I heard about “Terror-Free Oil” while listening to the APM Marketplace podcast on the train this morning. Nice idea, but isn’t this similar to the idea of “conflict-free diamonds”? And don’t even get me started on the concept of “organic food”! As opposed to “inorganic”? These are all just sweet marketing campaigns to get people to pay a little more for fundamentally the same product. All food should be farmed using sustainable farming techniques and stored using non-CFC releasing techniques. It turns out that the terror-free oil comes from the oil giant Sinclair, and that while most of its oil comes from US and Canadian oil fields, some of it is purchased on the US Mercantile exchange, which means that its source is essentially unknowable. Confict diamonds get mixed into the open market at various stages. And organic food, well, that is just a label to lure in the suckers.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Notes from a commute. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.