More on Deceptive Green Advertising

After General Electric launched their "sexy", yet misleading clean coal commercial, the AdRants blog delivers a surgical analysis of the series (a commenter noted that the background song is Merle Travis's "16 Tons", a story lamenting the oppressed miner) and then finds another questionable advertisement.

The latter has ExxonMobil touting their steam recapture technology as key in reducing greenhouse admissions. While you do make a difference any time you can recover energy and so displace fossil fuel from the carbon cycle, they over-exaggerate the effect this has on total emissions. So-called second-order effects never really add up to much. The first-order effect of generating the steam predominates.

With all the money the energy companies have started to rake in via high oil prices, I predict we will see many, many more of these self-serving public-relation-style ads.