Last week the perpetually capital-minded CityLab jumped on the corporate sponsored greenwashing train to gush over the forthcoming Olympics in Tokyo. Such a damaged brand are the Olympics – with it’s massive wastes of subsidized funding, razing poor neighborhoods for athletic mega-infrastructure, and general disruption to normal street life – that it’s now necessary to hire numerous firms for their Herculean public relations battles.
Urbanist rags like CityLab are all too eager to root for the monied establishment, and come up with the best way to absolve liberal guilt via some paper-thin progressive Trojan Horse.
Here it was puff piece for embattled Tokyo metro governor Yoichi Masuzoe. $350 million is ready to subsidize hydrogen cell cars for the Olympics, as well as the 6,000 unit Olympic village planned to run solely on fuel cells. Despite hydrogen’s abyssimal record as an extremely expensive alt fuel, Masuzoe chimed, “Fortunately, we are rich.”
Certainly a compelling proposition when you’re playing with somebody else’s money.