COP27 and the 10 Rules of Corporate Greenwashing
BY THOMAS KLIKAUER
"With the Coca-Cola sponsored blah-blah-blah festival of COP27 in the
Egyptian dictatorship done and dusted – until the next one – corporate
greenwashing has worked its magic again. And this is not just because
Rachel Rose Jackson of Corporate Accountability commented that, COP27
looks like a fossil fuel industry trade show.
Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh made itself looking green and sustainable – thanks
to corporate PR superstar company Hill+Knowlton which also supplied
corporate propaganda for ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco.
Like whitewashing that seeks to wash things clean, corporate greenwashing
is a form of corporate marketing spin telling you that toxic sludge is good for
you. In short, greenwashing is designed to make people believe that a
company is doing more to protect the environment than it really does. It sells
lies.
Corporate greenwashing is deceptively used to persuade the public that a
company’s products, their corporate aims, their policies and politics (read:
lobbying – a $3.5bn industry) are environmentally friendly.
The top-10 corporate greenwashing corporations are: Volkswagen, BP,
Exxon, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, IKEA, plastic bottle water companies,
major banks, and fashion companies like H&M, Zara and Uniqlo.
By now, one of the more classical textbook-style cases of corporate
greenwashing remains that of the German car-giant Volkswagen. VW was
forced to admit to cheating emission tests by fitting various vehicles with a
so-called defeat device. This is a software that could detect when it is
undergoing an emission’s test and then alters the performance to reduce the
emission’s level – simple but effective.
This was done while hyping-up the low-emission features of VW vehicles
through marketing campaigns. In truth, however, Volkswagen engines were
emitting up to 40-times the allowed limit for nitrogen oxide pollutants.
Yet, VW still means Volkswagen and not Very Worried as VW made a
whopping $15.5bn in 2021. Corporate greenwashing works – for corporations
and that is the raison d’être for doing it. Yet, there are other countless cases.
Take for example, the global fossil fuel giant BP that has even changed its
name. Such a move is also known as re-branding. Now, BP wants to be
known as Beyond Petroleum – it sounds really green!
To greenwash one of the world’s major corporations, BP even put solar
panels on their gas stations – that looks so green! Sadly for BP, the
corporation got called out for their self-greening deceptions.
Next, there is also Coca-Cola. Coke also has been accused of greenwashing
because of its ‘natural’ sugar claims. Coca-Cola started its marketing
campaign as a way to attract more health-conscious consumers. And so,
Coca-Cola turned itself into a health drink! More recently, Coca-Cola tried to
beef this up through Innocent Drinks – also deemed misleading.
Yet, the reality of the Coca-Cola corporation looks rather different. For
example, many of Coke’s plastic bottles probably end up polluting our
environment – like oceans. Greenpeace listed Coca-Cola as the leading
plastic polluter in 2019. It makes and sells around 100 billion (no spelling
mistake!) single-use plastic bottles a year. In the very same year, the Coca-
Cola corporationannounced,
Coca-Cola is unveiling the first ever sample bottle made using recovered and
recycled marine plastics, demonstrating that, one day, even ocean debris
could be used in recycled packaging for food or drinks. This sample is the
first ever plastic bottle made using marine litter that has been successfully
recycled and reused in food and drink packaging
Yet, their plastic bottles – whether made from recycled material or not – still
end up in our oceans. Meanwhile, the Coca-Cola corporation – world’s worst
corporate plastic polluter for four years in a row – has resisted legislation
intended to force the company into adopting more environmentally friendly
practices. At the same time, corporate greenwashing continues, for example,
when Coke’s very own website says,
we make brands and products that …
build a more sustainable future
These and plenty of other companies intentionally and deliberately instigate
greenwashing PR strategies. Often, they do so in order to distance
themselves from their – equally intentional and deliberate – environmental
vandalism.
Through corporate greenwashing, even oil corporations can be made to
appear green and sustainable. The successes of, for example, oil
corporations in circumventing COP27 remains hidden behind a green
corporate logo.
Corporate greenwashing means that companies and corporations spend
very significant resources on corporate PR advertising the false image of
being green. And usually, this comes in three versions:
corporations’ greeewashing makes their products look sustainable;
corporations also greenwash the production process of these products; and
they greenwash themselves – as a business to make them look sustainable.
Corporate greenwashing can range from changing the name of the
corporation, the logo, and the label of a certain product to pretend to be
supporting the natural environment while these products still contain harmful
chemicals.
Yet, there are also multi-million dollar corporate PR campaigns that portray,
for example, highly-polluting energy companies as eco-friendly. The key idea
behind corporate greenwashing is that it covers up unsustainable and
destructive corporate agendas and policies while, simultaneously, allowing
corporations to carry on making profits.
Corporate PR firms like Edelman, for example, have even facilitated climate
change denial. The corporate PR industry – and more importantly “routinely”
– also funds astroturf organizations. These are PR firms that set up other –
even more evil – organisations that falsely pretend to be grassroots activists
while being paid by corporations. Some examples are: Ethical Oil, Resource
Works, and the International Climate Science Coalition.
Of course, there are also well-paid business school professors in the mix
supplying the necessary ideology to camouflage corporate greenwashing.
The ideologies come – mostly – in three forms:
Business Ethics: is an oxymoron known as business ethics pretending that
corporations are ethical;
CSR: next is management’s all-time favourite ideology of corporate social
responsibility (CSR); and finally,
Citizenship: there is the business school hallucination that there is something
like corporate citizenship – corporations pretending to be like ordinary
citizens.
Ideological support for corporate greenwashing also comes from coin-
operated corporate-sponsored think tanks in which crypto-academics find
additional employment particularly when they are too bad even for a
business school. Their junk science contributes to the crypto-academic field
of management studies.
The ideologies they create work against democratic regulation and
environmental regulation. All this comes as part of an even more important
ideology – the global ideology of neoliberalism.
One of the methods used by corporate greenwashing are fake grass roots
campaigns involving letter-writing to legislators. This is done on behalf of an
– almost always – undisclosed interest group that is in reality, financed by a
corporation. Yet, this sort of greenwashing also employs real people posing
as volunteers. These corporate stooges speak at public hearings and
participate in real grass roots campaigns.
In any case, such planned PR deceptions are central components of the
corporate propaganda filling us with doubts – and even self-doubt – as the
earth confronts the environmental abyss. Many of such activities amount to
very serious corporate greenwashing.
Yet, corporate greenwashing has more tricks up their sleeves. The Chicago
Climate Exchange, for example, was set up by global greenwashing polluters
like BP, DuPont, and the Ford Motor Company. It was a tool for voluntarily
cutting emissions that fancies the neoliberal hallucination of industry self-
regulation.
Some evil heretics might argue that there is a reason why, for example, there
are drivers’ licenses, why they are regulated by the state, and why people
cannot regulate their own driver’s license printed out on their kitchen table.
The corporate greenwashing idea behind the self-regulating Chicago Climate
Exchange was to reduce pollution. It failed, even as a corporate
greenwashing idea.
Ideas like this are only another tool in the box of corporate greenwashing.
Perhaps an even more interesting aspect of corporate greenwashing is that
multi-national corporations have become bigger sources of global aid than
nation states.
And of course, corporations cold-heartedly promote this fact. Their wealth is
partly engineered through decades of corporate tax-cutscreated by
governments that are under the spell of neoliberalism. Corporate PR sells this
as sustainable corporate social responsibility (CSR).
This gives CSR a human face – as applied to capitalism and to make
capitalism look human-like. It simply means that polluting corporations get
up each morning, get increasingly smeared during the day, and simply wash
off at night. That is the basic idea of CSR. CSR-fancying corporate polluters
make particular use of greenwashing PR. It comes as part of their search for
an environmental-friendly license to operate – a core ideology of CSR.
Of course, this reaches deep into company accounting where much of this is
rather cosily sold as triple bottom line – people, profit, planet. Planet being a
distant third! This accounting ideology emerged from none other than the
corporate consultancy world.
The ideology behind it is to merge corporate profits with human society
(people) and the environment (planet). Its goal: justifying profit making.
Greenwashing remains a key component of this corporate strategy.
Following this business strategy, many companies and corporations have
wrapped themselves in a green cloak. Today, brands even try to outdo one
another with their eco-credentials to become the – hopefully undetected –
master of corporate greenwashing. To win the green consumer game,
companies often exaggerate environmental claims or simply make things up
– whatever works best for the corporation.
Worse, criminal polluters even engage in a rather new form of corporate
greenwashing. They share positive information about their environmental
records while concealing negative aspects which, so the hope goes, can be
offloaded onto others. This is known as externalisation. Meanwhile, the
public should no longer see what is real – environmental pollution – and what
a public relation constructed image of the corporation is.
One of the goals is to blur the boundary between what is reality and what is
faked. This is also known as gaslighting. The idea of gaslighting is based on a
1940’s movie called Gaslight in which one is no longer sure whether the
flickering of the gaslight is real or not.
Today, gaslighting is a propagandistic and manipulative-psychological tool
used by, for example, global warming deniers that seeks to induce the
doubting of one’s own reality and even sanity.
One of the goals of the more severe forms of corporate propaganda is that
once a person’s underlying reality is lost, the person becomes more open to
propaganda as words, images, and signs become self-referential while
bypassing reason. Yet, the entire process is driven by the propagandist.
With no residual correspondence to the real anymore, corporate propaganda
has achieved its goals. Reality has adapted to corporate propaganda. Reality
has become a mere simulation. French philosopher Baudrillard calls this
simularcra – the simulation of reality. For corporate greenwashing, this also
means that being green and sustainable is just a matter of simulation –
pretending.
The simulation of corporate sustainability is about the pretence of a
corporation as being environmental. And now comes the crucial bit. This is
within the dynamic core of the capitalist economy.
Necessarily, corporate greenwashing has to leave out some very
uncomfortable facts, like global environmental vandalism, starvation,
sweatshops, slavery, managerial despotism, mass poverty, and global
warming – our highway to climate hell. To divert attention away from the
pathologies of corporate capitalism, corporate greenwashing does ten
things:
1) it pretends that there is a trade-off between consumer choices and
sustainability;
2) many corporations offer next to no proof that their supposedly
environmental initiatives have a positive impact on nature;
3) corporate greenwashing lives from general statements that are
deliberately kept vague and non-specific;
4) corporate greenwashing uses false labelling – often in the form of self-
invented “eco-certification” that, in reality, is no certification at all;
5) corporate greenwashing pretends to be sustainable in areas that have
next to no relevance to the corporation, their product, and the production
process used to make these products;
6) corporate greenwashing presents false choices, at times, framed as the
lesser of two evils;
7) of course, corporate greenwashing lies by presenting something – a
something that simply does not exist;
8) corporate greenwashing sells false hopes into a corporate-based
environmental future that does not exist;
9) corporate greenwashing also covers up serious corporate dangers, harms
to the environment, environmentally hazardous products, and negative
environmental consequences; and finally,
10) corporate greenwashing converts capitalism’s reality of profits over
people and the environment into pretending to be environmentally
sustainable.
In the end, corporate greenwashing is an important tool in the arsenal of
propaganda and corporate public relations. Capitalism not only lives by
flooding us with consumer goods, it also needs an accompanying ideology
telling us that two iPads will make us twice as happy.
Part of this necessary ideology to sustain capitalism is not only to hide
capitalism’s environmental impact but also the pretence that capitalism and
its corporations are environmentally friendly. This marks the moment when
corporate greenwashing enters the scene. Corporate greenwashing is the
ideological by-product of living in a capitalist society.
Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave, 2013)."
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