This Earth Day, Let’s Scrape Off the Greenwash
Today marks the 38th annual celebration of Earth Day, and once again the event comes with its fair share of PR hype and misleading marketing campaigns. In the spirit of dedicating ourselves to genuine concern for the planet, today is therefore a good time to look carefully at corporate environmental claims, some of which consist more of empty rhetoric than real substance.
Companies like Wal-Mart are announcing environmental initiatives. General Electric has its “Ecomagnation” advertising campaign. In Singapore, a shopping center is advertising that customers can “shop to save planet earth” — and if they buy enough, they might win a new car!
The ritual of green hypocrisy frequently requires that companies and politicians redefine environmental progress in increasingly creative ways. Last week, for example, George W. Bush announced a plan to address the problem of global warming by “halting the growth” of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2025. Beyond the fact that this target date is 17 years in the future, what really means is that during those 17 years not only will greenhouse gas emissions continue, the amount of those emissions will continue to grow. As columnist Gail Collins observed in the New York Times, this would be akin to having an overweight person announce a plan to achieve “an 18 percent reduction in the rate at which he was gaining weight, to be reached within the next decade.”
Of course, this strategy of reframing failure as success is hardly unique to Bush. Last year, the Dallas-based utility TXU had plans in the works to build 11 new coal-fired power plants until it was bought out by private equity firms that had struck a deal with two environmental groups, Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Under the terms of the buyout, TXU scaled back its plan to only build three coal plants instead of 11. This of course still means burning more coal, not less, but to judge from the Earth Day section of TXU’s website, you would think the company had died and gone to environmental heaven.
As Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich observed last year, “The biggest problem with Earth Day is that it has become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity. Small steps, we’re told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well. … If the politics of gesture weren’t bad enough, Earth Day is rapidly becoming a firestorm of gestural shopping. Marketers today will shamelessly slap the ‘green’ label on nearly anything, including things that are demonstrably stupid and ecologically steps backwards.”
How did the actual practice of Earth Day become such a corrupted version of the original concept? As John Stauber and I wrote in our 1995 book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, this transformation was no accident. It reflects deliberate, carefully calculated strategies by the public relations industry. PR firms have carefully studied opinion polls which show that the vast majority of people in the United States (and throughout much of the rest of the world as well) are concerned that human actions are damaging the natural environment. Rather than confront public opinion head-on, therefore, they use environmental rhetoric — often consisting mostly of empty words and minor, symbolic gestures — to make themselves look green while continuing to do business as usual.
The appropriate term to describe these environmental deceptions is “greenwashing.” We have an article on the topic on SourceWatch, which defines greenwashing as “the unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government, a politician or even a non-government organization to create a pro-environmental image, sell a product or a policy, or to try and rehabilitate their standing with the public and decision makers after being embroiled in controversy.”
As a result of its reliance on greenwashing, the public relations industry has redefined the terms “environmental” and “green” to mean the very opposite of what those terms evoke for most people. “Environmental public relations,” for example, refers to a PR campaign designed to lobby against environmental regulations. E. Bruce Harrison, the man often considered the founder of “environmental public relations,” got his start when he helped the pesticide industry attack Rachel Carson and her classic 1962 environmental book, Silent Spring. By the 1970s, however, Harrison began to adopt a more subtle approach, aimed at undermining environmental activism from within, by offering corporate cash to environmental groups that could be persuaded to moderate their activism.
“The activist movement that began in the early 1960s … succumbed to success over … the last 15 years,” Harrison proclaimed in his 1993 book, Going Green, which argued that large environmental groups had become so focused on fundraising that they were really businesses themselves. As he put it, the environmental movement’s most pressing need was “not to green, but to ensure the wherewithal that enable it to green.” The need for money and a “respectable” public image, he said, provided the motivation for green bureaucrats to sit down and cut deals with industry.
Harrison and other PR firms also work through a variety of green-sounding front groups that have been created precisely to create confusion about environmental issues. Many people, for example, have heard of Keep America Beautiful (KAB), ostensibly an anti-littering organization. In fact, KAB is funded by major corporations such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Busch, as well as major tobacco companies, and it has refused to support legislation that would make companies responsible for recycling the bottles, cans and cigarette butts that they produce.
Some groups still attack environmentalism head-on. This year, for example, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group formerly known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, is using Earth Day as the occasion to launch a “nationwide hot air balloon tour” aimed at ridiculing what it called “global warming alarmism.”
Some environmental front groups adopt a more subtle strategy. The Greening Earth Society, a project of the Western Fuels Association, claims that greenhouse gas emissions are a good thing because they will lead to greater plant growth and a greener environment. The The Foundation for Clean Air Progress, a front group for the American Petroleum Institute, was created by the Burson-Marsteller PR firm to lobby against air pollution controls.
There is a reason why front groups adopt language that means the very opposite of what they really intend. As George Orwell observed in his essay on politics and the English language, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Greenwashing is ultimately an attempt to obscure awareness of environmental pollution by polluting language and thought itself in an attempt to stop people from thinking clearly about the issues they face.
In this degraded information environment, it helps to have some means of identifying the most common deceptions. For that purpose, our SourceWatch article includes links to examples of greenwashing throughout the world — Australia, Europe, Canada, the United States. We also have dozens of articles about environmental front groups and other greenwashing-related topics. Like all articles on SourceWatch, these profiles are open to public editing, so you can add your examples and research.
Of course, not every environmental initiative on Earth Day should be dismissed as greenwashing. For example, Heather Clancy at ZDNet has compiled a short list of environmentally-themed marketing campaigns that actually look worthwhile. Genuine efforts to protect the environment should be praised and valued, which is all the more reason why phony marketing campaigns and outright attacks on the environment should not be allowed to masquerade as the real thing.
Sheldon Rampton is research director at the Center for Media and Democracy.
This Earth Day, sit and meditate on what you are personally doing to help the earth and what you are doing to hurt the earth. Then change.
What disturbs me is that the heads of industry seem to actually believe that green b.s. p.r. is addressing the problem. The oil company with the “imagine that, an oil company as part of the solution” ads, the car company with the commercials about all the rabbits that are happily breeding alongside the plant, the car company that claims to be the “greenest on earth” — all of them. I suspect that if you accused their senior management of stomping all over the future with their big carbon footprint they’d say: “You’re wrong! Look at our ads! See what we’re all doing!”
But many Americans are suckers for a good ad and want to believe that “we” are all in it together and all working to turn things around.
As George Carlin says, “It’s all b.s. and it’s bad for ya.”
Two of the biggest greenwashing scams: Ethanol/Bio-fuels and ‘Hydrogen’.
’nuff said.
Green is a colour. Green is used to refer to money. A half-acre of chemical-soaked turfgrass is Green. Green is the colour of envy. The poor word has enough on it’s hands without being strapped to a Hybrid SUV.
Try “sensible”. If that were the buzzword, folks’d hafta be even dumber to think that a Hybrid SUV is part of the solution.
I have always maintained (and still do) that the important thing to take from the idea of “greenwashing” is not that corporations are doing it — of course they are, the shifty bastards. But the important thing is: They think it’s important enough for them to do it. To try and create that perception. THAT reflects a change in the taste and values of CONSUMERS, which they’re trying to exploit. THAT’S important, because for environmental and animal-friendly lifestyles to come about and stick, consumers have got to be the ones who take to the idea and embrace it as part of their daily lives. Changes in government mandate are not enough.
Galen…I agree with the biofuel criticism…its a scam…but Hydrogen isn’t a scam.
To be sure as the battery technology keeps improving I may not be as promotional toward hydrogen as a means of storing power in general but I think it would be better to run internal combustion on hydrogen.
brontoburger - perhaps, then, it is internal combustion which is a scam. The electricity required to pull enough hydrogen out of water to feul an IC engine to drive a car 1000km could quite simply feul a battery powered car much further. IC is painfully inefficient, but technologically simple to put on the road. Hybrid engines are an inefficient way to power up batteries, too. Wind+Solar+Tidal+Geothermal->Battery->ElectricMotor. So efficient that the economy would certainly collapse, if you asked an MBA, anyway.
Sheldon:
Thanks for your efforts at exposing Greenwashing. It is no accident, as you well put it, that the large mainstream environmental groups have become corrupted. Nor that companies would use P.R. efforts to try and portray a disengenious positive public image.
What disturbs me most, though, is the recent evolution of “Green Consumption”. We are a consumption based society, culture, and economy. And the focus of “Green”, lately, has become the effort at consuming in an environmentally friendly manner.
The Sierra Club is being paid by Clorox, to have the environmental group’s logo, placed on it’s new line of eco-friendly products.
The “Greenwashing” of consumerism, sends the message that you don’t need to consume less, just green. This is false. The problem facing the planet is not the type of consumption, green or brown, but consumption itself.
Although green consumption is preferable to brown consumption, it nonetheless, still requires the same amount of global warming energy to produce and transport the product. We cannot consume our way out of the planetary crisis.
Green must become the effort, at not only consuming green products, but also consuming less product overall.
Y’all missed the best of the lot:
“Fox is launching its first network-wide public service campaign in two years:
“Green It. Mean It.”
Because, if nothing else, FOX CARES!
Shut up! I said FOX CARES! And where the hell is your flap lapel pin, traitor!?
Big Money - you are correct that it would be better to have full electricity but if you actually want to make things better sooner than decades later we need to convert internal combustion to run on hydrogen (as well as gasoline and natural gas…why make it run on only one fuel?)
Over time the electric drive vehicles will dominate by far but for all those on the road now we can improve things economically for people now AND knock out the oil companies. But then again I’m actually an engineer and not a sole advocate of one particular thing. It’s just common sense and logic that we need to use the ICE’s on the road.
If you find yourself faced with a lot of greenwash, you’re probably way too dependent on the capitalists. Reduce your dependency, and you’ll see less greenwash.
The “Hydrogen Economy” as a drop-in replacement for our automobile-based transportation system, high levels of consumption and endless growth would be a scam. Hydrogen as one of many ways for long-term storage of energy from intermittent renewable sources, coupled with modest levels of consumption doesn’t need to be a scam.
Greenwash is corporate propaganda designed to obfuscate and confuse authentic action with consumption.
And it works.
Sigh. Any time anyone, anywhere, consumes less of anything, it’s considered some kind of terrible problem. The whole house of cards is propped up by cash seeking returns based on the promise of increasing sales, each and every quarter of each and every year. If the whole world only consumed 98% as much this year as we did last year, it wouldn’t even begin to save the world. And the talking heads will be non-stop about the “global recession”. The failure of conservation is baked into the cake.
Correct, big money, and all quantitative savings will be sucked up by increasing demand. That is why we should aim for a system change, not palliatives.
1. reverse autosprawl 2. educate all kids 3. give the suburbs to the organic farmers.
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
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Isn’t greenwashing one of the fastest growing industries ?
Housing is another corporate greenwashing zone. Huge energy gobbling houses that use a small forset to build, and are built poorly so they will soon need extensive material wastinng repairs, are all greenwash and no green. Builders can tout so-called green products in these houses but if the house leaks, it will soon rot, and that means more waste in the landfill and more trees to cut to replace the rotten parts. If building industry org’s wrote the standards for green building, chances are that the effort is more hype than green, and mostly about profit. Before green was cool it was written about in magazines like Mother Earth News, where the goal has always been more toward zero energy homes, durability, less waste, etc, not just slight improvements to the McMansion. Also, new developments tend to be walled off and lacking safe pedestrian routes to nearby stores. This causes the residents to have to drive even on errands that are well within walking distance. I’ve seen people have to get in their car to get to a business that was maybe 100 feet away because it was on the other side of a 6 ft. brick wall, and the only route to it on foot or bike would mean probably getting hit by a car because there was NO place but the street to go there. Definitely not green.
With global missionary zeal, we have spread the tentacles of our faith in capitalism as the savior of freedom and the American way of life to the far corners of the Earth. To fuel and perpetuate such an economic expansion we long ago made a deal with the devil at our cultural crossroads. There we sold our collective soul for a ride on the American Dream Machine. The Dream, however, is the Devils Machine and it has spawned the devil’s children in the image of global corporations. The sacrifices due at the altar of corporate gods are great, and there are those that believe that God gave man dominion over the Earth. Yeah, right. If so, I imagine there will be hell to pay.
People Power Granny is tired of being called an ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMIST. Are there any others of you out there, or do you think if we just ignore environmental threats, they’ll just go away, like stars with the sunrise? No, I think I’ll continue to wear my ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMIST badge with pride, especially on EARTH DAY. How would you folks describe such an animal these days?
I’ve just started a new company. We do environmentally freindly greenwashing. Or, “Greengreenwashing”. 80% less carbon emissions that ordinary greenwashing! Now that’s gonna make a big difference!
Okay, I’m having fun with my new company, Big_Money’s Greengreenwashing. Our business philosophy is that if everyone in the world was employed by an Environmentally Friendly Greenwashing Agency, there would be no problem with CO2 emissions. So I’m going to divulge the secret to reducing your greenwashing-related CO2 emissions, and you can start your own home business, or maybe a large corporation with a Green office tower in your home town, and a Green bank account in the Bahamas or somewhere pleasant and Green like that. Perhaps you’ve heard the term, “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Unit Economic Activity”. Konservatives like this idea, because if they can sell 20% more crap, and only emit 19% more CO2, they get to claim that they have reduced their emissions! That’s ordinary greenwashing. In Greengreenwashing, what you do, is decide how much you want to reduce your greenwashing related greenhouse gas emissions, and then increase the price of your service accordingly! Easy! We multiplied our price by 5 - an 80% reduction in “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Per Unit Economic Activity”! Not so hard to do, and we produced almost no CO2 emissions in the process! Now, do I need to tell you what you’d need to do to achieve a 90% reduction? Can you imagine the number of contracts you would get brandishing numbers like that around? Happy Earth Day!
I walked by a “Earth Day” celebration in my hometown..a couple of giant tractor trailers provided a stage, a huge diesel generator was running to power the live band, and the whole lot was surrounded by a couple hundred cars of everyone who DROVE THE THREE BLOCKS TO THE EVENT!!
I think they missed the point.
Yes, and coal can be made “clean”! I think the biggest surprise for me, in joining the grassroots movement against “clean” coal was that Big Green does seem to be more focused on Raising Money than integrity.
Too bad, because the time for real solutions — before peak oil, peak natural gas and peak water — is running out.
How green are our computers, laptops, cell phones?
Again, the idea here is to get the other guys to go green, so WE can keep stomping all over the landscape with our gigantic carbon feet.
Just like the corporations.
Recycle1,
You issued a useful imperative. I’m a day late(but not a dollar short), but I intend to be conscious throughout the day about my own consumption habits and whether or not I am minimizing the entropy I create to stay alive.
There are two paths to cleaning up the earth. The well-known path is to take on small (symbolic) gestures of personal cleaning up — recycling, cleaning out river bottoms, vigiling, writing your congressperson. It helps. Some people even take calculated small risks at getting arrested for four hours or for a night.
The less-traveled path says that we’re all one people in covenant with one another, and in the long run, everyone else’s cleaning up to help on climate change is as important as one person’s action. So, technological changes are important.
A monastery put up a wind turbine on their hill, not just to save their own money, but to be a light both to their neighbors and to their faith, to be a city on a hill. Now the neighbors are thinking about saving money, because putting up a turbine is safe now.
Being first is extremely tough. It takes money and that takes convincing some very conservative elders that the monastery’s precious endowment money has to be risked. What if something goes wrong?
Inventors fall into this category too. Some of them bet half their lives on a gamble. If it works, and if they don’t get the invention stolen away, they’ll maybe be rich and happy. Maybe. But winning doesn’t usually happen.
Inventors aren’t fools. Neither are monks who take financial gambles on new technology. They live in covenant with you and with all people. If enough “they”s take technological gambles, you win. We win.
I’m not suggesting that any of you take enormous risks, so minimize your risks all you possibly can, but then take these risks with half of your life.
I’m writing this under a headline of “Let’s scrape off the Greenwash.”
Biofuels are not a scam. Corn ethanol is not the best way to go, but cellulose biofuels are. You can rant and rave all you want, but in the next 5 years you will be putting cellulose biofuels in your car. If you don’t want to do that you do not have to. You can ride a bus, ride a bike or walk.