It's Climate Week, And The Corporate Greenwash Bullshit Tide Is High

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The planet is in full-on meltdown, but the brands would like you to know it’s OK. They will save us. This week—officially Climate Week—has seen a flurry of pledges, plans, commitments, vows, words, promises, sacred oaths, and blood pacts from companies including Walmart, Amazon, and Microsoft on how they will reduce their ponderous footprints on the planet. Those announcements were preceded by others last week, including from Facebook and Google, and a slew of commitments over recent months from Big Oil to reduce emissions and get in the renewables game.

The number of companies and array of pledges and timelines is a lot to take in. But corporate commitments are likely to intensify as the world hurtles toward a hotter future, so understanding the good, the bad, and the bullshit will only become more vital. The first step to understanding corporate climate plans is that all your reasons to be skeptical are almost certainly valid. Large corporations are driven by one goal: trying to separate you from your money. And they have traditionally done that in one way.

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The biggest bullshitters in the pledge game, though, are oil and gas companies as well as utilities. Perhaps it’s not surprising since they’re companies that have entrenched business models almost wholly reliant on fossil fuels. Just Wednesday, a report came out showing oil majors’ climate plans are largely smoke and mirrors. Many plans fail to address the biggest source of emissions downstream or rely heavily on unproven carbon capture technology, which means companies will keep digging up oil-based on dreams that might not exist. Utilities also play similar shell games of big promises to reduce emissions and actions that speak otherwise (including allegedly resorting to corruption!).

“Look at like Southern, they have a net-zero emissions by 2050 pledge,” Stokes said. “When their subsidiary companies like Alabama Power and Georgia Power—which are very dirty companies—actually go to decide what they’re going to build in the next couple of years, they keep proposing a lot of fossil fuels, a lot of fossil gas plants. Then when people say, ‘well, how come you’re not working towards this pledge that your parent company, Southern, has put forward?’ They say in the (permitting) proceeding that those pledges don’t apply to us.” And that in a nutshell points to the final way to decode climate pledges. Corporations have mastered the art of saying they’re going to do good, but what really matters is their actions right now. And those actions are wildly out of step with long-term promises. Facebook has committed to carbon neutrality by 2030 while allowing climate misinformation to run rampant. Oil companies have pledged to rein in immediate emissions but refuse to do anything about the larger downstream ones when their products are burned. Amazon has kicked $10 billion into a venture capital fund that would enrich itself while also at the same time selling cloud computing software to oil firms.

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https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-to-figure-out-if-corporate-climate-plans-are-bullsh-1845159682

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WARNING:

This kind of bullshit can be extremely hazardous to your biosphere! Do not ingest this product or put children in it. Keep away from living organisms and ecosystems.