Written by Bennett Kirschner
How “Green-washing” Demands a New Climate Activism
By now, most conscientious consumers are attuned to the use of pink ribbons in marketing to highlight companies’ support for breast cancer-related foundations or charities. Also known as “pink-washing,” it’s in many cases a benign enough display that does route money to a good cause, but in others it screams of hypocrisy: corporations producing carcinogenic chemicals, for instance, have appropriated the symbol to get an edge, distracting from products that cause the very disease the company claims to be “fighting.” Associated with a cause that no one could reasonably object to and protected by the pink ribbon’s uplifting visage, corporations have for years used pink-washing as an effective platform for their bottom line. The reason they’re so freely able to eschew criticism, of course, is that many of us don’t research or care enough to realize how twisted the use of such a symbol may be. Their logo flashes by on the TV screen with a pink varnish – sometimes a ribbon, other times just a pink hue – and people hardly bat an eye. Who, after all, could object to funding breast cancer research?
Over the years, the model of pink-washing as a clever PR tactic has been applied to many political spheres. As the effects of climate change, for instance, become more undeniable with each passing heat wave, hurricane and extinction, environmental causes – and corporations’ support for them – have started to take on a similar sheen. The days when global warming was up for debate are long gone, and consumers, in turn, are expecting more accountability out of the companies they support. To be sure, the point here is not to deny the existence of for-profit companies that make a real effort to solve the climate crisis – those companies exist, and they are essential in the fight to save our planet. Yet those companies, regrettably, are often overshadowed by others who have adopted environmentalism as their “cause” without doing much to substantively support it. Just as pink-washing subliminally placates consumers, green-washing is meant to convince us that our purchasing decisions are not contributing – and, in some instances, are counteracting – the climate crisis when often this message could not be further from the truth.
Of course, none of this is a new idea: companies have used terms like “green” and “sustainable” to promote products or services for decades, even when many of those same companies were making no real effort to minimize their environmental impact. The use of natural imagery is more often used to draw attention away from what companies are doing, not towards it. Today, this initiative has transmogrified into a new series of buzzwords like “carbon offset” and “net-zero” that are touted by large corporations as the next great solution to a crisis that they continue to literally fuel. Even as they reach record levels of carbon emissions, airlines and petroleum companies are releasing climate pledges that tout a commitment to ecological welfare and carbon neutrality. But just like the pink ribbons that have been pinned on corporate causes for years, this new trend comes with a great deal of fine print, and arguably only deepens the very crisis it purports to solve. In a perverse but predictable twist, the widespread use of terms like “Net Zero” is undermining – not advancing – climate action.
This doesn’t mean, though, that hope is lost. Instead of resigning ourselves and wishing for the best possible outcome, let’s actively draw attention to all corporate practices that capitalize on environmental causes without contributing to them. Instead of rolling out clever PR stunts and calling it a day, large companies should make real, substantive changes to their environmental missions. So here are the three most glaring flaws that appear in several corporations’ “climate pledges,” along with some thoughts on how you can use your dollar to encourage meaningful action:
1. Most climate pledges kick the can down the road: At this point, most large corporations – ExxonMobil and DOW Chemical, for example – have published climate pledges that promise to achieve carbon neutrality by a specific year. Setting aside the fact that “carbon neutrality” is a nebulous and easily manipulated phrase, what’s most striking about these pledges is that almost none of them says anything about the immediate future. Instead, they allude to an abstract goal that their respective authors will reach in the distant future – typically sometime between 2030 and 2050 – when they’ll supposedly have adopted more sustainable practices. In the meantime, though, those corporations are free to continue polluting the planet and even increasing their carbon emissions as they display their lofty pledges about carbon neutrality on their website’s front page.
2. Many “Net Zero” pledges don’t even account for the majority of a company’s emissions: Even if a company claims it will achieve net zero carbon emissions by a given date, there’s still a good chance they’re not giving consumers a full picture. When petroleum companies pledge to achieve carbon neutrality in the next 30 years, for example, they’re typically only referring to the emissions that come from the oil extraction and distribution processes, and not the emissions produced when their petroleum is used. As a result, many of these pledges are not only abstract in nature, they’re also fundamentally hollow. If a corporate manufacturer of assault weapons claimed to have some of the best working conditions in the country, would we no longer try to hold that company accountable for its role in America’s gun crisis because they actually treat their workers pretty well? Of course not.
Surely the same idea applies here. Chemical and petroleum companies whose products cause climate change must also account for the impact of the commodities they sell – a “net zero” pledge that obscures those emissions misses the point entirely. There are so many technicalities and loopholes like this that companies can (and do) exploit in their pledges – whenever this happens, it’s our job to read between the lines and call them out.
3. Carbon offsetting programs are hard to measure: Most of the systems that we use to counteract our emissions are still very new and extremely difficult to measure with much confidence or objectivity. So while all reforestation programs, for instance, do offset carbon emissions to some extent by capturing Carbon Dioxide and converting it into Oxygen, most fail to actually track the development of the trees they plant, and therefore only work with vague approximations of how much carbon dioxide their work is actually pulling out of the atmosphere. As long as large companies are relying on poorly tracked initiatives to “offset” their carbon, it’s hard for us to take their word at face value – an estimated carbon offset, for example, may rely on the assumption that all trees planted on a plot of land grow to a state of maturity, when in fact, only one in two that were originally planted (or less) may actually make it to that point.
There’s truth to the idea that knowledge is power. With this knowledge, we have the tools we need to hold companies accountable to their pledges. In the meantime, we can support those organizations – nonprofit and for-profit alike – that are actually making a real effort to offset emissions, actively reducing their carbon emissions now, and/or committing in a material way to demonstrably sustainable practices. Words are important, but without action to prove their authenticity, they’re just that – words. It’s our responsibility to help turn them into realities.
