountain Pen

Inadvertently, using a refillable pen does have it’s benefits to the planet. Because you’re just buying the refill cartridge, you’re saving a whole load of materials used to make an entire disposable pen. Then there is also less packaging to keep that new disposable pen in, such as cardboard and plastic.

But more importantly, a pen is something that every person of class should have. And not just any pen, something of quality. Many people say the watch has become obsolete with the invention of cellphones, but only the poor, weak and plebbish crowd say that.

Trust me, a good watch, a fine pair of leather shoes and a quality crafted pen have a lot to say about a person. Keep that in mind!

I’m rolling a Lamy fountain pen, and unbelievably, five refill cartridges only cost R30. This is rather cheap I would say. Coupled with some killer Moleskine notebooks, and I’m ready to roll.

Box of 5 refills — R30…even good in the recession

Next time you look at a person of stature, look at their watch and pen. You’ll notice that all successful people have a taste for lifes finer things, and we can all afford to do better with our pens.

Carry a quality pen with you wherever you go, it’s a deal maker. Would you trust a man in a baggy suit with a BIC click pen? No, because that would be an estate agent starting out in the business.

That’s not what you want.

Lamy available at Pen & Art in Cape Town.

Check them out at Cavendish Square and the V&A Waterfront.

Sean Lloyd

Editor