Note: I’ve edited this to accurately represent what really happened at the Green and Sustainability effort during my tenure at this job. It has died because once the fury of Green passed by, nobody cared about it. That accurately reflects the real position by everyone in the company that I worked with except the executive who got paid for running it. I don’t think he cared either once the assaignment was over because he moved on and it was dropped.
I was given a stretch assignment for Green IT at IBM this year. A stretch assignment means you get another job without the extra pay, or layoffs just happened and a person now has to do the work of 2 since they don’t want to backfill, or the powers that be don’t feel like you have enough to do so they use this as retribution. In this case it’s mostly the second one because they know I can deliver when others can’t, so they dump stuff on me frequently.
I have a lot ahead of me, thus the title of this blog post. The hardest thing about this assignment is that I know that IBM doesn’t really believe in it (and there is only a small faction of nuts in the company trying to get buy in). The entire premise is almost 100% hype for corporate responsibility and image rather than any actual product or offering. I really wasn’t given a choice whether I wanted to do it and I certainly will do my job, but as you can see in the details below, it’s hard to believe in something when it’s based on bullshit. I see through it and I know that TPTB are just being politically correct to avoid the (very small but politically damaging) social justice warrior hostage taking out there.
During the Major Analyst Conference we did in November, I had to get this nonsense into all the Smarter Planet materials to show (SJW and PC) compliance (so as to not get the Jessie Jackson-ish extortion treatment by the Al Gore crowd). It turns out to be a bunch of nonsense that is made up to try to fool the press and analysts into thinking IBM actually does something in the Green space.
It all started out with trying to be politically correct about global warming, since IBM really isn’t and has the carbon footprint of China (or Al Gore’s 2 houses and jet setting around the world). Now, everyone has started shying away from the words “global warming” once the world saw through that as a lie and ineffective, they renamed it Sustainability. That means you wrap up all the things that tangentially have something to do with being sustainable, since it is a nebulous name and concept and voila, you claim sustainability.
Once the word sustainability gets found out as a fraud as part of the global warming and money grabbing hoax, you then call it Smarter Planet or roll it up into that campaign and somehow you are politically correct, even if you aren’t really doing anything different (which IBM isn’t). We had to sell this crock to the press and analysts who wanted so badly to be able to charge extort us for pretending to buy our baloney of offering something in this space that resembled eco-friendliness. They were compliant in our scam as long as there was money.
The worst thing is having to deal with the idiots out there who buy into this Gaia religion like Tom Raftery of Greenmonk and James Governor of Redmonk and Greenmonk. Our executives in a briefing after a different Green Day analyst conference in London actually called James a wanker and Tom a whiner after the event due to their outbursts and views as they interrupted the entire day. Greenmonk has since gone dormant for lack of money, facts and believable content on climate. Their credibility was shot when they wanted a carbon tax at a dollar a pound. James told me the real truth was he wanted to make money while trying pretend that they were doing it to save the planet, making money being the operative words (see the above extortion tactics). I put the Dilbert cartoon in specifically for O’Reilly, Raftery and Governer – the 3 stooges.
The net of it is that IBM is pretending to be a player in this shell game but is a pseudo player. Fortunately, the analysts and press who are pushing it are just bully’s, but know as we all do that the evidence is not there, so they make up new stories when the lack of facts expose the wild goose chase de jour.
Too bad it is all a farce and IBM’s offering is equally a load of hogwash.
THE WORLD IS FLATTER, BUT NOT LIKE YOU THINK.
That is right, the real flat earther’s are the one’s who buy into this farce of “sustainability” like Greenmonk whose job was to suck around for money. Another dissembler Tim O’Reilly, who couldn’t defend global warming with anything other than “climate science is hard” (or I have no real facts so I’ll call you names), while condemning those who don’t believe in it wrong without any proof of his position was another nut I had to deal with. None of either’s positions are based on anything but computer climate predictions of which none have come even close. they based their position on the IPCC report. It now comes out that The IPCC; Never Has So Much Been Made Out of So Little by So Many at So Great A Cost. In other words it was a money transaction that had nothing to do with climate other than earth worshipping. Any other “climate facts” are 50 years in the future, which is an even bigger joke since real meteorologists can barely predict the weather next week. I could be convinced of global warming if there was one little thing called evidence. What I find unfathomable is the lack of backbone by IBM to stand up to this money grabbing extortion theme by these pseudo experts.
As it turns out, I had tweeted in response to Tim’s crisis about the rising tides that I didn’t believe him, but would accept his facts if he had any. Like all good climate warriors, he made ad hominem attacks on me and in a more harmless statement, said that I got all my information from Fox News (I don’t watch any news as my career with the media already told me that the press are biased). The only real facts about the state of Climate issues are found at What’s up with That unlike Tim who had no facts like all climate warriors.
As it turns out, the tides are receding Tim and here is the evidence. The waters on the island of Tuvalu (the tidal benchmark) are receding. This is one of the crisis places of the world that was supposed to be drowned along with the Statue of Liberty. So Tim, your views are biased and calling people flat-Earther’s because they don’t sign up for the pseudo science you have bought into is ridiculous, like your views.
Epilogue:
I got out of this assignment because I couldn’t lie for the company, nor lie to myself by doing something I didn’t believe in and realized was a lie. It’s lost its mojo because both the premise of Sustainability and climate change are based on predictive models that aren’t true. The fact that IBM doesn’t really do anything (other that trying to keep up with the Jones) was too much for me to take, and claim any sense of honesty. My credibility is more important than getting a paycheck for lying. I’d never make it as a politician.
I left the position right before a green conference where Al Gore was the speaker. It was the second time in my IBM career that I made a conscious decision to avoid him so as to not listen to his spew about global warming, nor be disappointed in humanity by seeing so many people being fooled by this scam based on redistribution of money to the climate warriors.
I told James that it was good that Gore wasn’t president on 9/11/2001 as he couldn’t lead a lottery winner to any bank (other than his bank account), let alone a nation in a real crisis. Being a good liberal, he was offended since he knew it was true and couldn’t defend his hero. He, like Biden and Cheney were only impeachment insurance for their respective presidents.
So having to lie to defend Climate anything, especially at IBM when I understood the facts makes it hard to be green. I’ve moved on to something I can be honest about.
The position went away as it became “under the guise of everything is sustainable” – (more lies) that we didn’t need a person babysitting it anymore. The real truth is that it didn’t develop into an issue like diversity that a company could be blackmailed into payment or bad PR due to non-compliance. It just went away as did the fake committment to global warming by my employer.