Brand Strategy always enjoys a good hoo-hah kicked up by major companies. Chrysler’s chief economist Van Jolissaint has apparently launched a fierce attack on ‘quasi-hysterical’ Europeans and their ‘Chicken Little’ (who had the mistaken belief that the sky is about to fall on our heads) attitudes to global warming, according to a report on the BBC website.
Jolissaint was allegedly scathing about the recent Stern report into the environment published by the UK government which urged countries to take global warming seriously and urgently. He suggested that the report was flawed and claimed that the risks of global warming were far off and uncertain.
Also on the panel at the private breakfast where Jolissaint is supposed to have made these views clear were economists from General Motors and Ford, who did not apparently correct him. But GM boss Rick Wagoner stated only a few days ago that there was an ‘irrefutable business case’ for producing green cars.
So is the car industry just paying lip service to being green? Or has Jolissaint made his own views clear but this is not the view in the rest of the industry? Can the US and European views on climate change ever be reconciled? Let us know your views.
January 21, 2007 at 8:26 am |
Yes, I think that the “views” on European and US on global warming will be reconciled when the US insurance companies will spent billions of $ each year to pay for damage due to extreme weather. And well, just to remind you, the global warming is not a US/Europe politics issue, and there are no compromise possible on that – just the raw facts that the westeners, and in particular America with its insane comsumption of energy, is screwing up the world, period.
So, what we are waiting, we Chicken Little sort of Europeans, is for people like Mr Jolissaint to be gently but firmly put at the recycling bin by more compentent persons, so the US can finally come at the discussion table and discuss how we can, together, to fix this huge problem.
Otherwise, it is amusing to hear about car manufacturers questionning global warming, and sharing their own belief about earth climate evolution. Of course these people are wheater experts, and before being businessmen, spent 10 years doing atmospheric physics science. I recently read an other statement of the same sort, by the director of a energy distribution (!) Swiss company – ” there is no such a think as globalwarming, it’s only extreme ecologists that want to bring us back to the stone age … “. Incompetent imbecile.
Mr Jolissaint, I wish you a warm, dry, and windy year 2007,
Laurent Jolissaint