Total Greenwash - NOT a Green Thing

Another load of total nonsense from Total's lame "our energy is your energy" advertising campaign trying the 'we're all in it together' position on for size.

"Imagine if confronting climate change and solving energy needs were inseparable" they muse. Not much to imagine since these two issues are obviously inextricably linked.The problem is, while posing the question they seem mostly focused on business as usual. Which makes these kind of environmental claims or associations  irrelevant and distracting greenwash.

It would be helpful if an oil firm like Total told us exactly what percentage of money and resource they're spending on developing clean energy solutions and how they're planning to help us all move away from the fossil fuel economy to tackle climate change.

The use of micro-homilies like "Common Interest" (note the 'Co' stylised / highlighted to connect with Co2 - purlease) is all related to the idea of "deep framing" which I'm going to a very interesting session about today organised by behavious change strategist Tom Compton of the WWF.

'Frames' are the conceptual models and perspectives we all have which act as the lens through which we see the world. As cognitive linguist George Lakoff (who, rather excitingly, will be video conferencing into this WWF session) notes, “all words are defined relative to frames”. So when Total uses phrases like "our energy is your energy" and "common purpose" they're activating emotional mental circuitry that makes us perceive them a certain way.

In other words: they are part of us - and we're all trying to work out this climate change problem together - rather than one of world's largest oil companies with an order of magnitude greater authority, power and responsibility to confront climate change than any individual citizen or consumer.

Interesting stuff, I'll report back later....

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