Prince Charles Rainforest Project Champions McDonald’s And Coca Cola
PRESS release of the day comes courtesy of The Prince’s Rainforests Project, and features blonde actress Talulah Riley kissing a frog in London’s Piccadilly Circus:
The St Trinian’s star kissed a frog to find her Prince last night as the iconic signs in London’s Piccadilly Circus burst into life with the appearance of a new animated rainforest frog. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s simultaneously launched new graphics in honour of The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) in a brand partnership first.
The climate change campaigning Prince of Wales’s Raindforest Project involves transporting an actress (by jet?) to the centre of London to kisss a huge electronic frog and so trigger gigantic electronic billboards to advertise how, er, burning things is killing the planet.
Says the PRP:
Tropical rainforests absorb nearly a fifth of all man-made CO2 emissions around the world, which helps greatly to minimise the effects of climate change. However, these same rainforests are currently being destroyed at the rate of an area the size of a football pitch every four seconds.
Scorchio!
To make matters worse, when the rainforests are burnt down – to clear land for commercial farming or mining, for example – they release all the CO2 that they have stored back into the atmosphere. The alarming scale of this rapid burning of the rainforests around the world means that CO2 emissions from tropical deforestation are actually higher than from the entire global transport sector.
And then the farmers graze cattle. You know, methane-emitting beef which is what – get this – organic McDonald’s sells by the bucket load and is washed down by lashings for organic Coca Cola…
As Charles says:
Fast food may appear to be cheap food and, in the literal sense it often is, but that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations. Any analysis of the real cost would have to look at such things as the rise in food-borne illnesses, the advent of new pathogens, such as E.coli 0157, antibiotic resistance from the overuse of drugs in animal feed, extensive water pollution from intensive agricultural systems and many other factors. These costs are not reflected in the price of fast food.
Nor in the price of electricity…
Posted: 6th, July 2009 | In: Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
