Typically, corporate greenwashing is seen as the practice of making untrue or inaccurate green claims – a discrepancy between the ‘walk’ (corporate ESG policies and actions) and the ‘talk’ (e.g. corporate PR and marketing). Accordingly, greenwashing usually results in harms to the environment when promised actions and policies fail to materialise. But consider the following:
“1. Greenwashing, which results in environmental harm, can be contrasted with environmental benefits, such as funding climate projects or planting trees.”
“2. Funding climate projects or planting trees are frequently the vehicle by which companies are able to greenwash.”
1) and 2) appear to contradict one another. How can greenwashing be enabled by actions which we normally take to be good for the environment, like planting trees and funding climate projects (assuming the trees are actually planted and the carbon projects really do reduce carbon)? Surely these things are always a good thing to do?
Here is one answer: as we become more sensitive to companies greenwashing us with nonsense claims, fewer companies have greenwashed through lying or deception. Instead, corporate greenwashing is increasingly characterised by a gesture, a token, a ‘wave of the hand’, in the direction of genuinely ambitious environmental policies and actions. The result is delay, distraction and falling short of the actions needed to mitigate the severe environmental harms they cause. Therefore, let’s call this new form of greenwashing, ‘greenwaving’.
This article will take a closer look at greenwaving: what it is, why it is bad and why we should think of greenwashing in this broader, less obvious sense. Greenwashing should not be limited to outright lying or causing harms, but expanded to the token gestures which have the effect of slowing and delaying real action, and distracting from the harms of corporate environmental policy. If we accept this broader concept, we are in a much stronger position both to explain why well-intentioned companies get into trouble, as well as calling out the bad actors and holding them to account.
Traditional Greenwashing
Since its invention by Jay Westerveld in 1983, ‘greenwashing’ has usually been defined as a “discrepancy between words and deeds”; i.e. an example of lying or unintentionally deceiving someone about one’s actions. In the case of corporate greenwashing, this is usually to cover up the active pollution of the environment, or lack of environmental policies and action in that direction.
Social scientists sometimes distinguish between direct greenwashing, where a company lies about its own actions, indirect greenwashing, where a company’s supplier lies instead. Another form, known as ‘vicarious greenwashing’, is where companies blame their own inaction on their suppliers, thus turning suppliers into “scapegoats for their own shortcomings”. Interestingly, the more that companies lie or deceive with respect to their own, internal policies, as opposed to blaming their suppliers, the more reputational damage they experience. This may be one reason why companies have increasingly tried to avoid lying or misleading their consumers, and choose to try a newer, more subtle, form of greenwashing.
Problematic Cases
“Carbon Offsetting. A pharmaceutical company actively causes severe environmental harms, including 1m tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. So it decides to fund climate projects which remove 1m tonnes of CO2 each year, while maintaining its high level of emissions. The projects are highly effective, and the overall result of its actions is less carbon in the atmosphere, compared to doing nothing. In other words, their actions wholly mitigate the harm caused by their emissions. ”
“Token Trees. Consider a major fashion brand, which also actively causes severe environmental harms, including severe chemical pollution. But it has the right intentions – it wants to do something good – so it plants 10,000 trees and creates a marketing campaign to promote its efforts. The trees are responsibly planted and have a very low risk of death or future deforestation. The overall result of its actions is more trees planted, compared to doing nothing at all. In other words, their actions benefit the environment. ”
Both carbon offsetting and token trees, as I will argue, are greenwashing. Offsetting has been condemned as a practice in recent years, and ‘tokenism’ has long been branded as a greenwashing tactic. Yet we have no reason to brand them as greenwashing, if we take the traditional definition, because they involve no such ‘discrepancy’ between words and deeds. Their claims are completely accurate, in both cases. More than this, they appear to be doing the right thing: both scenarios make the environment better off than it otherwise would have been! What we need, in fact, is a broader definition of greenwashing, if we are to explain why what these companies have done is wrong, and why it should be called out.
‘Token tree planting’ is one of the most common pledges advertised by companies, but does it merely have the effect of distracting from the harms they are responsible for?
Greenwaving i) Worse Than Nothing
“Consider Petrol Inc.. Its short-term environmental policies (call them E1) benefit the environment in and of themselves, but they result in greater environmental harms than having no environmental policies at all (E2), when broader context is taken into account over the long-term. Therefore, E1 is ‘greenwaving’ because it results in more environmental harms overall than would have otherwise occurred.”
In this type of case, the problem for Petrol Inc. is that the inaction scenario (E2), in practice, is not simply that ‘Petrol Inc. took no action on the environment and got away with it’, but is often something broader, such as ‘Petrol Inc. took no action on the environment, and started to face increased public pressure to act, and in the future was forced to substantially reduce its environmental harms.’ Contrast this with their current policies, where Petrol Inc. makes small, ‘wave of the hand’ environmental actions which pay lip-service to real issues, but which require barely any changes or investment compared to the scale of the harms caused. With an appropriate PR strategy, this strategy, despite being positive, is highly effective in shutting down all public pressure, and ultimately reduces and delays substantive environmental action. This should be called out as greenwashing – or ‘greenwaving’ – as much as outright lying.
This type of argument has been made by climate scientist Kevin Anderson, specifically with respect to carbon offsetting. Consider the case of carbon offsetting again. In this case, climate scientists like Anderson of course agree that supporting effective climate projects can be better for the environment, as they help developing countries to reduce their emissions and drive the restoration of nature. But Anderson rejects the conclusion that buying carbon credits is ‘better than doing nothing’, because of the wider, negative impacts of doing carbon offsetting, and the positive, longer-term impacts compared to short-term inaction. Firstly, “the promise of offsetting triggers a rebound away from meaningful mitigation”, i.e. it distracts companies from the urgent need for bolder, deeper and more rapid decarbonisation. Secondly, without the ‘get out of jail free card’ that carbon offsetting provides, i.e. if companies did nothing in the short term, there would be even more pressure on these companies to decarbonise in the future. Thus, the inaction counterfactual (E2) – i.e. with no offsets – would likely result in greater environmental change than with offsets over a 5-10 year period (E1). Conversely, the widespread purchasing of offsets is delaying much-needed decarbonisation in the private sector.
Such is the concern among scientists of this strategy, that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -the leading global panel of experts on climate -, explicitly warned against the overreliance on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) – a popular form of carbon offset – as being indirectly counterproductive to progress on climate.
“There are concerns that the prospect of large scale CDR could, depending on the design of mitigation strategies, obstruct near-term emissions reduction efforts (Lenzi et al. 2018; Markusson et al. 2018), mask insufficient policy interventions (Geden 2016; Carton 2019), might lead to an overreliance on technologies that are still in their infancy (Anderson and Peters 2016; Larkin et al. 2018; Grant et al. 2021), could overburden future generations (Lenzi 2018; Shue 2018; Bednar et al. 2019) might evoke new conflicts over equitable burden-sharing (Pozo et al. 2020; Lee et al. 2021; Mohan et al. 2021), could impact food security, biodiversity or land rights (Buck 2016; Boysen et al. 2017; Dooley and Kartha 2018; Hurlbert et al. 2019; Dooley et al. 2021), or might be perceived negatively by stakeholders and broader public audiences (Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering 2018; Colvin et al. 2020).”
In summary, despite their positive appearance, short-term beneficial actions may result in a net environmental harm, if the broader context is that those actions fuel longer-term stagnation in our international progress towards the decarbonisation of society. This is a clear case where short-term, distracting and gestural instances of ‘greenwaving’ need to be called out.
To avoid this form of greenwaving, companies must i) take extra care to actively contextualise the shortcomings of their actions, situating them in the broader context of the problems they aim to address, ii) ensure that they are moving in the right direction with respect to the harms they cause, rather than distracting from them, and iii) avoid claims that they have ‘neutralised’ or ‘offset’ their moral, and therefore environmental, responsibility. As a rule of thumb, corporate environmental policies should aim to increase, not decrease, the momentum of change in society more broadly.
The world’s leading panel of climate scientists, the IPCC, have consistently warned about the dangers of relying on someone else removing carbon in the future, instead of us reducing our emissions in the present.
Greenwaving ii) Better Than Nothing
But however well-intentioned or honest a company’s environmental policies are, they may simply not go far enough. This alone brings us to a second type of greenwaving:
“Consider Logistics Ltd.. Unlike Petrol Inc., Logistics Ltd.’s environmental policies have a small net benefit on the environment (E4), compared with inaction (E3). Despite this, its policies are greenwaving because they fall far short of strong environmental policies which would mitigate the severe environmental harms caused by the company (E5). ”
Firstly, note the difference between Petrol Inc. and Logistics Ltd.. The latter’s policies provide a net benefit to the environment, perhaps because the company isn’t well known and so would face little backlash if it did nothing, or because its policies are currently industry leading. Nonetheless, its policies are inadequate when compared with stronger environmental policies that do not cause severe environmental harms. Strong, positive policies (E5) are better than weak, positive policies (E4), which are in turn better than inaction (E3). But how can any positive policy, adequately contextualised, be accused of any type of greenwashing?
Consider the case of token trees again. While the environmental impact is clearly substantially net positive – planting 10,000 trees is a lot better than doing nothing -, it seems inevitable that such claims risk distracting from the urgent need for the company to tackle its own environmental impacts, such as the chemical pollution it causes. Firstly, to avoid greenwaving, it should be explicitly demonstrating responsibility for its own environmental impact by taking sufficient steps to address its pollution. Secondly, while planting trees is positive, it seems inevitable that it will have the effect of distracting from these harms, so there is indirect harm caused by its policies.
Or consider the case of corporate net zero targets. Leading scientists and net zero guidelines have made it clear that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees requires 90% global emissions cuts by 2050, and no new fossil fuel expansion [11]. Suppose a company implements policies which result in genuine emissions cuts of 0.1% per year. Clearly, this is better than doing nothing, but equally it falls short of the deep cuts required to mitigate severe environmental harms.
Or consider oil giant BP, which between 2016 and 2022 spent $3.2bn on clean energy, and $84bn on the expansion of oil and gas [12]. That’s less than 4% invested in renewables. Now, oil companies may well be accused of being deliberately misleading with their marketing of such claims. But it is more than this: even if we assume that BP is entirely honest about its green investments, it still seems that there is something deeply problematic – greenwaving – about the fact that their investment strategy is wholly inadequate, about the fact that it simply falls short, in the context of vast oil and gas investment.
What exactly is problematic about all these cases? Firstly, the cases are problematic simply because they are inadequate. They are inadequate because they fall short of what is required, where ‘what is required’ is, at the very least, that ‘Companies must not commit severe environmental harms’. Suppose a company causes 3 or 4 severe environmental harms, and comes up with policies to mitigate one of those. We should say: your policies are good, but they are not good enough. Causing even one instance of severe harm is vastly inadequate.
Secondly, these cases are problematic because they cause indirect harms. We saw earlier that token environmental policies risk dissolving the momentum for change, and without careful contextualisation, risk being overall worse than doing nothing. But even policies which have a net positive effect on the environment can have the effect of slowing the rate of social and environmental change compared to what it could be. They delay the required action by kicking the can down the road, slow it by doing only what is minimally necessary to avoid criticism, and their token policies distract wider society from the severe harms being caused.
Two lessons can be drawn from both types of greenwaving. Firstly, we should not view greenwaving as a criticism of a particular, isolated policy, but rather of a company’s entire impact on the environment. It is not BP’s investment in renewables that is greenwaving, but rather its investment in renewables in the context of vast fossil fuel investment.
Secondly, companies should be judged, not just compared to doing nothing, or to what is ‘industry leading’ at the time, but rather on whether their policies meet the requirement to avoid severe environmental harms. When it comes to greenwaving in particular, it is not merely the misleading or lying typically associated with greenwashing, but rather the ‘lip-service’ in the direction of strong environmental action that is so dangerous. We should call out as such those actions which fall short of mitigating severe environmental harms, and which have the effect of slowing, delaying or distracting from that harm.
One might object that my reference to ‘severe environmental harms’ is a bit vague – why not just say ‘moderately bad’ environmental harms, and why not include environmental benefits as well as harms while you’re at it, and where do you draw the line anyway? True, there is debate to be had about what constitutes a ‘severe harm’, but the notion that companies’ policies can and regularly do fall short is uncontroversial. The question of what exactly counts as ‘falling short’ is an academic point; the key point is that the concept of greenwashing should encompass harms of this type, instead of comparing actions with reference to ‘what everyone else does’, or worse, merely to ‘doing nothing’.
Clearly, many companies will commit both traditional greenwashing and greenwaving – they may lie as well as distract and delay. But given that greenwaving is more subtle than explicit greenwashing, and increasingly common, it is all the more important to focus on. If we swap greenwaving with the traditional definition of greenwashing as mere lying or ‘breaking promises’, we let loose a substantial catch of bad behaviour, and with it those companies which fall short of the standards we should expect, and ignore the indirect effects of their actions on the green transition. If we want to pin the greenwashing badge to corporate behaviour which kicks the can down the road, distracts from strong environmental action, and fails to take responsibility for the harms it causes, we need new and clearer and stronger concepts. Greenwaving should be one of these.
Further information: https://edengreenspace.co.uk/
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