2021 In Review - A Big Green Explosion Of Greenwash, From Shoes To Trees To Even MORE Plastic
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Tree Planting In The Desert
Saudi Arabia announced in March that it would be planting 50 billion trees as part of a plan to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060. There was very little detail given about how the world’s largest reforestation programme would work in a country with limited water resources. “Greenwashing Joke of the Day, courtesy of number 2 top oil-producing country, which apparently wants to plant 10 billion trees even though it doesn’t have a single river,” tweeted Assaad Razzouk, chief executive of Gurīn Energy. Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the country planned to continue to extract hydrocarbons while reducing its own emissions through means such as carbon capture, use and storage technologies (CCUS) and would be creating a “circular carbon economy”. Matthew Archer, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, told Al Jazeera: “It’s absurd to think that an economy based on the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels can be ‘circular’ in any meaningful sense of the word. The only way it works is if you rely on technologies that don’t exist yet. These initiatives are … full of language that’s as ambitious as it is ambiguous, with very few concrete plans and no accountability mechanisms.”
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The Alliance To Produce A Lot More Plastic Waste
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), a Singapore-based non-profit backed by big oil and chemical companies such as Shell, ExxonMobil, and Dow that launched in 2019, claims to be spending US$1.5 billion on cleaning up plastic waste in developing countries. But an investigation by Reuters in January highlighted not only the failure of one the Alliance’s flagship projects to clean up the Ganges river in India, but the fact that these companies are planning to dramatically ramp up plastic production, which will fuel the plastic pollution crisis. Greenpeace has called AEPW a “distraction” from Big Oil’s expansion plans. In November, AEPW published a story on its website headlined Why proper waste management is more important than going plastic-free, which argued against bans or other means of reducing plastic production. Tom Peacock-Nazil, co-founder of Seven Clean Seas, an ocean clean-up organisation, commented on LinkedIn that AEPW’s article was unbalanced “propaganda” that made AEPW seem like a plastic industry lobby group.
Deep Greenwash
A slickly produced video posted on LinkedIn features animated explosions in land-based mines and warns viewers about the dire consequences of mining the metals needed for the energy transition. “Nature disappears, humans suffer, Earth suffers. But there’s another way,” purrs the narrator in the ad for The Metals Company, which until a recent merger was known as DeepGreen, a Canadian mining company which claims to be able to responsibly suck up potato-sized metal nodules lying on the sea floor. “If we use them to make a billion electric car batteries, we can dramatically reduce our environmental and social impact for the whole planet. We’re building a world where metals are not mined and dumped, but rented and returned,” says the narrator. But not everyone is convinced that deep-sea mining is necessary or a better alternative to land-based mining. “Oh, sure! Let’s rape another part of the earth in order to make things “cleaner”. This kind of thinking is what got us here in the first place,” said one commenter on LinkedIn. “Be cautious! Deep sea mining is connected with a large number of concerns that currently heavily outweigh any greenwashing arguments presented here,” said another, referring to calls from scientists, environmentalists and even businesses to ban deep-sea mining, because of the environmental impact of mining an ecosystem about which less is known than the surface of the moon.
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Carbon Neutral Hydrocarbons
Carbon neutral oil — yes, as bonkers as it sounds. At the start of the year, oil companies (United States-based Occidental Petroleum was first…) started branding their barrels carbon neutral because they claimed to have bought sufficient carbon offsets to account for the carbon emissions of their hydrocarbons. Shell did the same, using PR firm Edelman to pitch its “carbon neutral” Helix Ultra car oil (the same oil for sale in Shell’s award-winning eco-brick stores) in Singapore with the following: “If you are looking to do features on how one can take a step forward in the mission towards a more sustainable future and lead an eco-friendly lifestyle, we feel that Shell’s carbon neutral Helix Ultra lubricants will be a good addition.” In March, Shell was ordered to stop advertising in the Netherlands that claim customers can render their fuel purchases “carbon neutral” by paying for carbon offsets, because the firm had no proof that their claims were genuine. Declaring fossil fuels as carbon neutral is like “a tobacco company saying they sell nicotine-free cigarettes because they paid someone else to sell some chewing gum,” David Turnbull, a spokesman for Washington-based advocacy group Oil Change International, told Reuters.
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https://www.eco-business.com/news/11-brands-called-out-for-greenwashing-in-2021/