Twenty Trees For a Ford

The 11 o'clock news goes to commercial. Queue the soggy music. Glaciers falling into the sea. The announcer starts talking about automobiles and the environment. Okay, who could it be? Some sort of environmental group, right? Nope. It's a Ford dealer. Frontier Ford in Santa Clara is touting the fact that it will plant twenty trees for each car purchased. This in turn would theoretically help offset the carbon spewing out of a brand new Expedition.

Carbon offsets are nothing new. It's a growing business that shows promise of becoming a worldwide phenomenon. It's how Al Gore offsets his inconvenient electric bill. What caused me to drop my remote was how Frontier Ford was advertising this new perk: by drawing direct causality between global warming and automobiles. This isn't a wink and a nudge, these guys are raising their hands and saying "Guilty" and then offering twenty trees.

It's all a bit too close for comfort in my opinion and one that twenty trees planted in a newly purchased Expedition's honor does little to assuage. I fail to see who wins here. As Coldplay found out, there is a lot more to sustainable carbon offsetting than just buying a bunch of saplings. So will environmentally savvy people truly be swayed by a dealer's offer to plant a few trees? I doubt it. On the flip side what damage does a commercial like Frontier's do to the image of the automobile? It certainly doesn't help.

Let's say a dealership wanted to really show that it was green. How about solar power or a living roof? How about using green alternatives in the shop? How about handing out tire gauges to all visitors? Any of those alternatives will probably do a lot more for the environment than a bunch of defenseless saplings that have only a slim hope of surviving.

I'm not against a dealership offering to help the environment, but I just don't think this campaign is well thought out. What it looks like to me is that someone offered the dealership a way to appeal to the environmental crowd for a very minimal investment. I'm guessing this whole promotion costs Frontier less than $50 per car sold. Probably a lot less. However, it does cost the automobile credibility. Something the automotive industry can ill afford to lose.