What comes through: Mother Nature is a demanding corporate nuisance manager and toxic boss: cold, calculating, demanding appeasement and the appearance of personal humiliation in a way that causes even Tim Cook to condescend to her. It fits with a certain sour mood on the Left where environmentalism means placating an angry Earth goddess, and the only way to avoid her wrath is privation and severe human austerity.

[Not only that, but Mother Nature is depicted as both omniscient and oddly uninformed about Apple at the same time. Ditto for omnipotence too, with the very clear implication that weather events are punishments for our sins against Gaia. There’s nothing wrong with environmentalism and resource conservation, and a good portion of Apple’s claims are worthy. But this idea that we have to do all this in service to a pagan goddess of nature is a bit beyond the old “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” ads from Chiffon Margarine back in the 1970s. — Ed]