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GE ad campaign "NOW" misses the mark

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Superficial would not be the right word to describe the innovative ad campaign, called "NOW", that GE launched on February 1, 2009 to promote, primarily, its energy business under the ecomaginationTM brand. Perhaps a better word is oversimplified.

Take a look for yourself at PlugIntoTheSmartGrid.com, then tell me how you felt about the amount of substance you got for the time and bandwidth you spent walking through GE's eye-candy-filled PR wonderland.

Don't get me wrong: there is a huge element of good in what GE is promoting, and GE's web design firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners has kicked ass at making it shiny. Someone with a bigger design budget then me needs to do that every once in a while; I'm glad GE did.

Now to the criticism. GE's message is too simple and too cheery to do any more than sell product. While that is surely GE's goal (after all, they are in the business of making money), the side-effect of this particular campaign is the blithe and irresponsible pacification of the public. The implication that if we follow GE and tell our governments and utility companies to adopt GE technology, all will be well, is, sadly and painfully for us, misleading.

I'm not all criticism, however. I can't argue with GE's three key messages, that we need to look into "smart grid" technologies in its various forms:

  1. Better energy demand management (implemented in GE's world by 2-way smart meters and smart appliances),
  2. Higher voltage, longer distance transmission lines to better move capacity around the country, and
  3. Alternative energy, such as wind.
My concern comes down to this: with the budget GE has surely spent on this campaign, the least they could have done was mention that this is only the beginning of a long, painful slog toward energy efficiency and, maybe, eventually, sustainability.

Why do I criticize so? Why do I care? Because if George Monbiot's well-researched book on global warming, Heat, is right, we can't afford to tolerate high-profile pacifying messages. The "smart grid", as GE envisions it, will be necessary, but it will also be ridiculously insufficient to address the global warming problem. Cuts in energy consumption need to be far more aggressive and far more sweeping than GE seems ready to accept. Only the government can make that happen, and even then not through subsidies but through (presently unpopular) taxes on carbon emissions.

Perhaps it's time to stand up to the greenwash and demand something better, if not from GE then at least from our legislators. As long as the prices of carbon-based fuels do not reflect their true long-term costs on civilization, no amount of ecomaginationTM is going to solve the global warming problem.

Can we really leave thought leadership up to a megacorporation that makes money from both heavily-subsidized wind farms and CO2-belching airliner engines?

P.S. For a thorough, yet managably-sized gloss of Monbiot's book, see Part 1 and Part 2 blog posts by Dave Pollard.

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