What are the greenwashing tricks

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TL;DR

Hot take

Greenwashing is marketing spin to make a company or project is environmentally friendly when in fact it is, or it’s spin that is overdone. In our context we’re talking climate change, but it could be any form of “green” - such as water sustainability.

In some examples the organisations spend more on their greenwashing claims than their actual actions.

Greenwashing exists as a tactic of climate delay - to give the appearance of taking action while faking it.

Explanation

Greenwashing

Have you ever stayed in a hotel and in the bathroom there is a sign detailing what to do with the towels - if you want clean ones, leave them on the floor; if you want to help the hotel save the environment hang it up and use it again. I’m paraphrasing, but you know exactly what I’m talking about. Environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term greenwashing in the 1980s to describe this practice. In reality the hotel is trying to save on costs - but they spin it as environmentalism to appear like they are concerned about their impact on the environment, and at the same time adding a bit of guilt to you if you put the towel on the floor.

If we let greenwashing pollute our decarbonisation efforts it will make it that next level harder to take collective action to reduce global carbon emissions.

Carbon offsets

The use of carbon offsets is one of the most common greenwashing techniques in climate change. Airlines, retailers, banks, car insurers … will either claim to be using carbon offsets to negate their impact on the climate crisis, or in most cases will try and upsell the end customer to pay a little extra and fund the offsets themselves. Most of these carbon offsets are very bad, non-existent or overblown.

Dig into the details - find out about which carbon offsets have been used, how effective they are. Treat them with suspicion.

Carbon intensity

Large fossil fuel producers have made pledges to reduce their carbon intensity. That sounds good and to be fair it’s better than nothing, but did you know it can still mean an actual increase in total carbon emissions?

Carbon intensity refers to the amount of carbon emissions created in the production / delivery of a good or service per unit. If a business can reduce this per unit carbon impact great. However if they are selling more and more units than ever before and growing, their total emissions can still increase even if their carbon intensity is lower.

On a national and international level you often see country-level carbon emissions analysed on a per capita basis. This is a useful metric and allows us to compare countries, but similarly it can be used to mislead carbon emissions reduction efforts.

The atmosphere only cares about total carbon emissions, it doesn’t care how many widgets you made along the way. So when companies try and pass off lowering carbon intensity they are most likely engaging in spin and greenwashing to come off better than they are.

For example: Shell mentions “using lower-carbon energy products to reduce GHG emissions”, but the company’s plans include growing its fossil gas business by 20% in the coming years. Whilst the company believes its oil production peaked in 2019 and will decline slightly by 1-2% per year until 2030, the company wants to grow its fossil gas operations until this occupies over half of Shell’s energy business by 2030.

(via https://www.clientearth.org/projects/the-greenwashing-files/shell/)

This carbon intensity focus also leads to things like BHP buying renewable energy for it’s coal operations. You want a cookie for digging out the coal which will be burnt and make climate change worse, because you use renewable energy to do it?

Net-zero pledges

Net-zero is greenwashing? Hang on, aren’t we trying to get governments and industry to achieve net-zero goals?

After the Paris agreement the world got on a bit of a roll as countries and companies started to make public net-zero pledges - goals to reduce their carbon emissions output by certain dates. This was great news after years of inaction … but we need to closely inspect these pledges for their scope and achievability. After all, we can all pledge we’re going to compete in the Olympics but getting there is another thing. Pledging is the easy part.

We’re in danger of net-zero being abused and used for greenwashing purposes if we don’t pay attention to how big the “net” side is. We need deep decarbonisation. Net-zero allows for fancy accounting tricks which relies on the existence of carbon offsets while continuing business-as-usual. Some high-quality carbon offsets are going to be necessary, but if we allow too many companies to claim they can just magic away their carbon emissions with offsets then there won’t be enough left for the hard, critical things we need to continue to exist, and we’ll still have a high level of carbon in the atmosphere.

I would also argue net-zero itself can be misused to delay action as it implies reaching a zero-balance at a certain point in time, e.g. 2050. This obscures the fact that it’s total, cumulative carbon emissions that matter most to the atmosphere. It’s like driving over the speed limit for hundreds of kilometres but then slowing down under the speed limit just before the speed camera.

Regulators

Corporate regulators, advertising regulators are starting to wake up the greenwashing claims of companies and are taking action to protect consumers. This is more than a consumer rights issue, but it’s a start.