🥉Willie, the say 'Hey [where's my money?]' kid
(158) Honoring a true American hero this past July 4th
Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
You expect me to believe that?!?! (Watch: Y)
Cleantech has an enshittification problem (M)
enshittification (n): process by which digital services degrade in quality as they first extract value from their users, then from enterprise customers
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Battery startup Sila raised a $375M Series G led by Sutter Hill Ventures(TC)
Eve Air Mobility, an eVTOL aircraft manufacturer, raised $94M from Embraer, Nidec and others (PRN)
Hayden AI, a vision AI platform for smart cities, raised a $90M Series C led by The Rise Fund (BW)
Polystyvert, a recycling startup focused on styrenic plastics, raised a $16M Series B led by Infinity Recycling (PRN)
Eneida, a Portuguese deep grid operational analytics platform, raised a $11.4M Series B led by Junction Growth Investors (FN)
Dynelectro, a Danish green hydrogen startup, raised an $11M round from EIFO, Vsquared Ventures, and others (EU)
Cement and concrete decarbonization startup alcemys raised a $10M round led by Norrsken VC (EU)
Scaler, an ML-based decarbonizing platform for real estate, raised a $10M Series A led by Plural (EU)
Vertus Energy, a waste-to-X industrial biotech startup, raised an $8.75M seed round led by Energy Capital Ventures (FN)
Reusable packing company Vytal raised a $6.6M round led by Emerald Technology (EU)
Battery electrolyte startup Feon Energy raised a $6.1M seed round led by Fine Structure Ventures (FN)
European carbon offset startup Tree.ly raised a $5.4M seed round led by PortfoLion Capital Partners (EU)
Altrove, a materials development startup, raised a $4M round led by Contrarian Ventures (TC)
Sensorita, a trash tech startup, raised a $3.3M seed round led by Brick & Mortar Ventures (FN)
Vaire Computing, a startup building energy efficient chips, raised a $4.5M seed round led by 7percent Ventures and Jude Gomila (TC)
Green Theory
Willie, the say 'Hey [where's my money?]' kid
The year is 1954, and it’s the first game of the World Series of Baseball. The New York Giants face off against Cleveland, and in the 8th inning, the game is tied. Cleveland has one runner on 1st, and another in scoring position, when their batter Vic Wertz hits a deep fly to center field.
In almost any other ballpark, and perhaps against any other outfield, this booming at-bat would have scored Cleveland 3 runs, effectively wrapping up the game. It looked too deep to catch as it careened down on one of the longest outfields in America.
Much to Cleveland’s chagrin, Willie Mays—in just his second MLB season—was making a dash toward the the falling ball. For the last 20 feet, he didn’t even look back to spot it, knowing if he didn’t concentrate on speed, he wouldn’t get there. Nearing the outfield wall, he held his mitt in a basket in front of him, and the ball fell perfectly over his shoulder, securing the out. With a strong throw to second, the runners were all held on base, and in extra innings, the Giants prevailed: paving the way to secure the 1954 championship, and Mays’ place in baseball history.
Willie Mays passed away in Palo Alto last month, at the age of 93. While his statue still greets visitors to SF’s baseball stadium, located on a street named after Mays, and his legacy as a caring leader—such as alongside Sandy Koufax in the infamous Battle of Candlestick—will persist, a lesser-known side of his baseball career illuminates the insidious underside of big business’ grip on American pastimes. Most simply, for a player who dedicated his post-retirement career to uplifting youth sports, how could he have appeared in so many cigarette ads?
For the kids
Almost a decade ago, I had the privilege to meet Mr. Mays while researching the links between tobacco advertising, baseball, and youth addiction. The big leagues’ embrace of Big Tobacco has helped nicotine products retain a reliable foothold in the American social scene. Even if they can’t directly advertise on stadium billboards now, tobacco companies thrive on shots of sports coaches’ jaws packed with chew. On top of that, new or refurbished nicotine delivery methods are finding novel ways around advertising restrictions, bringing renewed attention to the role of celebrities and media in ensuring social welfare. The big difference between the influencer advertising of 2024 and 1954 is who gets paid, and who chooses the spots.
Willie Mays appeared for dozens of advertisements as a Giants’ baseball star. When I met him as a nearly blind octogenarian, he was sharp as a tack. Recounting vivid details of baseball days gone by, he suddenly turned to me and asked,
“Son, do you know what happened to all that Chesterfield money?”
“I don’t. What did you spend it on, Mr. Mays?” I responded.
“No, I’m asking you because I don’t know either!” Mays laughed, “The Giants didn’t give me a cent of it!”
Indeed, teams owned the image of every player, to the extent they could dictate player product placements, on and off the field. Mays shared he found the required tobacco advertising especially frustrating since he abstained from nicotine, wanting to serve as a role model. He recognized the challenging legacy left behind by these ads, regardless of his level of agency at the time.
Merchants of Doubt
To win the hearts, and occupy the minds of Americans, Big Tobacco ran all manner of advertisements and promotions: from choice spots in classic Disney movies, to free samples handed out on street corners. But on the political side, cigarette companies controlled tobacco regulation by hiring scientists to sew doubt in the broad, robust consensus on the link between smoking and cancer. In their monumental 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway show the pattern of artificial, pseudoscientific dissent that big industry oligopolies have employed, across industrial tobacco, refrigeration chemicals, pesticides, and—our favorite—the climate crisis.
Finding folks with backgrounds in academia or science, industries drum up testimony that preserves a controversy over their product’s threat to public safety. As long as some politicians can point to some ‘experts’ that disagree with a robust scientific consensus on exorbitant social costs of a business practice, they can continue to profit off of their extractive, damaging businesses, and forgo regulation, nationalization, or abolition. This tactic delayed action against harmful chemicals including DDT and ozone-shrinking CFCs, not to mention fueling the bad faith arguments against the proven science of greenhouse gas emissions.
Today, the Department of Justice may be able to leverage legal strategies against Big Oil that were effective on tobacco companies. Though the tobacco industry didn’t invent these kinds of PR conspiracies that inhibit human flourishing, the precedent set in charging Big Tobacco with (legal) conspiracy helps pave the way to bring the oil & gas industry to justice. In addition to obfuscating the scientific consensus and delaying action on pollution from burning fossil fuels, these same companies have lied and suppressed the truth about plastic recycling, too.
As complex and contrived as the theater of fake science remains in politics, over time these positions (such as climate denial) become less and less tenable, and massive shifts in policy have indeed reversed some man-made ravages, albeit often nearly too late, and not nearly enough of the time. Pulling more on human emotion than imitating academic patterns, the merchants of doubt play a much simpler game in the public sphere, compared with politics and courts.
Badvertising
The conversation fed to us in advertising and media is more straightforward than the “delay art” of climate denial pseudoscience. Polluting industries socialize their products and services by showing off their glamorous sides, and playing on our deepest fears or desires. Even if you don’t want to see these products’ ads, you may not be able to evade them. Eventually, it just looks normal to see a Coca Cola tin sign on a wall, or artsy painting of a gas-guzzling Volkswagen.
Cigarette companies can’t air TV ads in the US today, but plenty of other combusting, emitting activities remain fair game to promote. Selling the allure of gas cars, flying to far flung destinations, eating factory farmed burgers, and even streaming shows: just these highly advertised forms of consumption alone generate a third of all emissions.
Smoking, decades after US advertising regulation, still kills about 8 million people each year (13% of all deaths), with air pollution a close second for non-communicable diseases at 7 million annual deaths (12% of all deaths). If we keep allowing advertising to be dominated by resource-intensive, polluting industries, we shouldn’t be surprised by the human toll’s growth in years to come. Just look at the staying power of the tobacco industry’s harms.
Making it personal
While celebrities have long served as spokespersons for brands, the age of the influencer economy creates a new product testimonial paradigm: one where anyone can monetize anything if they pitch it or give it a spot online.
With the rise of new media, and new vectors of advertising, it’s certainly more relevant to judge content creators, celebrities, and platforms by their chosen product placements, than it is to judge a company by its chosen spokespersons. It turns out, we don’t really hold corporations accountable for the bad things their spokespersons do, anyway.
Willie Mays couldn’t decline cigarette photoshoots, but people and platforms today do hold that kind of power.
In the era of manufactured authenticity, we shouldn’t trust platforms pedaling heedless advertising, and with extra attention to socially harmful products. When it comes to folks who present as honest journalists or educators, their advertisers may betray good reasons to be skeptical of their work.
News sites, especially, have the power to reject greenwashing advertising spots for oil & gas, and yet many, if not most, from The New York Times to Politico and Reuters, simply don’t. The false climate claims drafted by oil profiteers and laundered by media, influencers, and celebrities all take a heavy toll: not only in the direct dismay and deaths their products will precipitate, but also the cementing of these unsustainable fossil fuel lifestyles into popular culture. The ads have gotten so out of control that the UN Secretary-General advocated every nation ban Big Oil advertising.
We Green Bite readers can’t control everything, but we can each choose what content, creators, and platforms to engage in and uplift, or abstain from and hold accountable. Now that every level of the media value chain has more choice in its partnerships, we should pressure them all to use it for good (or at least basic social responsibility). At the very least, we should do so in honor of those who couldn’t.
The Closer
Thomson Fire (Oroville) and Toll Fire (Calistoga) burning last week on the first day of a prolonged Nor Cal heatwave. (Source)