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greenwashing
Whose Green Transition Is It Anyway?
Development banks must stop promoting false solutions that are implemented without community consultation, cause environmental damage, and lead to the further grabbing of local lands and resources.
Jun 20, 2026
Two years ago, the International Accountability Project, or IAP, first launched the Energy Finance Tracker, or EFT, and Energy Finance Tracker Report, as the accompanying analysis of energy investment trends between 2022 and 2023. The goal of EFT was to provide a tool for movements and communities to follow the money, hold 16 major development banks accountable for their role in the global energy transition, and push them to support priorities for a just energy transition. However, that direction looks less certain. As we dug deeper into the data from January 2024 to December 2025, we noticed that development banks still favor privatization and promote greenwashing and false solutions.
In just four years, EFT tracked 2,119 projects related to energy financing. We noticed a staggering increase in development bank funding toward energy projects, with total investment increasing from US$ 139.8 billion (as of December 2023) to US$ 304.3 billion (as of December 2025). However, we argue that this increase does not represent a victory for the climate and communities. Instead, we find that this capital is flowing into an increasingly privatized landscape. The share of public sector funding has slipped to just 30.1% (US$ 91.5 billion as of December 2025), as development banks increasingly prioritize private sector interests that now command nearly 69% (US$ 209.5 billion as of December 2025) of the total portfolio.
The EFT also tracked a surge in high-risk (Category A) projects, which jumped from 9.9% (92 projects as of December 2023) to 14% (297 projects as of December 2025) of total investments by development banks. We argue that this shows a dangerous trend where development banks accelerate large-scale energy infrastructures by sidelining environmental and social safeguards. Such a rush replicates extractive colonial models that promote greenwashing and false solutions, which bring harsher impacts on local communities’ livelihoods, lands, and resources.
A prime example is found in Brazil’s Alto Jequitinhonha region, where International Finance Corporation (IFC) has provided a US$ 155.64 million loan, complemented by up to US$ 117,2 million (€100 million) from other lenders, to expand Aperam BioEnergia’s large-scale eucalyptus plantations and charcoal production for the steel industry. While marketed as a “sustainable” project eligible for carbon credits, the operation of Aperam BioEnergia has been criticized as a “greenwashing” that functions more like an ecological desert than a forest. The expansion of this project impacts more than 30 local communities, including four Quilombola groups. These groups reported that the eucalyptus plantations strain and pollute their water sources, and further damage their health and traditional livelihoods. Beyond these human impacts, the project also causes significant biodiversity loss. Researchers have found that non-native eucalyptus monocultures are known to harm the local ecosystems they replace.
We believe that a just transition requires a shift to supporting decentralized, community-led renewable energy through direct grants rather than debt-intensive loans.
The preference for greenwashing and false solutions also still pertains elsewhere. Despite the severe harm and rising tensions reported by local communities, IDB Invest has proposed a US$ 150 million loan to AES Colombia and the oil company Ecopetrol SA for large-scale wind farm projects in the Upper and Middle Guajira region of Colombia. While framed as Colombia's just energy transition initiative, the project actively threatens the traditional livelihoods of the Indigenous Wayúu people and has proceeded without their Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). IDB Invest is moving forward with this funding even though this negligence has caused dangerous levels of conflict. The Indigenous Wayúu people, who maintain deep spiritual and customary law over their lands, have made it clear how far they will go to protect their home. One community leader stated, “The Wayuu defend their territory with blood and death, if necessary.”
The threats to the region extend beyond wind farms, as La Guajira is also being designated as a hydrogen production hub to supply Europe with “green” fuel through the European Union’s Global Gateway program. This initiative has been criticized as neocolonial because it prioritizes European energy needs over local rights in a region that already suffers from some of the lowest energy access rates in Colombia. A community leader from the Indigenous Wayúu people, Eliel de Jesus Castillo, denounced the injustice by saying, “While large electricity projects are being installed in our territories, we have no energy in our homes.”
The words of Indigenous Wayúu leader Eliel de Jesus Castillo are a stark reminder for development banks, corporations, and governments that the current energy transition often perpetuates deep injustices against the very communities whose resources are being extracted. Instead of replicating extractive models, development banks must stop promoting false solutions that are implemented without community consultation, cause environmental damage, and lead to the further grabbing of local lands and resources.
We believe that a just transition requires a shift to supporting decentralized, community-led renewable energy through direct grants rather than debt-intensive loans. A successful example of this approach is found in Nepal, where a local initiative supported by the Community Empowerment and Social Justice Network (CEMSOJ) developed a community-based renewable energy project for the Indigenous Tamang and Chepang communities. Additionally, it is also evident in Malaysia.
We further believe that a just transition can finally serve the people it claims to help by prioritizing the voices of those promoting climate justice and being community led. If the system continues to favor corporate profit over human rights and the environment, we are forced to ask: Whose transition is it anyway? Because at the end of the day, the word “just” before transition means changes must ensure that the “whole of society is brought along in the pivot to a net-zero future,” rather than shifting power into the hands of a few.
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Big Oil's Post-Trump About Face Proves Corporations Won't Regulate Themselves
The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions.
Mar 28, 2026
President Donald Trump has long called global warming a hoax, but his sweeping anti-climate agenda has stunned even many of his supporters. Since returning to the White House, he’s withdrawn the US from the Paris Treaty, rolled back critical greenhouse gas regulations, and opened up millions of acres of previously protected public land for oil and gas drilling.
In response, big oil and gas companies have abandoned, without the slightest resistance, the showy public commitments they had previously made to climate transition. For example, BP has slashed green energy expenditures by 70%, Equinor has cut back its renewable capacity targets by almost 40%, and Chevron has reduced its carbon-reduction capital expenditures to about 5% of its total capital expenditures. None of the world’s 12 largest oil and gas companies plan to decrease fossil fuel production, and all of them project that fossil fuels will continue to overwhelm other sources of energy for the foreseeable future, according to a recent evaluation.
Far from a change of heart, this is simply Big Oil returning to form. The petroleum industry has never been serious about curbing emissions, 90% of which globally come from fossil fuels. Indeed, after decades of investment, renewables still account for a minuscule amount—about 0.13%—of total energy produced by the world’s largest 250 oil and gas companies, according to a recent research paper. “I think the article resolves the debate on whether the fossil fuel industry is honestly engaging with the climate crisis or not,” said the paper’s lead researcher. “Their interest ends with their profits.”
Some oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, continue to promise to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. This appears to align them with the consensus of climate science that this is necessary globally to limit warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels. However, Exxon is typical in designating a narrow target of greenhouse gases to eliminate: only those from its own operations, mainly pumping and refining oil and gas, and from buying electricity generated by fossil fuels. This conveniently ignores greenhouse gases from the consumption of its gasoline and other petroleum products, as well as those of its suppliers—which exceed by four times the total covered by Exxon’s commitment.
We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord.
Exxon wants us to believe that running its pump jacks and refineries on solar and wind power puts it on the side of the climate transition. It’s cynical buffoonery. But it’s also a sign that America’s leaders and electorate have been willfully blind. We should have realized that companies, like Exxon, that knowingly act in pursuit of catastrophe cannot be trusted to stop of their own accord. As Shakespeare might have said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in Big Oil but in ourselves.”
The past is prologue. Ever since the advent of industrial capitalism in America in the early 1800s, corporations have consistently served one master, shareholders, delivering them profits by open competition in free markets. From the start, elites have insisted that corporations must regard financial and social objectives as mutually exclusive, even as a single-minded quest for profitability has pushed the system to its breaking point.
We saw the injustice of this belief in the late 19th century, when “robber barons”—who had clawed their way to the top of an unregulated, chaotic economy—justified poverty wages and harsh working conditions by co-opting Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution, popularized as “survival of the fittest.” Railroad magnate Charles Elliott Perkins—who embodied Social Darwinism by rising from office boy to president of one of the nation’s largest railroads—declared his creed: “That a man is entitled to a living wage is absurd… [If] you take from the strong to give to the weak, you encourage weakness; therefore, let men reap what they and their progenitors sow.”
Early capitalism was marred by periodic, destructive economic downturns. But over time, government acquired fiscal and monetary tools to smooth the boom-and-bust cycles and soften the hard edges of fierce profit seeking through welfare programs, especially during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920) and the New Deal (1933-1938).
However, the bedrock of the corporate mission stayed solid even as the government built new structures on top of it. During the New Deal, for example, leading industrialists joined the American Liberty League to oppose innovations like Social Security. A League leader, echoing his counterpart six decades earlier, proclaimed, “You can’t recover prosperity by seizing the accumulation of the thrifty and distributing it to the thriftless and unlucky.”
The permanent establishment of a taxpayer-funded social safety net in the postwar period only reaffirmed corporations’ unwavering fealty to shareholder value. The president of the mighty Dow Chemical Company, Leland Doan, wrote in 1957: “Any activity labeled ‘social responsibility’ must be judged in terms of whether it is somehow beneficial to the immediate or long-range welfare of the business... I hope we never kid ourselves that we are operating for the public interest per se.”
The corporate community resisted even when the tide of public opinion turned against the malign Jim Crow segregation system in the 1950s and ’60s. When US Steel was accused of workplace discrimination in 1963, prominent academic Andrew Hacker struck back forcefully: “If corporations ought to be doing things they are not now doing—such as hiring Negroes on an equal basis with whites—then it is up to government to tell them so. The only responsibility of corporations is to make profits, thus contributing to a prosperous economic system.”
Predictably, that same decade, the corporate establishment dismissed the emergence of the environmental movement. In 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring shocked the nation by exposing the harm to human and animal life posed by the unrestricted use of pesticides, a chemical industry spokesman responded, “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and chief economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, famously summed up the unchanging corporate consensus in words still widely quoted today: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
For the most part, investors have held their noses and counted their gains. But starting almost a century ago, in 1928, when the invention of mutual funds opened up the stock market to the middle class, “ethical” funds, as they came to be known, entered the arena. They were marketed to individuals and families who wanted their portfolios to reflect their values, and to asset managers who wanted their clients to consider them good citizens.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government.
For a long time, these socially responsible funds were a negligible part of the industry because they typically underperformed the market. These funds used a strategy called negative screening—excluding certain “sin” industries, such as cigarettes, liquor, and weapons. Unfortunately, negative screening typically yields lower returns (sin often pays in the stock market!) and greater price volatility, due to limited diversification. In addition, there is no reason to believe that negative screening has any discernible effect on stock prices, so it has no power to compel corporations to reform.
The answer to this quandary finally came in the early 2000s, in the form of a new stock-picking tool called Environmental, Social, and Governance, or “ESG” for short. The seductive promise of ESG is “doing well by doing good”—or getting rich by investing in companies that make the world better. On the back of this dream, capital invested in accordance with ESG principles has grown monumentally, to as much as $30 trillion, about one-quarter of the global total of assets under management.
ESG claims that adroitly managing environmental and social risks will improve profitability and, therefore, stock prices. But ESG only counts risks that are financially material, ignoring all social or environmental harm for which a company faces no financial penalty. As you might expect, this often bears perverse results. For example, cigarette companies kill their customers—you can’t get more anti-social than that!—but smoking is legal, and Big Tobacco rarely faces liability for cancer from smoking. That is why tobacco companies are sometimes awarded good ESG scores and even appear in some ESG stock funds. Likewise, fossil fuel companies, which have historically made high returns and avoided significant regulatory penalties, appear in 80% of ESG funds.Whether it be alcoholism, gambling addiction, gun deaths, climate change, or other iniquities, the damage that companies inflict on society without literally paying for it—or the negative externalities, as they’re called in economics—entirely escapes ESG’s radar.
Worse, the key assumption of ESG—that adept social risk management translates into higher profitability—is fundamentally unprovable. Many studies have attempted to show a strong positive correlation between specific ESG policies, like emissions reductions or heightened employee benefits, and financial metrics, like cost of debt or return on assets. But, as I explain in my forthcoming book on socially responsible investment, very few succeed. In the end, the research only allows you to draw one conclusion with confidence: that it is simply not possible to precisely define ESG practices at a granular level, measure their direct effect on financial performance, and compare these results validly across different companies.
But that does not stop ESG rating agencies from trying. ESG ratings have grown into a big business, since fund managers pay dearly for them to guide their stock selection. The rating agency reports are typically long, detailed, and quantitative—but completely unreliable. These reports may look sober and professional, like credit rating reports from companies such as S&P Global or Moody’s. But credit rating agencies are analyzing real financial values to assess a tangible corporate quality: its ability to repay its debts. The numbers are verifiable and have a proven relevance to the projected outcome. That is why credit ratings have a 90% correlation; S&P and Moody’s seldom disagree substantially on a company’s rating.
ESG ratings, by contrast, are all over the map, with a correlation of only 40%. Analysts point to three key factors: the rating agencies choose different terms to measure; they measure them with incompatible methods; and they use contradictory methodologies to combine these idiosyncratic measurements into final ratings. These discrepancies build on each other to produce wildly variant final scores. A company denigrated as a dog in ESG terms by one rating agency may be lauded as a star by another.
If ESG is just an illusion, and negative screening a disappointment, how should investors direct their capital to make corporations more socially responsible? The answer is, they shouldn’t bother.
In the game of capitalism, the role of corporations is to make as much money as they can, while playing by the rules. The role of the state, as we learned in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, is to revise the rules periodically to ensure fair play and a socially positive outcome—without hobbling the players. We do want fierce competition, but we don’t want to destroy the playing field in the process.
Today, corporate profits are at their highest proportion of GDP in 50 years, while wages are at their lowest. Overall, income inequality has never been greater, not even in the Gilded Age, the period immediately preceding the Progressive Era, when many toiled in Dickensian poverty while a few, like the Vanderbilt dynasty, flaunted their extravagant and lavish lifestyles. Now, like then, the people, with justification, are losing faith in the system.
Like our Progressive forebears, we will have to revamp capitalism in order to rescue it. Key objectives must include rebuilding organized labor, since what benefits unions benefits the middle class. We’ll also need to break up de facto corporate cartels that stifle competition, squeeze wages, and lower productivity. To counter the existential threat of climate change, we need a cap-and-trade system that makes industry a partner in carbon reduction, not an opponent, and can serve as a model for other public-private partnerships.
It is folly to ask business to do the work of government. The sooner we stop expecting companies like Exxon to be voluntary agents of social change and acknowledge that they are amoral profit machines, the sooner we can stop the flow of hypocrisy and greenwashing and start working on resolving the social and environmental crises that blight the lives of billions. The path to greater corporate social responsibility leads through the voting booth and the statehouse, not through Wall Street and the C-suite.
This piece was originally published by The MIT Press Reader.
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How You Can Help Save Boreal Forests in 2026
Want an easy New Years' resolution? Buy 100% recycled or alternative fiber toilet paper instead of rolls made from virgin forest pulp.
Jan 01, 2026
North America’s boreal forests are crucial for wildlife and the climate, but we’re literally trashing them to make pulp for toilet paper and other disposable paper products.
Companies are clear-cutting a million acres a year, according to a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The northern boreal forests are Earth’s largest terrestrial biome. They’re the breeding grounds for 3-5 billion migrating birds that populate our backyards. And they’re a key carbon sink, storing 20% of global forest carbon and 50% of global soil carbon.
Studies show these forests have been overharvested and degraded to such a degree that the ecological damage will be difficult to reverse. They’re increasingly beset by global warming, melting permafrost, fires (including multi-year, spontaneously reigniting “zombie fires”), and pests, which threaten to destroy them and release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
If every American bought just one roll of toilet paper made from recycled paper rather than a conventional forest-fiber roll, it would save 1.6 million trees, 1 billion gallons of water, and 800 million pounds of greenhouse gases.
The United Nations recently warned of an approaching tipping point that could turn them from carbon sinks to carbon sources. That would be catastrophic. The recent COP30 climate summit, held in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, was billed as “the forest COP.” But its outcomes were dubious for tropical forests—and nonexistent for boreal forests.
But if climate delegates don’t protect them, consumers can—by buying 100% recycled or alternative fiber products instead of toilet paper made from virgin forest pulp.
A market for these alternatives is emerging. The US toilet paper industry is worth $42 billion, but a whopping 68% of US consumers surveyed want eco-friendly toilet paper made from recycled pulp, bamboo, or cornstalks.
If every American bought just one roll of toilet paper made from recycled paper rather than a conventional forest-fiber roll, it would save 1.6 million trees, 1 billion gallons of water, and 800 million pounds of greenhouse gases—the equivalent of taking 72,000 cars off the road for a year, NRDC found.
Eco-friendly toilet paper start-ups have a $1 billion toehold on the overall market so far—little more than 2%. But they’re growing fast. Imagine how many trees, how much water, and how many emissions we’d save if they gained a 68% share.
The big paper companies are imagining it, too. Procter & Gamble (P&G) makes Charmin, the top US toilet paper brand. This year it launched a bamboo version. That gives the company a green-sounding talk point, and a theoretical way into the growing alternative market. But it isn’t really available in stores and doesn’t do anything to change P&G’s bad practices.
It’s well documented that P&G makes regular Charmin by clear-cutting Canadian boreal forests for pulp, cutting down old-growth groves that have stood for a century or more. Only about 20% of these old-growth trees are left.
Any remnant wood left (called “slash”) after logging gets burned, and the land gets plowed and sprayed with glyphosate (RoundUp), eradicating formerly diverse ecosystems that caribou and birds depend on. They’re replaced with monoculture plantations of softwood trees planted in tight rows, worsening vulnerability to wildfires.
Yet P&G has the chutzpah to claim its slash-and-burn practices “absolutely prohibit deforestation” and “incorporate sustainability.” No wonder the company is being sued for greenwashing, with plaintiffs demanding it be held accountable for “egregious environmental destruction of the largest intact forest in the world” and making “false and misleading claims of environmental stewardship.”
Ultimately though, the power to change practices resides with consumers, not courts. Some 90 million Americans buy regular Charmin—and another 5 billion consumers worldwide buy P&G products. Collectively they have enormous power, provided they’re alerted to the problem and aren’t fooled by greenwashing tactics.
But if those conditions are met, consumers can save the boreal forests, one roll at a time.
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Shell’s Marketing Head Has No Business Leading the Assoc. of National Advertisers
Few brands have been the subject of more legal, ethical, and regulatory action for their advertising than Shell.
Oct 30, 2025
Last Wednesday, the Association of National Advertisers, an American trade group representing some of the world’s biggest brands and advocating on marketing public policy, appointed the CEO of Shell Brands International, Dean Aragón, as their new president.
That same day, half a world away in the Philippines, survivors of Super Typhoon Odette filed suit against Shell for their decades of contributions to climate disasters like the storm that destroyed their homes.
There is no better contrast to show how far corporate leaders have strayed from common sense when it comes to climate strategy in 2025. Cowed by headlines and short-term thinking, marketers and brand leaders of all kinds have stepped away from taking vital steps needed to protect the planet and the economy that connects us all.
Putting the head of Shell’s marketing into a leadership role at the ANA is a bizarre and self-destructive decision. Shell is the subject of dozens of legal and regulatory actions around the world for misleading marketing, and continues to produce products that directly harm dozens of ANA members in the insurance, health, and food sectors.
A forward-thinking organization with its members' interests at heart wouldn’t put their leadership in the hands of a company that harms every other sector on the planet.
The ANA is made up of companies whose business models are fundamentally threatened by climate change, which is caused by Shell's products—from Piedmont Healthcare and the American Heart Association dealing with diseases caused by extreme heat, to Mars and Anheuser-Busch struggling with higher commodity prices caused by flood and drought.
Shell has recommitted to producing more oil and gas, and less clean energy, despite their own research from the 1970s and 80s onward showing that fossil fuel production posed a fundamental threat to the global economy and the consumers who use their products.
But promoting Shell as a leader in marketing is particularly laughable. Few brands have been the subject of more legal, ethical, and regulatory action for their advertising than Shell.
Their advertising campaigns have been banned in the UK, ruled to be misleading in the Netherlands, cited as evidence in lawsuits in the United States, and are also laughably bad at times. There is no reason to be elevating the mind behind projects like “Shell Ultimate Road Trip”—a Fortnite experience that attracted single-digit users and never worked properly, or cringe-inducing, disturbing AI videos of engineers talking to their "younger selves."
In short, appointing the CEO of Shell's marketing as chair is a guarantee of the ANA losing credibility in the eyes of regulators and organizations with sustainability agendas worldwide. It’s also a sign of a lack of original thinking as the climate emergency grows and clean energy becomes the dominant form of new energy worldwide.
There is no worse representative for the marketing industry, either for regulators or for the rest of the economy, than Shell, and the ANA will lose credibility with Dean Aragón as its figurehead. A forward-thinking organization with its members' interests at heart wouldn’t put their leadership in the hands of a company that harms every other sector on the planet, or one that continues to rely on the old tropes of climate delay and denial.
The marketing industry should be looking to companies in clean energy, healthcare, and the circular economy—all growing sectors with pressing needs for communication expertise—to help chart a sustainable future. Fossil fuels and Shell represent the past and a dead end for marketers everywhere.
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Abolish the World Cup!
We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end.
Oct 23, 2025
Football is more popular than Jesus of Nazareth and John Lennon combined. And at first glance, it seems like a pastime that doesn’t harm the environment: Players just need a ball, some space, and the desire to run. But the data are shocking: Football is directly responsible for 0.3-0.4% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to Denmark's emissions. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2024 the sport generated more than 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels as a source of energy, equivalent to 150 million barrels of oil. Every match at the men’s World Cup finals emits between 44,000 and 72,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases, the same as 30,000 to 50,000 cars on British roads each year. Recent studies estimate that emissions from the cup will range between 1.65 and 3.63 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent between 2000 and 2026.
Let’s also consider football’s basic equipment: boots and balls. Generations of kangaroos have been slaughtered, with the blessing of the Australian government, as raw material for “k-leather” boots, while balls from Pakistan are made from petroleum-derived synthetic leather, rubber, and cotton extracted from plant species, and leather and glue obtained from animals slaughtered before their natural lifespan. The 60 million balls sold in 2010 travelled from the sewing workshops in Sialkot to the professional football pitches of Europe and the Americas. The balls emerge from these frequently clandestine sewing workshops to a carbon cycle of transport companies, customs administrations, equipment, the advertising industry, sporting goods retailers, and department stores. The chain turns a ball costing 63 rupees (€0.62) into a product retailing for over €100.
Think also of the water and chemicals used in the construction and maintenance of stadia, the electricity needed to watch matches and bet or report electronically on them, and the impact of tourism.
Sponsorship by companies with high CO2 emissions alone is responsible for 75% of sports emissions, as it stimulates demand for highly polluting products and lifestyles. The large eco-laundering multinationals use football to cover up their environmental shame. For example, shortly after Repsol spilled thousands of barrels of oil on 1,400 hectares of Peru’s Pacific coast in 2022, killing native life and destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people, the company signed a sponsorship with the national team. The motto of the project, also associated with supporting youth and women's representatives, was “Let's look to the future.” In Spain, Repsol and Petronor have signed an agreement to supply renewable energy to Athletic Club de Bilbao that supposedly demonstrates the multinational’s commitment to decarbonization. But the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority found Repsol distorted its environmental commitment by highlighting production of synthetic fuels and biofuels, which only account for a small fraction of its core business—fossil fuels.
Instead of greenwashing and pseudo-reforms, football needs a drastic transformation to disrupt its environmental impact, corruption, systematic human rights violations, sponsorship by highly problematic companies, and money laundering by bookmakers.
Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup in 2009 promised to be CO2-neutral. The damage caused by constructing facilities, desalination, and water use in an arid climate would be offset because, according to the organizers, future generations would enjoy the facilities. There is no evidence for that.
As we all know, the candidacy was successful, despite evidence of vote buying. Implementation resulted in total disregard for labor and human rights: massive exploitation of migrant workers, workplace accidents, derisory wages, and impossible working hours. The pollution generated by air conditioning stadia to withstand Qatar’s climate, as well as the 150 daily flights of attendees, confirm the New Yorker’s verdict: FIFA is “a rancid institution.”
600 million trees would have to be planted to counter the climate calamity caused by Qatar 2022. Despite the trademark Sustainable FIFA World Cup 2022TM, the environmental plundering of the event was greater than that of any other World Cup or Summer Olympics. As usual, the United States provided the largest number of international tourists, which resulted in the emission of 191,055 tons of CO2, including a staggering 14,700 tons produced by private jets.
Le Monde exposed the environmental propaganda as a “mirage.” Scientific American called the event a “climate catastrophe.“ This was “the dirtiest World Cup“ in history, bathed in oil and corruption. The French collective Notre Affaire à Tous explained: “By presenting the World Cup as carbon neutral, FIFA makes [...] fans believe attending such an event has no impact on the environment, which is clearly incompatible with the international World Cup travel that affects greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Swiss Commission for Equity received complaints from Notre Affaire à Tous along with Carbon Market Watch (Belgium), the UK’s New Weather Institute, Alliance Climatique (Switzerland), the Netherlands’ Reclame Fossiettvrij, and Fossil Free Football (international). The commission ruled FIFA had lied by claiming the cup was the first event of its kind to be “totally carbon neutral.”
The 2026 men’s World Cup is expanding to include 48 national teams. For the first time, matches will be held in three huge countries: Canada, Mexico, and the United States, across four time zones, in 16 venues separated by several thousand kilometers, each with derisory public transport. Five and a half million spectators are expected, who will need to use the map to locate the venues: Mexico City will mark the southernmost point, Vancouver the north, Boston the east, and San Francisco the west. In terms of logistics, practically all travel will be by air due to a primitive railway infrastructure. Radio France refers to this as a “very carbonated cocktail.” The New Weather Institute with Scientists for Global Responsibility estimates that aviation emissions “will increase by 160% to 325% in each of the three tournaments in 2026, 2030, and 2034” compared to recent World Cups.
In addition, in the scheduled period—midsummer—96% of the US population experienced extreme heat for one or more weeks in 2023, and 45 cities had very high average temperatures. 2024 broke numerous records due to unprecedented drought and rainfall.
The environmental impacts in Mexico are horrific. The Akron stadium is close to the Primavera de Guadalajara reserve, home to pumas, a near-extinct species, deer, golden eagles, and migratory birds. The conservation of wild fauna and flora is at serious risk due to the World Cup, while the presence of 50,000 spectators and 4,000 cars will cause significant tensions in water resources in Mexico City and Monterrey (also next to a key biological corridor).
The World Cup is “simultaneously the greatest sporting festival on the planet and a sordid commercial machine that carries an enormous human and environmental cost, for the benefit of torturers, exploiters, and insatiable greedy.” Ecology only matters in football as an instrument of public image for the governing associations, host countries, and sponsors.
Instead of greenwashing and pseudo-reforms, football needs a drastic transformation to disrupt its environmental impact, corruption, systematic human rights violations, sponsorship by highly problematic companies, and money laundering by bookmakers. The World Cup's claims of carbon neutrality are just rhetoric. In reality, it has become a “greenwashing World Cup.”
We’re football fans who see no alternative: The CO2 party must end.
Abolish the World Cup!
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Climate Week Is Here; Our Governors Are Still Siding with Polluters
Frontline communities are exposing blue state governors that sell themselves as climate leaders while favoring polluters.
Sep 23, 2025
I grew up in New Mexico, where oil rigs appear in every direction and wildfire smoke fills the summer air. For years, I’ve sat through state climate hearings and planning sessions, believing our leaders might finally act with courage. Instead, what I’ve seen is a machine built to protect industry and silence communities.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sells New Mexico as a climate leader, but her record tells another story. This year alone, her administration advanced industry schemes like the Strategic Water Supply Act, moving forward with rules to recycle toxic fracking waste.
This comes in addition to leaving basic protections like a drilling setback law off the table and welcoming Wall Street giant Blackstone to place a bid to take over PNM, our largest utility in New Mexico—handing over our energy future to corporate profiteers.
This isn’t climate leadership. It’s industry power dressed up as progress—at the expense of our health, water, and future.
So here is our challenge to Governors Lujan Grisham, Shapiro, and Newsom: If you truly oppose Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, prove it.
Pennsylvania and California tell a similar story.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro brands himself as a pragmatic moderate. In reality, he green-lit new gas plants, advanced fossil fuel-powered data centers, and supported liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals—projects that lock in fossil fuel expansion while exposing Pennsylvanians to deadly risks.
Worse, his administration is backing legislation like HB 502 and SB 939 that strip municipalities of the power to reject harmful facilities, in direct violation of Pennsylvania’s constitutional right to clean air and water. Families already sick from fracking are being sacrificed so Shapiro can keep industry happy and court national credibility. That isn’t pragmatism. It’s siding with polluters over people.
Gov. Gavin Newsom positions himself as a global climate champion. But in California, frontline communities experience a different reality. Basic health protections like the oil drilling setback law remain under attack, while projects like the Sable Pipeline continue to threaten communities and ecosystems.
Newsom touts his “climate leadership” on the world stage, yet at home he delays, waters down, or sidesteps measures that would phase out fossil fuels. Recently, Democratic lawmakers—backed by Newsom—passed a “climate” package that extends California’s cap-and-trade system for another 15 years while also permitting new drilling. It’s yet another regulatory giveaway to Big Oil. California is sold as a model of climate action, but the truth is clear: Fossil fuel power still dictates the terms.
The pattern is undeniable: governors who pose as climate leaders while protecting fossil fuel interests. Their playbook is the same—adopt the language; sign onto climate alliances; and then push carbon capture, cap-and-trade systems, produced water, hydrogen, and LNG as “solutions.” These are not solutions. They are lifelines for oil and gas, designed to extend extraction.
This is not accidental. It is a deliberate political strategy—a blue-state echo of US President Donald Trump’s fossil fuel agenda. Yet the result is the same: communities poisoned, democracy sidelined, industry shielded. The message to frontline communities is clear: Our lives are expendable if they threaten the profits of fossil fuel companies.
That’s why this Climate Week in New York City, frontline communities from New Mexico, California, and Pennsylvania are coming together to expose the truth. Behind the speeches and pledges, our governors are siding with polluters. They cannot continue to market themselves as climate champions while advancing the fossil fuel agenda at home.
We know what real climate leadership looks like. A just transition—led by communities and workers, not corporations—can phase out fossil fuels, create union jobs, and protect public health. It means rejecting false solutions. It means putting water, air, and people before industry. It means confronting the political power of fossil fuels head-on.
As the 2026 gubernatorial races approach, young people like me are paying attention. We don’t just want new leaders. We demand leadership that stands up to polluters and delivers a future worth living in.
So here is our challenge to Governors Lujan Grisham, Shapiro, and Newsom: If you truly oppose Trump’s fossil fuel agenda, prove it. Stop greenwashing. Stop silencing frontline communities. Stop pushing industry scams dressed up as climate policy.
Because climate action without justice isn’t action—it is betrayal. And frontline communities are not backing down until we win the future we deserve.
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Steve Ballmer, Monopoly, Greenwashing, and the Media’s Favorite Fairy Tale
The former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner’s scandal shows how media culture hails billionaires as visionaries while their fortunes rest on monopoly, exploitation, and illusion.
Sep 10, 2025
Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is at the center of an NBA investigation into whether a bankrupt “green finance” startup secretly funneled tens of millions of dollars to Kawhi Leonard in a scheme to dodge the salary cap. Ballmer insists he was duped, not complicit. But even if he escapes punishment, this scandal is less about basketball than about a larger truth: Ballmer’s rise, like that of so many billionaires, rests not on genius but on monopoly, exploitation, and a media culture eager to turn raw power into the illusion of “superhuman brilliance.”
Steve Ballmer’s story is not just about one executive’s choices. It is about the deeper rot in a system that rewards monopoly, celebrates exploitation, and dresses up greed as genius. If we want to build a just and sustainable world, the first step is to stop believing the fairy tale.
How Ballmer Perfected the Monopoly Playbook
Ballmer’s career at Microsoft is often painted as the story of a bold leader guiding a tech giant through the new millennium. In reality, it was a case study in how to crush rivals and protect a monopoly. Under his watch, Microsoft racked up record fines from regulators; perfected its notorious strategy of “embrace, extend, extinguish;” and enforced a cutthroat internal culture that stifled collaboration. This wasn’t innovation. It was domination dressed up as genius.
When Ballmer became Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, the company was already facing a bruising US antitrust case over its efforts to crush competitors like Netscape and RealNetworks. European regulators soon followed, hitting Microsoft with record fines for abusing its monopoly. The Commission found that Microsoft had deliberately abused its dominant position by tying Windows Media Player to its operating system and undermining competition in server software.
At the center of these cases was a clear pattern: Microsoft used its dominance not to compete fairly but to block competitors, extend its monopoly, and extract rents from consumers and developers.
If journalism is to serve the public, it must puncture the myths of genius and demand accountability from those who profit most from monopoly and exploitation.
Ballmer did not invent these practices, but he perfected and defended them. The company’s infamous “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy thrived during his reign: Adopt an open standard, add proprietary extensions, then use those extensions to break competitors’ products or force users into Microsoft’s ecosystem. A series of leaked internal memos known as the “Halloween Documents” revealed how Microsoft viewed open source software as a threat and laid out strategies to undermine it. Far from being a story of daring innovation, Microsoft under Ballmer became a story of protecting monopoly turf at any cost.
Internally, Ballmer presided over the now-notorious “stack ranking” system, in which managers were forced to rank employees against each other, ensuring that some were always labeled failures regardless of performance. Vanity Fair reported that this system was described by employees as “the most destructive process inside of Microsoft.” It encouraged backstabbing, punished collaboration, and destroyed morale.
Yet Ballmer’s reputation in the business press was rarely tarnished. Microsoft’s aggressive tactics and toxic culture were downplayed as part of the “rough and tumble” of the tech industry. Instead of being recognized as symptoms of a deeply flawed corporate ethos, they were cast as evidence of toughness, discipline, or even strategic brilliance.
Genius by Headline, Not by Record
This discrepancy points to a larger cultural problem: the way American media routinely turns billionaires into celebrities and treats monopolists as “innovators.” Stories often described Ballmer as a “visionary,” even while acknowledging that he missed entire waves of innovation—from mobile phones and search engines to social media. For example, he later admitted that Microsoft “missed mobile by clinging to Windows.” In interviews, he reflected that the early 2000s were defined by “missed opportunities,” and critics pointed out that he “missed every major trend in technology”
But this is not just about Ballmer. Consider how the press has lionized figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and the Silicon Valley founders of Google, Facebook, and Uber. Musk is often portrayed as a world-changing genius, yet his real talent lies in projecting an aura of promise rather than delivering consistent transformation. Bezos is hailed as the visionary who built Amazon into a global empire, but the company’s rise is grounded in widespread worker exploitation, aggressive union busting, and what Jacobin bluntly calls a legacy of exploitation. These examples show how easily media culture crowns billionaires as “visionaries” while overlooking the systemic harms that make their fortunes possible.
The mythology of the “genius CEO” is not harmless flattery. It is an ideological weapon. It convinces us that billionaires deserve their fortunes because they are smarter, bolder, and more visionary than everyone else. It hides the truth that their wealth comes from structural advantages, monopolies, and an economy rigged to socialize risk while privatizing reward.
Ballmer’s career is a perfect case in point. Few in the press asked whether Microsoft’s dominance strangled innovation or whether his leadership undermined workers and consumers. Instead, the coverage painted him as a colorful eccentric, a lovable billionaire, and above all a success story—as if his rise were earned brilliance rather than brute monopoly power.
Pablo Torre’s remarkable reporting on the Aspiration scandal is a reminder of what real journalism can do when it asks hard questions instead of recycling corporate talking points. His work not only exposes the hidden machinery of sports business but also shows why we need the same relentless scrutiny of CEOs and executives across industries. If journalism is to serve the public, it must puncture the myths of genius and demand accountability from those who profit most from monopoly and exploitation.
The Aspiration Illusion
The irony of Ballmer’s current predicament is almost too sharp. The company at the center of the scandal, Aspiration, branded itself as an “ethical financial” startup, promising consumers the ability to save the planet while banking. Its pitch was slick and appealing: Open an account, round up your debit-card purchases, and the company would plant trees or invest in clean energy The company even raised $135 million to expand its “conscious consumerism” model, promoting debit cards that supposedly planted a tree with every swipe. But investigations later showed that the green promises were exaggerated, with ProPublica revealing that the company counted trees not yet planted and diverted some consumer funds toward administrative costs rather than reforestation.
Indeed, Despite the glossy promises, testimony from former employees and bankruptcy filings exposed a starkly different reality. It was less an environmental company than a marketing engine, spending lavishly on celebrity endorsements such as the $28 million Kawhi Leonard deal now under scrutiny, while delivering little measurable benefit to the climate. The startup positioned itself as a sustainable alternative to traditional banks, promoting tree-planting debit cards. Behind the branding, however, its financial practices were shaky. Aspiration relied on questionable deals to inflate its revenue and set up a high-profile IPO, even as its business model was already beginning to unravel.
Why do we continue to celebrate executives who built their fortunes on monopolistic practices, even as those practices hollow out innovation and concentrate wealth?
If Ballmer was indeed duped by Aspiration, as he claims, it only highlights how easily billionaires buy into glossy branding that flatters their image as progressive leaders. After the scandal broke, Ballmer admitted he felt “embarrassed and kind of silly” for not seeing through the company’s flaws. Yet Aspiration’s collapse alongside a multimillion-dollar “no-show” endorsement deal is not an outlier. It is a symptom of how much of today’s tech and finance sector manufactures a fraudulent sense of progress and value, dressing up speculation and extraction as innovation. In this world of legalized scams and corporate greenwashing, Ballmer’s embarrassment is less an excuse than a reminder of how disconnected billionaire investors are from the human and ecological costs of their money.
Aspiration’s story also echoes a broader pattern. Theranos promised a revolution in blood testing, WeWork styled itself as the future of work, and FTX declared it would reinvent finance. Each was celebrated as visionary until the façade collapsed, leaving behind fraud, debt, and disillusionment. These high-profile failures reveal how the mythology of innovation is repeatedly weaponized to disguise little more than hype, speculation, and exploitation. The media and investors continue to fall for it, again and again.
A Deeper Reckoning
The NBA investigation may or may not conclude that Ballmer violated the rules. But the larger scandal here is not limited to basketball. It is about how our culture treats men like Ballmer as role models—how we conflate wealth with competence, market share with innovation, and ruthless opportunism with genius.
It is also about how the very firms that claim to be solving our most urgent crises, from the climate emergency to economic inequality, are often vehicles for speculation and greenwashing, not solutions. They promise progress but deliver only shareholder returns and a deeper entrenchment of the same unequal and unsustainable order.
The Ballmer story forces us to ask harder questions. Why do we accept that billionaires should own sports teams at all, turning civic institutions into vanity projects for the ultra rich? Why do we continue to celebrate executives who built their fortunes on monopolistic practices, even as those practices hollow out innovation and concentrate wealth? Why do we allow financial startups to market themselves as saviors of the planet while continuing to accelerate ecological collapse?
Breaking the Billionaire Spell
The real lesson of this scandal is that we must break the spell of billionaire mythology. Ballmer is not a singular villain; he is an emblem of an age in which billionaires are lauded as saviors while their empires rest on monopoly, exploitation, and illusion. The media has played a crucial role in maintaining this façade, selling the public a narrative of “genius” to justify inequality.
A more honest narrative would recognize that the wealth of men like Ballmer was built on systems of exclusion, not innovation. It would expose the ways that corporate culture, whether in Big Tech or in the world of “ethical finance,” uses the language of progress to mask exploitation. And it would challenge the very legitimacy of an economy in which billionaires can fail upward, celebrated as geniuses even as their companies and investments leave wreckage behind.
What we need are not more billionaire idols but real accountability. It is long past time to stop confusing power with brilliance and to recognize that genuine progress will never come from self-styled saviors at the top. It will come from democratic action, collective struggle, and the hard work of reshaping our economy around justice rather than monopoly and the myth of capitalist progress.
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I Rescued 4 Chickens From Abuse; Now I’m the One Facing a Felony Trial
I refuse to accept that helping a few baby birds makes me a criminal, let alone a dangerous one.
Sep 09, 2025
As I write this, a GPS ankle monitor shows law enforcement exactly where I am. This invasive device has been strapped to my leg for nearly two years. It has come with me to family dinners, to doctors’ appointments, to university classes, and more. I have been forced to wear it in order to remain free pending a criminal trial, which begins next week. I face nearly half a decade in jail.
My trial is expected to last several weeks, though there is no doubt that I did what prosecutors say. My alleged crime? Taking less than $25 worth of chicken. This wouldn’t normally lead to felony charges or a government-monitored GPS tracking device. But, you see, the four chickens I took were alive.
In the city of Petaluma, about an hour north of San Francisco, nestled between a Subway and a Starbucks, lies a heavily guarded fortress. Nearly every night of the week, more than 40,000 live birds are driven through its gates. In the mornings, their deceased and dismembered bodies are wrapped in plastic, decorated with claims about sustainability, animal welfare, and a lack of antibiotics. Finally, they’re stamped with the brand names “Rocky the Free Range Chicken” and “Rosie the Organic Chicken.” By the time their bodies reenter the outside world, shipped to grocery stores like Safeway and Trader Joe’s, the birds have been thoroughly objectified, their suffering repackaged as ethical consumption.
This fortress is the Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse, a subsidiary of Perdue, one of the nation’s largest poultry producers. In important ways, Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry represents the worst of animal agriculture. Its branding is frighteningly deceptive, the company a master of manipulative marketing. Petaluma Poultry touts the supposed “luxuries” its chickens enjoy, posting seemingly staged videos of birds frolicking in the grass while, in reality, the birds live and die in factory farm conditions. Factory farming is widely known to be horrific, and companies like Petaluma Poultry represent a major obstacle to stopping it: They advertise animal suffering and slaughter as moral goods.
I know how birds at Petaluma live and die because I have been inside its facilities. In 2023, as an investigator with Direct Action Everywhere, I entered multiple Petaluma Poultry facilities. On these factory farms, I found chickens crowded together in filthy barns. One facility had mortality rates more than double the industry standard. Birds were suffering from severe neglect and dying from blood infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria. An investigation of the slaughterhouse found similar trends. One night, in April 2023, over 1,000 chickens from one shipment were condemned post-slaughter when workers opened them up and found their bodies full of infection.
Since 1993, Perdue has claimed its chickens “grow up healthy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Of the multiple facilities I’ve been inside, I haven’t seen a single chicken I’d describe with such a word. Chickens in the meat industry are systemically unhealthy. They’ve been genetically manipulated to grow three times faster and larger than natural. Their legs collapse as they struggle to hold their own weight. Their hearts fail, and their feet develop pressure sores. The poor health of the birds in Petaluma Poultry facilities is exacerbated by their poor housing conditions and lack of medical care.
In court, I will view myself simply as a representative, a body and a voice, for all of the chickens who have been wronged by Perdue, and by the animal agriculture industry as a whole.
Much of what I have documented at Petaluma Poultry’s facilities is criminal animal cruelty in the state of California. However, repeated reports to law enforcement, over multiple years, have not resulted in any enforcement. Haunted by the knowledge of the immense violence within, I entered Perdue’s Petaluma Poultry slaughterhouse on June 13, 2023. Partially disguised as a worker, I stepped into the cool night and approached a truck stacked high with crates crammed full with baby chickens. I rescued four of them, including one I named Poppy, who had an injured toe, a body covered in scratches, and intestines filled with parasites. I got all four birds veterinary care and shared their stories, asking members of the public to join me in calling for immediate action from law enforcement.
The rescue of four little hens finally sparked law enforcement intervention. However, instead of investigating years of reported criminal animal cruelty, law enforcement set off on a mission to gather evidence on what was likely the first act of compassion to be carried out within the slaughterhouse’s carefully constructed walls—and to charge me with crimes.
Months after the rescue, as I was walking toward the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office to once again file a report of documented animal cruelty at Petaluma Poultry, I was placed in handcuffs and arrested on seven counts of felony conspiracy. I was told about warrants obtained to access my cell-phone data and other records. Though some charges have since been dismissed or consolidated, I still face one felony, three misdemeanors, and nearly five years in jail. I have been forced to wear a GPS ankle monitor and adhere to other harsh pretrial release conditions for nearly two years because the government is afraid I might rescue more birds.
Why? It’s certainly not the monetary value of the birds. The value of a relatively healthy chicken raised in agriculture is only a few dollars, and the routine deaths of thousands before they even reach slaughter is deemed the cost of business. Moreover, there are so many animals in these facilities, it is unlikely anyone would have even noticed four chickens were gone if I had not publicized it. Instead, what is threatening is the idea inherent in my actions: that animals are individuals with lives worth living.
I’m a 23-year-old university student. I’ve been rescuing animals from abuse since the age of 11, when I founded my nonprofit, Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary. In the past, I’ve been able to work with law enforcement. Together, we’ve rescued roosters from illegal cockfighting rings and placed farmed animals in loving forever homes. But now, for saving four chickens, my entire future is at stake.
As I’ve gone to court over the past 20 months, represented by the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, it has become obvious that the prosecutors are trying to make an example out of me to scare other concerned members of the public. But that’s okay. Let me be an example. Let me be an example of courage in the face of repression and of compassion in the face of violence. Let me be an example of just how impossible it will be to stop the movement for animal rights.
I will not apologize for my actions. I will not hang my head in shame. I refuse to accept that helping a few baby birds makes me a criminal, let alone a dangerous one. To apologize would be to say that Poppy, Ivy, Aster, and Azalea deserved the cruelty inflicted on them. It would be to say they deserved to shiver in a crate, covered in scrapes and bruises, as they were eaten alive by parasites. Any apology would be a lie. I am not sorry I saved their lives.
Next week, I will be taking this case to trial. In court, I will view myself simply as a representative, a body and a voice, for all of the chickens who have been wronged by Perdue, and by the animal agriculture industry as a whole. I will tell the jury about the birds I rescued, and the birds failed by Sonoma County law enforcement.
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The Fire This Time: Capitalism and the Limits of Survival
Can capitalism survive the climate crisis it helped create? Or must we finally admit that it’s the system itself that’s killing us?
Jul 17, 2025
The world is burning, both literally and figuratively. Temperatures are shattering records. Wildfires sweep across continents. Glaciers melt while droughts deepen. Inequality balloons. Billions go hungry while billionaires build bunkers. And through it all, one system marches forward, extracting, exploiting, expanding.
Its name is capitalism.
And the question we must now face, urgently, collectively, without illusion, is this: Can capitalism survive the climate crisis it helped create? Or must we finally admit that it’s the system itself that’s killing us?
This isn’t just a theoretical question. It’s a matter of survival.
Contrary to what some economists would have us believe, capitalism didn’t arise through peaceful trade or natural evolution. It was forged in conquest, enclosure, slavery, and plunder.
Capitalism is not broken because it has failed to innovate. It’s broken because it has succeeded, at concentrating wealth, externalizing costs, and turning the Earth into a profit machine.
In early modern Europe, peasants were forced off common lands so the wealthy could raise sheep for profit. The so-called “Enclosure Movement” turned shared resources into private property, creating the first landless laborers, people with no choice but to sell their labor to survive.
From there, capitalism scaled outward. Empires expanded, fueled by the theft of land, labor, and life. The Atlantic slave trade, the colonization of the Americas, and the pillaging of India and Africa were not side effects, they were the fuel that powered capitalist growth.
Later came the Industrial Revolution, mechanizing exploitation, churning out commodities, and giving birth to the cult of “growth.” What had once been measured in survival and sustenance was now measured in productivity, output, and profit.
By the 20th century, capitalism had globalized. And by the 21st, it had digitized, financialized, and fully detached from the ecological limits of the planet.
The Myth of Green Capitalism
Today, we’re told that capitalism can fix the very crises it’s caused. Silicon Valley technologists, global financiers, and political centrists speak of green growth, decoupling, and innovation. Solar panels, electric vehicles, carbon markets, environmental and social governance portfolios, these are the new gospel.
But while emissions rise, forests fall, and temperatures climb, the promises feel increasingly hollow.
Capitalism is not broken because it has failed to innovate. It’s broken because it has succeeded, at concentrating wealth, externalizing costs, and turning the Earth into a profit machine.
The logic of endless growth is fundamentally at odds with a planet that cannot grow. And no amount of green branding can change that.
In places like Rochester, New York we see both the consequences of capitalism and the seeds of resistance.
The private utility company, Rochester Gas and Electric, is facing a people-powered campaign for public takeover after years of rate hikes and service failures. Community land trusts are reclaiming housing from speculative markets. Regenerative farms are feeding neighbors instead of shareholders. These are not utopias, they’re struggles. But they are real, local, and rooted in solidarity.
They remind us that the fight for climate justice is also a fight for energy democracy, housing justice, and food sovereignty. It’s not about tweaking the system. It’s about transforming it.
Gandhi’s Warning and Vision
Over a century ago, Mohandas Gandhi warned of where industrial capitalism would lead. In Hind Swaraj, he rejected not only colonial rule, but the Western model of “progress” itself. He saw clearly that a civilization based on speed, greed, and machinery would eventually consume itself.
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs,” he wrote, “but not every man’s greed.”
Gandhi’s vision wasn’t a return to the past, it was a radical call for restraint, community, and moral clarity. He called for economies rooted in place, not profit. He believed wealth should be held in trusteeship, not hoarded for personal gain. And he insisted that any real revolution must begin within the soul.
Capitalism is not compatible with climate justice. It never was.
To many, this sounded naïve. Today, it sounds prophetic.
The reckoning is now. A dead planet can not turn a profit. Capitalism gave us vaccines, satellites, supercomputers. But it also gave us rising seas, poisoned air, and mass extinction. We cannot separate the gifts from the costs. And we can no longer pretend that reform is enough.
Yes, we need innovation. Yes, we need policy. But we also need imagination. We need the courage to envision systems not based on extraction, but on care. Not on growth, but on balance. Not on domination, but on solidarity.
We need, as the late David Graeber wrote, a world where we treat each other as if we actually matter.
The road ahead will not be easy. It will be full of contradictions, compromises, and uncertainty. But we must begin with honesty: Capitalism is not compatible with climate justice. It never was.
And we cannot build a livable future with the same tools that built the crisis.
It’s time to stop asking whether capitalism can be fixed, and start building the alternatives that already exist in our communities, our movements, and our collective memory.
There may still be time.
But not much.
And history, like the atmosphere, is watching.
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Greenpeace Denmark Complaint Accuses Dairy Giant of 'Systemic Greenwashing'
"Greenwashing and false marketing will not be tolerated, no matter how big you are and where you are based," said one Greenpeace Denmark campaigner.
Jun 05, 2025
Greenpeace Denmark this week filed a formal complaint against the Denmark-based dairy producer Arla Foods, accusing the firm of creating a "false and misleading picture" of actual emission reductions the company has achieved.
The green group is arguing the company has both misled consumers when it comes to Arla's progress toward achieving climate goals and that its reporting does not meet requirements under the Danish Annual Accounts Act.
Arla is the world's fifth-largest dairy company, according to its website.
Greenpeace Denmark submitted the complaint to the Danish Business Authority, the body in Denmark that controls and supervises compliance with business regulations, on Monday.
Greenpeace Denmark says it is concerned that data from Arla's annual reports appears to show that Arla has "changed its calculation methods and data foundation for Scope 3 emissions per kilogram of milk and whey since the original 2015 baseline year," but the dairy producer has not consistently or transparently adjusted that baseline across all of its reporting.
"The 2015 baseline is built on older, less precise national statistics from 2012, and the subsequent shift to more specific farm-level data and new emission factors—without a clear and consistent baseline adjustment—creates major uncertainty about Arla's real emission reductions since 2015," per the complaint.
The Danish Annual Accounts Act includes requirements to disclose corporate social responsibility information that is true and not misleading. Compliance with this provision, according to the complaint, "is essential because the provision is intended to ensure transparency about a company's environmental and broader sustainability impacts. The rules aim to give investors, partners, and society at large access to essential, credible, and comparable information about corporate sustainability practices, risks, and objectives."
"Arla presents itself as a Big Dairy role model on climate and nature, with a concern for animal welfare. But behind the scenes, it is lobbying to repeal laws that ensure the well-being of farm animals. This must stop, and the public needs to know," said Gustav Martner, creative lead and advertising expert at Greenpeace Nordic, in a statement published Wednesday.
This latest complaint comes on the heels of two complaints filed by Greenpeace Sweden against Arla, also alleging "systemic greenwashing," and a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace Aotearoa (New Zealand) last year against the dairy firm Fonterra.
"By coordinating complaints against Arla in both countries it calls home, we aim to set a precedent: Greenwashing and false marketing will not be tolerated, no matter how big you are and where you are based," said Christian Fromberg, campaign lead of agriculture and nature at Greenpeace Denmark, in a statement on Wednesday.
Common Dreams wrote to Arla for comment about the complaints. The company did not respond before press time.
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