Vattenfall, Europe’s third-largest energy company which is wholly owned by the Swedish Government, has been announced as the winner in the Climate Greenwash Award 2009 at a ceremony in Copenhagen.

“Vattenfall, which won with 39% of the vote (about 2000 votes cast), was nominated for “its mastery of spin on climate change, portraying itself as a climate champion while lobbying to continue business as usual, using coal, nuclear power, and pseudo-solutions such as agrofuels and carbon capture and storage (CCS).”

The energy company also played a key role in setting up the World Business Summit on Climate Change through the Combat Climate Change – a lobby group established by Vattenfall to promote the “climate-friendly technologies” such as carbon capture and storage and nuclear power, which are the company’s preferred options for tackling climate change.”

Climate Greenwash Awards Coordinator Kenneth Haar congratulated Vattenfall for their hard (read: dirty) work which resulted in their first place. Haar also gave a special mention the Danish Government for giving these dirty corporations easy access to the climate talks:

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Last year I reported about Vattenfall, Europe’s third-largest energy company which is entirely owned by the Swedish government, and their latest greenwashing campaign. Their campaign involved a “climate manifesto” to hide their own dirty businesses, and on top of that they also created loads of small yellow plastic men which they placed around the world to show their “environmental support”.

Back then the greenwashing campaign faced protests from environmental organizations such as Klimax and Greenpeace. And last week the “Yellow Army Fraction” liberated 44 of these yellow plastic men from one of Vattenfall’s offices in Sweden:

“Yellow plastic figures has been Vattenfall’s way to try fool the public that they’re actually doing something about the climate change other than pollution through large scale coal fire power plants. What they didn’t take into consideration was the fact that the figures would come alive and organize! Today the Yellow Army Fraction liberated 44 of their fellows in their struggle to crush Vattenfall and their dirty industry and saving the planet in the process. No more coal!”

Watch the liberation: (more…)

If you live in northern Europe you might have heard about a new “climate manifesto” from Vattenfall, Europe’s third-largest energy company which is wholly owned by the Swedish government.

With this “climate manifesto” Vattenfall is a trying to influence politicians and governments to put a global price on CO2 emissions, support (read financial support) climate friendly technologies and implement climate requirements for products. It all sounds good but this is just another greenwashing campaign from a dirty energy company.

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