A crony who recently bought a Subaru emailed me a couple to a company’s heavily promoted new environmental initiative, that is front and core on a homepage. With a video patrician “Who We Are Is What We Leave Behind,” it has committed to assisting make a inhabitant parks waste-free, definition it would send no plain rubbish to a landfill: Everything gets composted or recycled. That’s flattering cool. And Subaru creates a good product: Its cars are plain and protected (the Legacy was a usually non-giant and non-hugely costly automobile to record no highway deaths for indication years 2009 by 2012) and are a go-to vehicles in sleet country. The mileage is decent as well: New Outbacks exaggerate a newly softened 33 mpg on a highway.



So here’s a question: Why is such an apparently well-managed association regulating an outdated, nice-but-irrelevant, and eventually villainous proceed to cause-marketing, during a accurate time when a country, a world, and a automobile attention needs confidant leadership? I’m articulate about a fact that by focusing on plain rubbish (a third or fourth sequence problem, during best) in inhabitant parks, Subaru orderly dodges any debate (what’s not to like about assisting a inhabitant parks — that check by a roof?) and also dodges any shot during poignant impact on a executive emanate of a time. Yes, I’m articulate about meridian change.


Look, Subaru is a automobile company. And there’s a reason one of a initial stairs an empowered EPA took to residence meridian change, even before traffic with spark plants, was to aim newcomer vehicles. Transportation accounts for nearly a third of sum U.S. hothouse gas emissions, and entirely 62 percent of travel emissions come from newcomer cars and light-duty trucks. And emissions from travel have increasing by about 16 percent given 1990.


A automobile association is a meridian changing machine, a kissing-cousin to a hoary fuel attention that has been a theme of a outrageous and flourishing divestment campaign. And meridian change itself is distant and divided a biggest plea of a time. Alan Rusbridger, a timid editor of a Guardian, orderly sums adult what we’re confronting in a warming universe as a “huge, overshadowing, strenuous emanate of how meridian change will probably, within a lifetime of a children, means infinite massacre and highlight to a species.” It’s really aged news that that highlight is attack a really organizations Subaru has committed to make 0 rubbish — a inhabitant parks. (Details can be found in a 2006 report Losing Ground: Western National Parks Endangered by Climate Change.)


In America, many of us drive cars. We shouldn’t be seeking Subaru to stop creation its excellent vehicles. But we as adults do wish Subaru to be partial of a solution, since we also wish to be partial of a resolution and we expostulate Subarus! And we don’t wish to be treated as dupes when a car company, of all things, creates a environmental focus, of all arenas, solid waste in a year 2015 and thinks we’re going to applaud that and dumbly and happily buy its cars meditative good thoughts about its business. Homey don’t play that diversion no more.


I can hear Subaru’s PR people saying: “Jeez, we theory no good help goes unpunished.” No, that’s not right. It’s that cluelessness gets punished. Not to discuss that this pierce is vital madness, as if a EPA had motionless to concentration on animal gratification instead of H2O peculiarity during a really impulse a Cuyahoga River held fire.


What should Subaru be doing? Expanding a good work on mileage potency (what about a super-efficient hybrid instead of a modestly fit Crosstrek?). Making meridian change, not plain waste, a concentration of a means marketing. Lobbying Congress for a CO taxation really publicly and from a CEO level. Continuing a 0 rubbish work too, since it’s good business, and inhabitant parks are awesome, though doing so in a context of meridian change, not instead of articulate about it.


We’ve entered a new epoch in corporate responsibility. No longer is holding a position on meridian change risky. Now, in a hottest year in a heat record, not holding a position on meridian change is a large risk. Companies that don’t should be called out. If “Who You Are is What You Leave Behind,” and we leave behind a universe warmed by 4 degrees C, afterwards we have a terrible Legacy. Tag, Subaru: You’re it.