Energy firm recruits children as ‘climate cops’
Tuesday, August 05th, 2008 | Author: Chris Brown
Did you know that German owned, Npower, is attempting to turn the children of its customers into spies, all under the guise of saving the planet, which makes it all right? Well actually it doesn’t make it all right, not by a long chalk it doesn’t!
Npower ran an advertisement in the Sunday times on July 26th, and on August 2nd the Sunday Telegraph an article that was highly critical of Npower for taking such an improper approach (this article is reproduced below).
We too should be angry for Npower’s actions amount to little more than the attempted perversion of our children (Npower = Nazi-Power it seems). Recruiting children as climate Stazi, is simply resurrecting old Nazi methods for indoctrinating children and turning them into informers. It is an utterly abhorrent practice, and it should be condemned!
Equally abhorrent has been the response from the Advertising Standards Authority, which has refused to condemn the advertisements. That the body responsible for policing all advertising in the UK - to ensure that parental responsibility is not compromised - should renege on its own rules shows that we can expect no help from the authorities! But Npower is a commercial concern so why not deluge them with complaints, and, if you happen to be one of their customers - change supplier!
Npower Executives may be contacted via this link
Energy firm recruits children as ‘climate cops’
Last week’s Sunday Times carried a large advertisement for the German-owned energy company npower, inviting children to “save the planet this summer” by becoming “climate cops”. A picture showed a sleeping dad, with a notice on his head warning in a childish scrawl that he had been found guilty of “climate crime” by “falling asleep with the tv still on”.
For more “interactive games and fun downloads”, readers were invited to contact npower’s Climate Cops website. This explains in comic book format how children can spy on their parents, relatives and neighbours to catch them out in seven “climate crimes”, such as leaving the TV on standby, putting hot food in a fridge or freezer (as is recommended by hygiene experts) or failing to use low-energy light bulbs.
Children could record these offences in a “climate crime case file”, while teachers are offered a full “learning resource” pack for use in schools, including a PowerPoint presentation and posters for classroom walls.
When my colleague Richard North asked the Advertising Standards Authority how they squared this with their rules prohibiting “marketing communications” which “undermine parental authority”, they replied (as he records on his EU Referendum blog) that they had “considered you (sic) objections but do not feel it have (sic) breached our Codes on the basis you suggest”.
My own advice to children tempted to become “climate cops” is that they might begin by looking at npower’s own record as operators of 13 fossil fuel power stations.
Its coal-fired Aberthaw power station in Wales, for instance, emits more CO2 in two months than is notionally saved in a year by all the 2,000 wind turbines now disfiguring Britain’s countryside. If merely going to sleep in front of the TV is a “climate crime”, why haven’t the directors of npower put themselves behind bars long ago?
