Coal giant exploited Ebola crisis for corporate gain, say health experts

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): Public health experts involved in the response to the Ebola crisis have condemned what they described as a ludicrous, insulting and opportunistic attempt to exploit the disease for corporate gain by the world’s largest privately-held coal company.

As part of a PR offensive to rebrand coal as a “21st-century fuel” that can help solve global poverty, it has emerged that at the height of Ebola’s impact in Africa, Peabody Energy promoted its product as an answer to Africa’s devastating public health crisis.

Greg Boyce, the chief executive of Peabody, a US-based multinational with mining interests around the world, included a slide on Ebola and energy in a presentation to a coal industry conference in September last year. The slide suggested that more energy would have spurred the distribution of a hypothetical Ebola vaccine – citing as supporting evidence a University of Pennsylvania infectious disease expert.

The World Health Organisation believes nearly 27,000 people contracted Ebola in an outbreak of the virus in West Africa last year, and more th
an 11,000 died – although the international agency believes that is probably an underestimate.

Public health experts who were involved in fighting the spread of Ebola were outraged at Peabody’s suggestion that expanding energy access with coal generation could have hindered the spread of Ebola and helped with the distribution of a vaccine – especially as there is no approved vaccine against the disease....

Coal stockpile at the Peabody Coal's Kayenta mine, Peabody Coal photo, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Greenwashing Index -- a new site to critique ads

As green becomes more of a fad, greenwashing becomes more pervasive. I came across what appears to be a useful site called the Enviromedia Greenwashing Index with a worthwhile public aim -- to subject the sustainbility pretensions of advertising to independent critical viewers: The integrity of today’s green ads can range from outstanding to outrageous, so it’s important for consumers to educate themselves on what makes environmental marketing claims truly authentic. The Greenwashing Index is an automated tool that provides five simple criteria developed by advertising academia and weighted according to their relevance in marketing claims. So, if you’ve seen a good or bad ad heralding the environmental qualities of a product or company, post it here, rank it according to the Greenwashing Index, and then come back to see how other consumers score it.

Photo of green giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota by greefus groinks (from Wikimedia Commons)