The Carbonators???

Over the past few weeks I have noticed with increasing curiosity, a series of small green ads appearing in every issue of the Courier and Sunday Mail. The ads poses various questions related to climate change such as ‘Who’ll tackle carbon emissions?’ and ‘Who’ll tackle Geothermal Energy?’ followed by the statement ‘The Carbonators are coming’. No other information is given in the ad and it had my curiosity. It was only on the bus today, on the way to uni, that I came to have an idea what this is all about…

We drove past three cars, painted in ‘The Carbonators’ colours and towing trailers with signs on them identical to the ads I described above…again, no more information given. I came to realise what I have been seeing is a mass viral marketing campaign…for what, I don’t yet know but my guess is a TV series by one of the major TV networks…

Now to why this shitted me off…the fact of the matter is, clearly tens of thousands of dollars is being spent to advertise this (possibly A LOT more if it is something larger than just Brisbane), meaning that whatever it is advertising is obviously planned to make A LOT of money back…Greenwashing? I am beginning to think so… When environmentalism turns into a mass money making exercise, things start going wrong, and these days it seems more and more that big, greedy companies (the media included) are seeing the benefits of supposedly being ‘Green’ and capitalizing on this new environmentalist movement.

In my opinion, if ‘The Carbonators’ really cared about saving the world, then for one they would acknowledge other problems aside from Carbon Emissions (eg. stop driving around in their cars and then ‘offsetting it’) and two, instead of trying to turn a hefty profit from what the public is into at the moment, they could have invested their advertising budget into renewable technologies…I could name at least one off the top of my head that has world changing potential yet can’t get government funding…but of course, at the end of the day what really matters is to be seen to be doing something, even if nothing ever gets done…

As for ‘The Carbonators’…maybe I am judging too early…so we shall wait and see what all this fuss turns out to be…

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