North Face refuses to supply jackets with company logo to oil & gas producer — even though the jackets are made from oil & gas
December 18, 2020
By Paul Homewood
Here We Go Looby-Loo Edition!
37 Comments
Comments are closed.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.
Recent Comments
oldbrew on Climate Professor Thinks We Sh… Gamecock on Climate Professor Thinks We Sh… glenartney on Climate Professor Thinks We Sh… julianflood on Climate Professor Thinks We Sh… Edmund Burke on Storm Ravages World’s La… Gamecock on Greta’s Halo Slips ann farmer on Climate Professor Thinks We Sh… JohnAM on Biggest Solar Farm In Wales… Micky R on Climate Professor Thinks We Sh… marksullivanhome on Greta’s Halo Slips
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
North Face, yet another company to avoid buying from.
We should form a list.
Patagonia is similar (but often even more expensive).
Simple. Refuse to supply them with any relevant raw materials!
Problem is, they are a marketing company, way upstream from the use of petroleum products. You surely can’t even find who/where to withold from.
Competition making for success in business, the customers should switch to another producer with more commercial sense and should publicise the crazy policy in the press, with copies to the more sensible manufacturer and suggest that the petroleum-based materials will have been made in China for both competing sportswear manufacturers.
The Chinese do not curb their greenhouse gases output, but could the customer nowadays source them from a factory complying with CO2-curbing production?
Some years ago, Rush Limbaugh reported that a college student in the US, somewhat disgusted by the prices and elitist attitude of North Face, began to produce his own line which he named “South Butt.” North Face sued him, but the college student won the suit.
Brilliant!
Thinking about changing my nom de plume.
ROFL
As a climber it is my view that The North Face (TNF) in the last 20 years switched from being a serious mountain brand to being a high street fashion clothing company. Many other “mountain” brands have gone the same way, chasing volume high street and fashion sales rather than quality, including Karrimor, Berghaus and others. In terms of quality they are now down with the budget outdoor brands such as Peter Storm.
TNF is trading on its former glory of supplying high end mountain gear. I take my mountain kit seriously and stopped buying TNF 5 – 10 years ago. For general outdoor wear I buy Rohan, for more extreme kit Mountain Equipment, Lowe Alpine, Mammut, etc.
I should add the climbing community is now very big on climate change etc and blaming evil oil companies. I pointed out that they can always ditch modern ropes, waterproofs, nylons, dyneema etc. Having to go back to hemp rope for some of these idiots might change their minds. I spent a lot of time last year on the following comments thread after a posting at UKClimbing by XR:
https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/the_climate_crisis_and_the_future_of_mountaineering-12453
The fact that the Alps was likely largely ice free back in Roman Times seems to pass them by completely.
For the vegan, climate aware, climbers, they can obsess over their moral dilemma of choosing between leather or plastic footwear of course.
Thinking Scientist: Thank you SO much for the link to the climbing article. I’ve been reading the debate/discussion (for what seems like hours) and I don’t think I’ve reached the end yet! It must have taken you a very, very, long time.
It’s just the kind of discussion/argument I love reading – and also the type from which I learn the most: argument and counter argument. Brilliant!
But I’m not sure which of the two excellent protagonists (for the anti-AGW argument) you might be: flash635 or Dave Cumberland? Or maybe you were both? (:p) However both of you were wonderfully restrained under intense provocation and kept to the facts. One of the best debates on the AGW theory I have ever come across – and believe me, I have spent the last eleven years reading mountains of ‘climate change’ material. In fact, it has taken over my life.
Hi Luc Ozade:
I am flash635 on there.
Dave Cumberland is in fact a mate of mine – fellow climbers and fellow geoscientists trying to push back against the tide.
We were both signatories to the Fellow’s letter to the President of the Geol Soc. Dave is a Geol Soc Fellow (FGS). Dave is a Geologist, I am a geophysicist and a Fellow of the RAS (amongst other memberships).
Dave helped organise a meeting of the Geol Soc in Cumbria In February 2020 at which I presented the sceptic arguments (much of which is on that thread). My opponent was Prof. Terence Sloan (Lancaster). I think we won (but then I would say that wouldn’t I?).
ThinkingScientist: Thanks for coming back – very enlightening. I am SURE you won. The facts and evidence on ‘our’ side, I think, are irrefutable (but I, also, would say that!).
The number of times the warmists have been caught lying, exaggerating and manipulating data speaks, largely, for itself. ‘We’ don’t need to. Critical thinking, logic and empirical evidence should always win the day – but in current times it’s always those with the loudest voices, biggest purses and a platform from which to preach, attract the most followers. As it ever was, I suppose.
But comments like yours and Dave Cumberland’s on an ‘open’ website (that is not particularly allied to climate matters) and where opposing opinions are permitted will have made a few people, who hadn’t made their minds up, think more deeply. I feel strongly that were open debates between the two sides allowed, the screaming headlines might be somewhat different.
With pictures its even better!
notice also that North Face jackets are required uniform for any BBC person out in the wilds. Just look out for them on country file etc . Seems to be some connection here .. Fellow travellers perhaps
When I was at John Ridgeway’s School of Adventure in Sutherland on a team building week from work in the 1980s; he and the half dozen staff all wore Helly Hansen gear. I beleive that he wore HH gear on his round the world yacht trips.
I bet Ridgeway was a great teacher – and his name reminded me of an odd experience. I was looking into buying a wonderful place in Grasse some years ago and it was snapped up by another English family called Blythe. They immediately renamed it: Chez Blythe. (!!!)
And to Harry P. :
Yes, John was great, by example, explanation and exhortation in his school.
Not basically a money maker but, like Chris Bonington, an inspiration.
Interesting. Their fellow cultural Marxists at The Weather Channel all wear Land’s End gear.
Product placement. Almost certainly offered by TNF as a freebie.
North Face refuses to supply jackets with company logo to oil & gas producer
Buy them on the open market and add the logo later.
https://www.thesalenetwork.co.uk/brands/the-north-face
Who wants a poxy logo? I pay more to find clothes without having to endure displayed advertising brands. If they want me to advertise their brand then they should pay me to wear their brand. boycott naff brands!
Just go to the NF website and check product content. Their hypocrisy speaks for itself.
I took up your suggestion, Sassy – but the whole website is in Californian – a language I can’t understand and which only means anything to those that use it…..
It is spoken without moving the lips.
I just clicked on several product items and they list the content on each item clicked on. Much of it is recycled petroleum based product. Here in Oklahoma our economy just like in Texas is very dependent on oil & gas.
Won’t be buying any more of their stuff then. Feck em!
I work for an oil company and the kick in the teeth was the NF comment that they have policy to not sell to “ pornographers, tobacco or fossil fuel companies”. I was frigging annoyed to be lumped in with such a crowd.
That behaviour prompts curiosity over the company’s supply chain: is it as squeaky-PC as their sanctimonious behaviour suggests?
It would be good if the oil industry would respond, perhaps with a detail breakdown of the materials used by NF and their origins.
And for fun they could paint “North Face” on the appropriate side of oil rigs, etc..
Hypocrisy rears its’ ugly head.
Virtue signalling is now a political fashion force it seems. This BS is right through manufacturing and business from them giving money to XR or BLM as someway protecting them from their turn in the firing line.
What is so pathetic about this is that those on the board who proposed this “think” a majority not a rabid minority of a rabid minority are responsible and somehow the world will now rush to buy their over priced low quality mass produced in Chinese sweatshop range of fashion junk. That their WHOLE range is made from hydrocarbon derivatives is neither here or there to these maggots.
This is in the same vein as Pippy Longstockings (Troubled teenager from Stockholm who as well as being weird has been lied to at home and at school then manipulated by her leftie handlers). Her iconic image is of her wearing her yellow rain coat outside of the Swedish Parliament ( Made from Hydrocarbons). Better are the images of her bedecked in Hydrocarbon derived garments AND life preserver on a plastic boat she sailed on to the US (with a diesel engine) for one more pointless set of meetings and the irony of it all was lost on the lot of them.
Add to that all the plastic bags and empty drink bottles left after one of the XR events where they erected nylon tents and were themselves all bedecked in garments and footwear produced from hydrocarbons.
Question is. are they all so wilfully ignorant that they do not see how absurd they all are?
There used to be a name for what companies face these days: a protection racket. Why aren’t the perpetrators prosecuted?
This reminds me of Rudyard Kipling’s poem DANEGELD.
The main two lines are that : once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
“Question is. are they all so wilfully ignorant that they do not see how absurd they all are?”
Yes. Nail, head, hammer.
When I was in HK about 20 years ago, I noticed that everybody but everybody wore North Face jackets. Not having seen them before, I assumed they were some high-street junk brand.
A few years later, I found myself in a country with real mountains and real cold weather – and in need of some serious cold-weather gear. The shop assistant recommended North Face – saying how up-market it was. This came to me as a complete surprise – in view of the prejudices I acquired in HK. I ended-up buying another (perfectly good) brand.
Thinking Scientist
Just read through much of the comments on the climbing site and appreciated your considered and well reasoned posts, Provided me with much useful information. One thing I noticed however was that none of your detractors ever mentioned the very important fact that you brought up that the models cannot do clouds. It has long seemed to me that this is a basic and even fatal failure of climate models. To my mind there is no way that clouds cannot affect the climate.
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the comment. Clouds are important and lacking in models but its arm waving to say it, rather than providing compelling images.
The first key point that is easy to get across to people I think is the requirement for temps to start increasing around 1910 in order to fit the forcings. Its then simple to show the sea level (linear) and glacial retreat (linear) starting at least 50 yrs earlier and ask the question – how is that possible? The models all fit the temps (because the forcings that drive them fit the temps). I think the fundamental issue is that the temps pre-1900 are almost certainly wrong – sea level and glacier data clearly contradict it. Models are tuned to fit post-1950s and the poor fit in prior periods is just arm-waved away. I spent many months in 2018 arguing with a Prof from British Antarctic Survey. When you point out the glacier and sea level trends starting 1850s he says “warming starts with industrial revolution”. When you point out the CMIP forcings do not have any net warming until at least 1900 he says “look at that squirrel” by talking about something off topic. Its like arguing round in circles with a child.
The second key point is to show the warming is the same in the period 1910 – 1945 and 1975 – 2010 but the forcings differ by a factor of 3x. If the physics is correct, how is that possible? The models miss the early warming (because its not in the forcings, which are the only thing directing the models).
Finally, my only regret on the thread in question was I set up the example of ocean heat increasing (the Resplandy paper). I never quite got to my last passing shot before the thread commnets were closed. You will note right at the end of the thread that someone comments that Resplandy was withdrawn “So the dialectic worked in this case. My point still stands. Some random bloke on the internet is never going to retract their biased work-ups.” My final point was going to be that Resplandy was withdrawn because of Nic Lewis, not because peer review works (which it doesn’t). Nick spotted the first regression in Resplandy was wrong immediately (along with much else). What were the peer reviewers doing? Giving it a free pass is the answer of course, like so many crap climate papers.