Completely Carbonated

Completely Carbonated

by [email]William
Bowles[/email]
•

Thursday, July 5, 2007 12:45

Completely Carbonated ?attid=0

Well
it’s started, in fact it’s more than started and it’s
driving me mad. You know what I’m talking about, my fucking
‘carbon footprint’! Every time I hear the phrase, which is
every damn day, it really pisses me off.
‘Carbon
footprint’ is the new Osama, the new bogie man with which to
frighten the kids. And as the campaign gathers speed, awful things happen
to your mind; the ‘green virus’ infects you, there is no
escape.
So last night
I was in the kitchen getting a meal together and I had to open a new
packet of spices and as I poured it into a container and then dumped the
empty carton into the garbage can a strange feeling came over me; I was
thinking about the fate of the empty carton.
Then I
realised that it wasn’t the first time I’d been
‘possessed’ by the feeling whenever I threw out the crap my
food comes packaged in. Bottles, wrapping, cans, every piece of junk
mail,
evokes the feeling that I’m fucking up the planet, even the stuff
that goes into the orange recycling bag (who knows what really happens to
it?).
But this is
how it works isn’t it, once the media gets its hands on ‘my
carbon footprint’, I’m buggered. Slowly but surely it worms
its way into my consciousness. It’s not just the dedicated
programming on ‘greening’ my life, every damn news broadcast
has at least one piece on ‘what I can do’ to save the
planet.
And it
works, no matter how insulated you think you are from the predations of
the media, engineered guilt worms its way into your mind. Every piece of
garbage on the street; every time you see someone drop something, you
want
to tackle them (and get whacked for the privilege of ‘doing my
bit’? Not likely).
The thing is
this, it’s no bad thing to having our streets clean (people tell me
that London is one of the dirtiest capital cities in the world) and
it’s also true that the sheer volume of packaging our food and such
comes packed in is ridiculous. This is what makes the ‘green’
propaganda campaign almost impossible to resist.
The point is
however, that all of it entirely misses the target and deliberately so,
for the objective is to shift the responsibility away from the economics
of capitalism onto our shoulders whilst we stay loyal consumers,
we’ll just consume ‘green’ crapola instead the usual
crapola. And as predicted awhile back by yours truly, every damn product
is now selling itself as ‘green’, even car
insurance.
It’s
one, giant con job and one of the major culprits is the BBC with its
endless series of programmes on how ‘we’ can save the planet
but not a one of them will actually raise the issue of the economics of
capitalism being intrinsic to the problem, that unless this is dealt
with,
we’re buggered.
Earnest men
with handlebar moustaches, invade our homes armed with meters to measure
our electricity consumption, dig holes in the backyard to put our crap
in,
and all of it without mentioning the ‘c’ word.
Look they
mean
well these ‘green crusaders’, that’s part of the
problem,
for them it’s fun being green and it pays well too. Books and DVDs
follow in rapid succession, in fact an entirely new industry is born and
all the ‘new’ products that go with it.
Every year
tens of thousands, if not millions of ‘new’ products hit the
market, most don’t make it beyond one year before being consigned
to
the dustbin of market failures for one reason or another. And no matter
whether the product is made of ‘sustainable’ materials and
processes or not, the sheer volume of raw materials consumed is
absolutely
necessary to the continuance of capitalism. Capital must
reproduce
itself and every market has a limit to what it can consume before it
becomes saturated and a ‘new’ product has to be produced and
a
new market created for it.
It’s a
self-perpetuating system with millions of jobs at stake, not to mention
profits. Everything is interlocked and inter-dependent. Without our
increasing consumption returns on investments diminish, the stockholders
complain and new ways have to be found to keep the rate of return
increasing. This means finding new markets, reducing the cost of
production, inventing new products, ad infinitum.
How to counter
this avalanche of capitalist ‘green’ propaganda? The latest
Medialens piece illustrates to some degree the problem that
confronts us. Titled ‘Melting Ice Sheets And Media Contradictions - An Exchange
With George Monbiot’ reveals the contradictions inherent in
capitalism allegedly trying to heal itself and the planet.
Monbiot is one
of the very few anti-capitalist writers with access to the corporate
media, principally the Guardian. The problem, as
Medialens points out, is that Monbiot’s essays are
immersed
in advertising; for cars, air travel, booze, etc, aimed mainly at the
‘jet-set’.[1]

“Doesn't this make a mockery of the Guardian's claims to
be responding to climate change? Is it really credible to expect a
newspaper dependent on corporate advertising for 75 per cent of its
revenue to seriously challenge the corporate system of which it's a part
and on which it depends? Why don't you discuss this inherent
contradiction
in your journalism? … [Monbiot doesn’t] discuss this inherent
contradiction in [his] journalism? … [that] the news reports,
comment pieces and adverts that surround your work powerfully reinforce a
“pathology of normalcy” and prevent people from seeing the
pathology for what it is.””

Medialens goes on,

“Isn't
it vitally important that this structural problem of the corporate mass
media system be exposed? Doesn't your silence on this issue indicate the
very real limits of free speech in our ‘free
press’?”

Monbiot agrees
but suggests that “alternative” sources of revenue be found
for the corporate media and invites people to send him suggestions. The
problem with the idea of “alternatives” is that it
doesn’t matter what is advertised, whether
‘green’ or not, advertising and the corporate media are one
and the same thing, abolish one and effectively you abolish the other. In
other words, advertising is intrinsic to the corporate press, there are
no
alternatives unless one pays for the actual cost of a newspaper, which
few
would be prepared to do. The very nature of the corporate media
is determined in the first place by its reliance on advertising; it
defines its choice of what is ‘news’ and how events are
covered, to expect anything else is self-delusion.
Medialens notes that the Guardian has an
online adverts-free edition, at a cost of course, but fails to point out
that the content of this edition has already made a profit from
advertising! Effectively, online versions of print media are a license to
print money, all that happens is that the content has been repackaged and
sold again (and again …). One way or the other, corporate
media are totally dependent on advertising as the major source of revenue
regardless of where it comes from.
Quite
correctly, Medialens points out that supporting independent,
non-corporate media is one answer but we know the problems that confront
such enterprises. And it doesn’t address the issue of our being
immersed in an ocean of capitalist propaganda, not only the corporate
press and state-run media but local councils, the education system, and
of
course central government and business, have all jumped on the
bandwagon.
‘Fighting
global warming’ has become the leitmotiv of New Labour (after the
‘war on terror’) but obviously it excludes the central
contradiction of the relationship between climate change and our economic
system.
But it goes
much further than the issue of climate change, for all climate change has
done is reveal the contradictions of capitalist economics which is why
for
the government and business, it's vital that there be no exposure of the
connection between the two.
To some
degree,
it can be argued that the issue of climate change actually masks the
central problem by diverting attention away from the essential nature of
the economics of capitalism which is why the central propaganda message
is
what you can do about your carbon footprint'. And so far the
campaign has been eminently successful in passing the buck. Who amongst
us
and aware of the issue, hasn't felt what I feel every time an empty
carton
is tossed away? Note
1. “Over
the last 12 months, the GNM [Guardian News and Media] total audience
accounted for:

“20% of all champagne drunk. One in six of all city breaks taken.
One in five Acorn ‘Urban Prosperity’. £1 in every
£7 spent on computer hardware or software. 1/6 of all MP3 player
expenditure.” (http://www.adinfo-guardian.co.uk/display/research/total-audience/total-audience-facts.shtml)

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