Green Doesn't Sell -- Which Should Be Good Since Greens Don't Really Care About Anything But Controling Everything

Last week, The New York Times noted that the advertising industry is pulling back from green-themed marketing, having “grasped the public’s growing skepticism over ads with environmental messages.

And advertisers’ concerns are buttressed by the recent sales figures for magazines that have published a “Green Issue” this year. Time’s Earth Day issue was the newsweekly’s third-lowest-selling issue of 2008 so far, according to ABC Rapid Report. A typical issue of Time sells 93,000 or so copies on the newsstand; the April 28 installment, which substituted green for red in the magazine’s trademarked cover design, sold only 72,000.

Elle’s May issue sold a mere 275,000 copies, versus the title’s year-to-date average of 328,500. The last issue of Elle to sell that badly was in May 2008—another green issue, probably not coincidentally.

Discover also published a green issue this year, and also took a hit for it, selling 86,000 newsstand copies, compared to an average of 117,000 in the first half of 2007. (Discover doesn’t participate in Rapid Report.)

The only magazine that didn’t take a bath on its green issue was Vanity Fair, which reported 370,000 single copy sales for May, only a little below its year-to-date average of 375,666.

Portifolio

A technological breakthrough might just allow CO2 to be "scrubbed" from the atmosphere. This from the Guardian:

It has long been the holy grail for those who believe that technology can save us from catastrophic climate change: a device that can "suck" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, reducing the warming effect of the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas produced each year.

Now a group of US scientists say they have made a breakthrough towards creating such a machine. Led by Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University in New York, they plan to build and demonstrate a prototype within two years that could economically capture a tonne of CO2 a day from the air, about the same per passenger as a flight from London to New York.

The prototype so-called scrubber will be small enough to fit inside a shipping container. Lackner estimates it will initially cost around £100,000 to build, but the carbon cost of making each device would be "small potatoes" compared with the amount each would capture, he said.

You would think that this would be an environmentalists wet dream. The perfect solution to their problem! Turns out...not so much. This from the National Center for Policy Analysis:

While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists oppose the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place.

Doesn't that go to the heart of the agenda of the environmentalists? They're not really interested in solutions, just control. People shouldn't be able to emit carbon whether it has an effect on the environment or not.

Conservative Punk