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The Super Bowl Ad That Coke And Pepsi Desperately Don’t Want You To See

By Sy Mukherjee on Feb 1, 2013 at 5:15 pm

This Sunday’s Super Bowl will be punctuated by dozens of ads featuring everything from adorable puppies to kids in Star Wars outfits. But one commercial you won’t see is a provocative ad by the carbonated beverage company SodaStream — an Israeli company that is no stranger to controversy — that takes on soda giants Coca Cola and Pepsi.

That’s because the ad has been pulled after pressure from the mammoth corporations led Super Bowl host CBS to take it down from its programming. Reportedly, Coke and Pepsi were upset with the commercials’ implied criticism of the soda industry’s use of plastic bottles and the subsequent harmful effects on the environment:

CBS rejected the ad, reportedly because of its direct assault on the big two carbonated-beverage makers (CBS didn’t return calls for comment). As the music from the movie Deliverance trills, deliverymen from Coke and Pepsi show up at a supermarket and rush to deliver their products. But the bottles pop and disappear, creating a mess. The ad then pans to a shot of a guy using SodaStream. The implication is that SodaStream will make bottled sodas irrelevant. [...]

Like many upstarts, SodaStream has taken an in-your-face, hyperbolic approach to marketing. The company doesn’t just suggest that SodaStream is a money-saving artisanal device. Rather, it suggests that some of the world’s popular brands (and biggest advertisers) are effectively evil forces. Why? They promote the production of polluting bottles and cans.

“SodaStream empowers consumers to make their own fresh soda at home in seconds, without the devastating environmental impact of plastic soda bottles and cans, which litter our parks and oceans,” said Daniel Birnbaum, the chief executive officer of SodaStream International, in a statement. “Our ad confronts the beverage industry and its arguably out-dated business model by showing people that there exists a smarter way to enjoy soft drinks. One day we will look back on plastic soda bottles the way we now view cigarettes; as a dangerous vice, not as an easily-accepted feature of everyday life.”

Watch the ad here:

Americans throw away enough trash every year to cover the state of Texas — twice. And this isn’t the first time that beverage giants have found themselves in hot water over public health issues. Just last month, Coca Cola launched a deceptive new ad campaign attempting to mask the harmful effects of calorie-laden sodas on America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics.

Climate Progress

Carol Browner On The EPA’s Stricter Protections Against Soot Pollution

By Joe Romm on Dec 14, 2012 at 2:14 pm

The Environmental Protection Agency today finalized tighter public health protections from soot pollution, an important action that will save lives.

Carol M. Browner, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former agency administrator (from 1993 to 2001), released the following statement on the agency’s action:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s air pollution standards are based on the best available science and updates to existing standards based on the new scientific evidence required under the law. We already know soot is a deadly air pollutant that takes tens of thousands of lives every year, increases the rates of heart attacks and lung disease, and exacerbates asthma attacks. And we also know that reducing the levels of soot pollution in the air can reduce these risks. The agency’s updated soot pollution protections will save lives and improve public health.

Opponents of strengthening this important public health standard say it’s not necessary. We’ve heard that before. As with the Environmental Protection Agency’s public health protections against lead in gasoline, acid rain, airborne toxic chemicals, and other pollutants, the industry predicted negative economic impacts. In reality, though, American innovation found a way to meet the standards while contributing new technology and jobs to the economy. We don’t have to choose between a healthy economy and healthy air and lungs. We can have both.

The agency has taken significant steps over the past four years to clean up our air, with new clean car and fuel efficiency standards, new protections against mercury pollution, and now stronger standards to protect us against soot pollution. The Obama administration should be commended for this work and encouraged to continue to fight for cleaner air with protections against carbon pollution from power plants.

As the agency administrator, Browner in 1997 led the charge to tighter the Clean Air Act’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards on acceptable levels of smog and the fine airborne particulate matter that makes up soot. She successfully convinced the Clinton administration to support these stricter air pollution protections and persuaded Congress to accept them. At the time, Browner argued that new air pollution protections against soot and smog “will provide new health protections to 125 million Americans, including 35 million children.” The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the soot and smog protections against legal challenges.

Climate Progress

The Journey From High Schoolers To Climate Leaders In Two Semesters Or Less

By Climate Guest Blogger on Sep 22, 2012 at 10:53 am

by Amanda Peterson, via Climate Access

School is back in session for high schools all across the country and the one thing on every student’s mind is, of course, climate change. OK, maybe in most schools who’s dating whom, getting into college and the elections are getting a bit more play.  But as we, the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), start back up, we’re getting climate change to top of mind, too.

Since 2009, we’ve been working with high schoolers – with an assembly, student action programs and leadership trainings – in climate science and solutions. We’ve reached more than a million high schoolers and seen the first of this generation of leaders step up to tackle some issues that people twice their age are intimidated by.

But since I’ve started at ACE, I’ve heard the question: “Why high schoolers?” or “Can we really wait for high school students to become tomorrow’s leaders, given the window of opportunity on climate change?” more than I ever would have expected.

Sometimes, I cite statistics on how influential high schoolers are on their peers, their family decisions and their schools.

Sometimes, I show videos of students we’ve worked with speaking at Power Shift, taking meetings at the White House, speaking at school board meetings and state assemblies about local environmental issues.

And sometimes I even show the findings that most high school students would fail a test on basic climate science without ACE.

Why we focus on high schoolers is simple.

Read more

Climate Progress

Old Yellow Goes Green: New York School District Will Start Using Electric School Bus

By Tanya Somanader on Feb 1, 2012 at 4:19 pm

As politicians and pundits continue to deny the existence of climate change, one New York school district is not only teaching students about climate science but taking it to the streets. CBS 2 reports that the Plainview-Old Bethpage school district’s yellow buses are going green with a new eco-friendly bus that doesn’t use fuel of any kind but is powered solely by rechargeable batteries. What’s more, they cost the same as the traditional bus but “are quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to maintain”:

The new eco-friendly buses have electric motors, and don’t use fuel of any kind, meaning they don’t produce emissions. Instead they are powered by a network of rechargeable batteries.

The buses cost $100,000, about the same as traditional buses, but they are quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to maintain.

“It doesn’t have a transmission. It has very few moving parts, and the vehicle is charged up overnight when the electric grid is being used the least so it’s off-peak,” said Bart Marksohn of WE Transport Inc.

The district is starting out with a one-bust test run over the next 60 days. If approved, the first electric buses will be on the roads in September 2012. The decision to go green was simple for district officials. As one put it, “In implementing this we’re only echoing what the students are learning — to care about their environment. So we’re just building upon what’s being taught in the classroom on a daily basis.”

Alyssa

Storytelling v. Statistics at Sundance

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 20, 2012 at 6:37 pm

Whatever you thought of Drew Westen’s op-ed earlier this year, he’s an interesting thinker, and I wasn’t surprised (and from the perspective of getting politics and art in conversation with each other, rather gratified) to find him on a panel at Sundance with Sen. Barbara Boxer, Margaret Atwood, and director Mark Kitchell. Fittingly for an event on the power of narrative, Westen said that one of the things his research had uncovered was the extent to which people shut down when you give them statistics about policy issues, while stories kept their minds opened.

“In Florida, over 10 percent of the homes have been foreclosed. When you say something like that, it’s an interesting thing…But it doesn’t tend to draw the feeling that a story would draw,” he argued. “It means one in ten parents in Florida has gone to their child and said ‘I’m sorry, this isn’t your room any more.’… Unconsciously, it is extremely difficult to live with the idea that the world is unjust…we all know victims of diseases, and catastrophes, but to live in a world where we honestly believe that things are capricious and things just happen and there’s nothing you can do about it is a really awful place to be…Never talk about the unemployed. Because when you talk about the unemployed, you take real people with pain-lined faces, and you turn them into a nameless, faceless abstraction…People start to go with the just world hypothesis, and asking ‘what did he do to lose his job?’”

Obviously, I don’t think this means that you should never use statistics in policy discourse: we don’t do private bills in the United States, and you’ve got to prove the magnitude of a problem in addition to its emotional impact on a single person. But I wonder if it makes sense to start with stories, and then hit folks with the numbers? Or does that risk overwhelming listeners with emotions that they can’t accept exist on a large scale because it’s simply too much to process?

In any case, I think there’s no question that structuring narratives is critically important to give people a hook into issues. And while humans may be the most effective protagonists, there are other ways to set up drama. Mark Kitchell, the director and producer of environmental documentary A Fierce Green Fire pointed out that telling a story doesn’t always require that narrative to be character-driven, or driven by a single main character. I’d argue that March of the Penguins did perhaps the best job I’ve ever seen, outside of Pixar movies, of creating non-human protagonists and creating drama out of its protagonists’ struggle to reproduce. It didn’t need a baroque villain: the forces at work were unfamiliar enough to most people to be dramatic standing on their own.

Climate Progress

Alliance for Climate Education: A Million Students and the Power of Awesome

By Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 11, 2011 at 8:34 am

by Pic Walker

Climate change is the biggest challenge of our lifetime.

At the Alliance for Climate Education, we use the power of awesome—awesome storytelling, awesome visuals, awesome presenters, awesome carbon-cutting projects—to inspire youth to take action on climate change while building habits for a lifetime and creating the will to change. Doom and gloom scenarios don’t inspire everyone, especially the younger generation.  Accordingly, ACE strives to inject fun and excitement around everything we do, to make beating climate change, gulp, awesome.

This week, we’re celebrating reaching 1,000,000 high school students nationwide with our award-winning assembly on climate science and solutions. It’s an awesome accompishment for an organization that has been around less than 3 years.  Best of all, our assembly works—it contributes to a 58% improvement in climate science understanding, according to 2010 survey with Chicago Public Schools, and 97% of teachers rate the ACE experience better than other high school assembly programs.

Take a look at our short assembly trailer to see how the power of awesome has helped ACE become the national leader in climate science education.
Read more

Alyssa

How Not To Do Environmentalism For Kids In ‘The Lorax’ Movie

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 2, 2011 at 2:51 pm

David Roberts unleashes a righteous rant on the disaster that looks like it will be a new adaptation of The Lorax:

While I agree with a lot of David’s criticism, including of the transition of the Lorax to a comedic figure, the personification of evil in a way that doesn’t require collective blame, and the insult to children’s intelligence, but I’d be curious to hear his thoughts on a couple of questions.

1) Collective responsibility is an important principle, but isn’t identifying specific villains also sometimes necessary? As with the financial crisis, there’s space between the “we’re all to blame” perspective and the “Bernie Madoff is the sole villain” view that’s pervading popular culture. Someone like Don Blankenship is uniquely evil, and worth calling out specifically, both for his environmental degradation of the Appalachians and for his disgusting record of disdain for his workers’ rights and safety. Does it make sense to draw general principals from specific examples, to illustrate a web of environmental interconnectedness? Villains can be a hook, rather than a distraction.

2) When it comes to kids, what should our asks or action items be? Getting children to start making responsible choices when it comes to sustainability, reusability, and the environment is important, but when they don’t have that much consuming power, what should the message be? I don’t think the overall framing of the movie is brilliant, but the idea that it wants to communicate a sense of wonder about a natural world kids may take for granted is not a bad one.

3) How do we draw the balance between respecting children’s intelligence and overwhelming them? If I read The Lorax to a young child, I’m not sure I’d expect them to get the argument that the vanished trees are an anchor species for the ecosystem. Instead, I’d focus on a sense of wonder and inherent value for the trees themselves. But if anyone here has a better grasp of early childhood education and elementary learning than I do, I’d be curious as to your thoughts on when these kinds of concepts are likely to stick and how we achieve that balance. At the end of the day, this is a mass market entertainment. I’m eager to respect children and young adults, and deeply appreciative of fiction that does. But I think the best tends to work at different levels for readers of different ages and often to reward re-reading, so I’m curious as to where folks thinks we might most productively aim certain messages.

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