How much can you lie in media
Lying is a part of humanity, I could never say that lying is always wrong, but lying for the love of money is certainly immoral, criminal, and wrong in the deepest sense.
Public Relations is, in essence, the interface between business and media. Businesses need to be covered by media and media needs to cover business. PR is the business of making sure the connection is the very best it can be for both the businesses and the media. The businesses want a flattering portrayal, the media wants to get eyeballs and ears.
The sad state of affairs has developed that PR will say whatever is necessary so long as it meets those two criteria, without any consideration with accuracy or truth. The media can publish without checking facts or even confirming plausibility, attributing the story to the PR organization. The PR organization exists solely to effect their client’s wishes and to take the brunt of any criticism. And yet I will criticize, if only briefly. Why waste my time with more?
“Charities”, “studies”, and “truth”
New Scientist’s environmental news feed published a story from a charity called Global Action Plan about how, among other things, computers produce as much carbon as SUVs, and are going to grow to take over the aviation industry. Nothing in their study is accurate: neither the bases nor the conclusions. And yet, to read their study it looks like a legitimate one and startling numbers jump out of it. And yet each one is carefully attributed, just as one would expect in a normal study, but the attribution serves to obscure the facts even further allowing Global Action Plan to pass along the blame to whomever they harvesting these ridiculous claims from.
Among the claims:
- Servers require as much energy as a 15 MPG SUV. According to CarbonNeutral, a carbon offset seller. Certainly they have ulterior motives. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as if it were 15 MPG SUVs would need only a 400 peak watt gas generator and an electric motor, because that’s how much power a server uses. Unfortunately even a Prius has 50000 peak watts so I doubt you could even get it rolling, let along keep it rolling. Further, if we were to plug a computer in to car the engine would die if it were anything less than a beefy SUV, unable to support the demands of the computer. The reality is that the lights on the car consumes more than a computer, to say nothing of actually making the car go anywhere.
- Servers require as much energy to cool them as they consume directly. This is simply misleading, everything requires as much energy to cool it as it consumes directly, be it a computer, a car, a tree, or a person. It’s physics. Energy in means you have to take the same energy out or it will be hotter.
- World paper consumption has office paper consumption has doubled since the PC was introduced. And productivity, not the idea you have in your head of “doing stuff”, but real measurable economic productivity has quadrupled. So we’re doing more with less paper. Where do productivity gains come from? Technology.
- Data storage shipped in 2006 increased by 48% from the previous year and global airline passengers increased by 3%. What do these two numbers have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing. But they abut a sentence stating that the “global IT sector” accounts for 2% of CO2 emissions, the same as the “global airline sector”. They suggest that IT will therefore increase emissions by 48% while airlines increase it by a paltry 3%. Unfortunately they cannot say it outright because it is patently false: we got that extra storage for free (in carbon terms)! It came on the same size disk, it costs the same as a disk storing half as much, and it consumes the same or less power than it did last year. Every passenger causes the emission of extra carbon so growth in airline traffic causes equal growth in emissions, while growth in data storage causes none at all.
- The “global IT sector” accounts for 2% of all carbon emissions. If we divide things this way, we count everything several times over. When airlines use computers, it counts for both airlines and IT. When carmakers use them it counts for both. If a human resources worker at Ford is using a computer in Detroit while surfing for nailcare products, then HR, cars, Michigan, and beauty all take the hit? Have these people ever heard of accounting? If airlines account for only 2%, where’s the other 98% coming from? There don’t appear to be any studies disclosing that.
I won’t continue but here is one amazing conclusion: The aforementioned imaginary link existing in the hopeless minds at Global Action Plan between “storing data” and “using energy” means that if businesses store less data, they will use less energy. Therefore Britain’s ID card scheme will cause not just less privacy for those involved some sort of carbon emission, which requires a “a carbon analysis of putting ID cards into our country” according to the group’s director.
Oh, but who could do such an important study for us? Why none other than Global Action Plan themselves!!! The same facile Luddites that brought you incomparable study on IT’s environmental costs has, since 1993, offered its services to businesses as an environmental consultancy. That’s right a not for profit charity engaging in business work. Thank god they were kind enough to show us how much we need their services. Why, until they brought it to light, no one knew what sort of amazingly terrible environmental damage I was doing typing away here in my laptop. I should be out driving my marginally-more-efficient-than-SUV car aimlessly around the parking lot.
But wait, who was it that gave us that fantastic piece of data in the first place: that a computer causes as much damage as an SUV? Why a “carbon offset” seller of course. So the chain is complete. Carbon credits cost a paltry few cents to assuage your carbon emitting sins by planting trees to “offset” your carbon production. And how do you find the right one? You pay a spineless bunch of washed up activists masquerading as a charity to tell you which one. And they’ll tell you Carbon Neutral, the same seller who gave them their ridiculous data in the first place. Any other advice? Well, maybe you should “store less data”! Wait a second say the IT department, that won’t change anything about my power consumption! “Ah, well we’re just trying to help, we’re only a charity full of washouts anyway! We’ll collect our consulting fees now. Hope your tree planting makes you feel better!”
What bothers me about this isn’t that there are crooked charities hired by the likes of E.ON, BBC, and British Gas to make convince their customers they are in fact, taking the ungreen menace seriously. Nor that there are carbon offsetters who make money by playing bookie between tree planters in the jungle and guilt-ridden businesses, making money off the vig. What bothers me is the poison that such organizations are willing to pour in to the minds of the public to turn a dime. They are, in what I presume must have started as and effort to make the world better, making the world worse for all those concerned. Tricking clueless people who know nothing better than computers are as bad as SUVs makes SUVs seem more innocuous and computers more evil, and it’s a lie.
But perhaps the biggest culprit is the media. I originally saw this story in the New Scientist, a very reputable magazine read by people who know rubbish when they hear it. But I also saw it on the evening news on television. And it was published numerous other places. The truth is hard to find, and Global Action Plan, CarbonNeutral, and their buddies in the media have made that truth as hard to uncover as possible. And for money. The very worst type of lie.
Media should filter this nonsense out but it won’t and can’t because it knows that the eyeballs and ears go to the loudest and most ridiculous clamor. So they all publish it, carefully crafting the article so that Global Action Plan, and then CarbonNeutral, and then who knows who next can take the fall. Media has a higher calling that to just publish and republish the nonsense of the world. The internet provides plenty of space. Media must filter for something, and rather than sensation it should be filtering for truth. And yet it is most susceptible to the perverse incentives to make the truth indiscernible from fiction.
