By Your Powers Combined, I am Captain Planet
Captain Planet, he’s our hero
Gonna take pollution down to zero
He’s our powers magnified
And he’s fighting on the planet’s side
Gonna help him put asunder
Bad guys who like to loot and plunder
Remember him? He was a super hero, who, along with a posse of kids, aimed to save the environment. CP is still around — he goes by a different alias and that is Al Gore. And his posse of kids? They have grown up to become the Green Collar workers – out to save the world and maybe even the economy.
(I had a neighbor that got arrested for being a green collar worker in the 90s – different kind of green though…. More on that another time.)
Before the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” the concept of global warming was still up for debate. Science was clear, but yet doubters persisted. Dubya didn’t believe in the issue. In his circle it was a cause for the liberals, the hippies, and the liberal hippy media. Nothing serious. Remember The Kyoto Protocol? Don’t feel bad, neither do they.
But when that movie rose up, things changed. Everyone seemed to take notice, and what environmentalists and scientists had been saying for years became almost overnight the new conventional wisdom. Gore wasn’t that boring suit who awkwardly smooched Tipper, he was – yep - Captain Planet, the voice that moved the world.
The film itself made around 25 million domestically. Great for a documentary, but that many Americans saw it. The publicity more than the movie itself changed the zeitgeist so dramatically that even Bush didn’t have a choice and soon he had to cop that global warming was pretty real.
Just like Styrofoam, that publicity for Gore’s movement isn’t going anywhere – it’s spreading everywhere. Now everyone wants the green seal of approval, and what’s fascinating to trend watchers is that, like the film, it’s the PR that’s leading the change. When a company says it’s easy for it to be green, it takes increasingly large steps to be green. Actions are now catching up with the branding.
Time Warner Cable tells customers “Going green is simple when your bills are paperless.” GE even launched Ecomagination campaign years ago to promote, among other things, how it works with wind turbines. Now even that monolith is doing more to maintain the momentum and integrity of those earlier promotional promises. From NBC Universal’s Green Week – hardy har har – to the new Ecomagination.com site, GE’s own slogans are motivating behavior.
Frito-Lay and PepsiCo are flexing green in a funny way too: The product SunChips is about to transition into a “green brand” by transforming one of the seven plants that manufactures the chips into a “sun” or solar powered operation. Their brand always seemed (a/k/a were branded as) earth friendly, now their policies are following suit.
The economy? Well, stupid, who is making all of these changes? In the wake of economic recession, the Prez candidates are talking about the promise of a “green collar” workforce. Urban groups are watching this as a way out of poverty, corporations see it as a the path to environmental favor (and a little bit of street cred) and environmentalists see it as the path to a better tomorrow! Everyone is happy. Thanks Captain!
The negative side to the environmental craze? Let’s quote Lewis Black: “President Bush said that he now believes there’s global warming. As a result, I’m not sure anymore.”
Tags: Environmental, Gore, Green, Lewis Black, Planet
