Greenwashing and isolated green warning sign against white background
‘Corporate greenwashing’ is going on all around the world.
So, I am putting its meaning here in English and in French.
Greenwashing” your social and environmental performance is as bad as “whitewashing” profits. europarl.europa.eu
Verdir” ses résultats sociaux et environnementaux est aussi répréhensible que de blanchir ses bénéfices. europarl.europa.eu
Greenwashing or environmental whitewashing means « donning the ecologists’ green garments », which has nothing to do at […] groupe-frayssinet.com
L‘écoblanchiment ou blanchiment écologique, c’est « s’habiller en vert écolo», ce qui n’a rien à voir avec la protection de l’environnement. groupe-frayssinet.fr
(Source : Ezra Winton “Corporate greenwashing : building up new mythologies groupe-frayssinet.com
(Source : Erza Winton, « L’écoblanchiment des entreprises : la construction de nouvelles mythologies »).
‘The term “greenwashing” was coined in the 1980s to describe outrageous corporate environmental claims. Three decades later, the practice has grown vastly more sophisticated.’
‘In the mid-1980s, oil company Chevron commissioned a series of expensive television and print ads to convince the public of its environmental bonafides. Titled ‘People Do’, the campaign showed Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles and all manner of cute and cuddly animals.
The commercials were very effective – in 1990, they won an Effie advertising award, and subsequently became a case study at Harvard Business school. They also became notorious among environmentalists, who have proclaimed them the gold standard of greenwashing – the corporate practice of making diverting sustainability claims to cover a questionable environmental record.’
Demonstrators protest against Nestle water bottling operations in California. According to news reports, Nestle, which operates five bottling plants in California, uses 244m gallons of water annually. Reports also said that its state water permit expired 27 years ago. Photograph: Eugene Garcia/EPABruce Watson
Sun 21 Aug 2016 00.00 AEST. – Note – this article was five years ago!Has anything changed for the better in 2021?
Go to the whole article. Begin with Chevron’s advertising campaign back in the 1980s.
This pretence about concern for the future of the planet is one of the ways we, as voters, are encouraged to believe we are doing more than we are to try to contain global warming. And, clearly, it is happening wherever corporations want to make money at the Earth’s expense while appearing – giving the illusion – of ‘caring about the planet’.
Imagine, for example, ‘Green’ high rise built on wetlands! If we don’t know, how can we challenge their behaviour? How bad are the regulations? How well is the government protecting the wetlands that we now know are essential for bio-diversity? And, if we are shareholders, why not threaten to move money to ethical corporations.
On our Australian Broadcasting Corporation television ABC Channel 2 soon ‘Gruen’ will be on. This series shows how advertisers spin information. How are they taking advantage of the pandemic? The panel examines advertisers. Due to start October.
‘Green Sport’ – These are the Forest Green Rovers of Gloucestershire, the world’s first carbon neutral football club going green, going totally eco-friendly and being successful!
I am learning about this ancient club, with its climate changing, eco-environmental approach, in Adelaide, on our Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National program, ‘Sporty,’
Meanwhile, ‘Down Under’
The presenter, Amanda Smith, also takes me to the Australian sportsmen and women before she goes to an Australian Rules Premiership being decided in COVID free Perth.
Our sportspeople’s commitment to climate change is called ‘ Cool Down’
All athletes need to cool down after a match.
This is a time for cool examination of global warming.
And this is what Australian sports people – women and men –
are asking the Australian government to do as it decides about our future.
We hear about the future for cricket matches in summer.
Penrith, the home of Australia’s fast bowler, Pat Cummins, will in the future
have summer temperature reaching 50 degrees Celsius. What is that in Fahrenheit?
David Pocock, former great Rugby Union player, leads hundreds of Australian athletes.
They know we must have a climate change policy that faces the need for effective action by 2030. Zero emissions by 2050 is not going to be enough.
David Pocock playing for Australia.
Our sports people have just made Australia proud in Tokyo, the environmentally-aware Olympic Games. Now they are making Australians proud in an even more important way. They are making us proud as citizens.
They go on Instagram and Twitter – this is the world of the young who can vote.
28 Aug 2021 — The Cool Down is a movement by athletes for all Australians. 250+ athletes from 30 sports calling for bold climate action to safeguard the future.
BUT – This is what Australia’s Prime Minister has done!
‘Advisor to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia – who gave Morrison the lump of coal he subsequently brandished in parliament, [saying, ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid of it’] – has been appointed as Australia’s new ambassador to the OECD.’
That lump of coal had been polished so he would not have to get his hands dirty!
Information provided by ‘The Canopy – Greenpeace Australia Pacific.’
Who would have thought that the 1863 Gettysburg Address at that Cemetery, with its consecrated ground, would have relevance for an international conference in Glasgow, meant to be held in 2020 but delayed by the pandemic, reminding us of the impact of our human actions on the environment that surrounds all of us, increasing the awful uncertainty we are facing, even if some still refuse to face it!
Abraham Lincoln.
I am putting his address here for all who don’t know what the President said. He was a member of a Republican Party I doubt he would recognise today. President Abraham Lincoln, of what had become the disunited States of America, knew what the future for USA would demand after that Civil War, meant to end slavery, was over. He is speaking in the middle of that war on a battlefield. There would be two more years of war until 1865, with all the resonances still felt today.
Now it’s not just one nation. It’s all of us. But first, his memorable address.
‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
Abraham Lincoln. November 19, 1863.
What connection could this most memorable address to a nation have for the Planet?
In Australia, in 2020, a book ‘What Is To Be Done’, by Barry Jones, a former Minister of Science in the Hawke Federal government, was published by Scribe.
His first book warning us was Sleepers Wake: Technology and the Future of Work. Published first in 1982, it was reprinted many times – again in 1995. Ironically, one year before Howard came to power. Some of us were awake. Organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation. The Wilderness Society. The Australian Marine Conservation Foundation, farmers moving to bio-diversity, protesters against logging, the Youth Climate Change Coalition but so many politicians – both Federal and State – would only wake if hit by storms, floods, fires, droughts and heatwaves.
We had had warnings about the ‘greenhouse effect’ in the 1970s. Schools were teaching students about it in the 1980s. Bob Hawke would be called Australia’s Environmental Prime Minister. ‘From saving the Franklin River, to protecting Antarctica from mining, conservationists have praised his environmental legacy in the same way economists have lauded his financial reforms. Hawke was in the Lodge during the crucial period when Australia first became aware of – and tried to grapple with – the issue of climate change.’ Marc Hudson, Researcher, University of Manchester, UK.
The Hawke government established the Ecologically Sustainable Development Policy.
That was thirty five years ago!
That was almost immediately undermined by the Howard government that took power in 1996 and its Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Nick Minchin, would work for its demise.
Just one year after Howard took power, in 1997, Malcolm Wallop came to Australia ‘to ignite a provocative debate on whether the world really needed a new global agreement to protect the planet from climate change.’ See The Carbon Club’ ‘Malcolm Wallop was the founder of Frontiers for Freedom and it was supported by some of the wealthiest men in America. Its dollars were helping to bankroll this Canberra show.’ That statement opens Chapter I, ‘Hearts and Minds’.
Marian Wilkinson, in The Carbon Club, makes clear how determined mining companies were.
By 1986 the Hawke government had decided the warnings from the UN had to be heeded. Nick Minchin now showed he cared more for his ideological position, backing Western Mining – supported by the Institute of Public Affairs – than everything that the scientists, including the growing discipline of ecology, had been revealing to us for decades.
The American Congress was informed about it in 1988.
See the details about his behaviour in The Carbon Club,by Marian Wilkinson – this Australian/American club crippled our responses to climate change. Subtitled ‘How a Network of Influential Climate Sceptics, Politicians and Business Leaders Fought to Control Australia’s Climate Policy’. Published in 2020 by Allen & Unwin. Check its index for the role of Nick Minchin.
From long term evidence in mainstream Murdoch media across Australia, that Carbon Club Climate Group still infects Australia and is probably among the reasons we are at the bottom of the pile of the developed nations for the absence of quality in our approach to global warming. Our national government continues financing fossil fuel and fracking developments.
BUT
Barry Jones was a real Minister of Science and cared about the future.
Now he is trying again.
‘What Is To Be Done’ has already been reprinted in 2020
It is a very detailed book. He is a scholar. He wants us to understand how we have reached this point. He takes us through it all and then he comes to one of the most important addresses he knows about dealing with the future even in the midst of a battle. Now, the battle for the Planet.
He has often asked himself the question about what Abraham Lincoln would have thought and said if he were confronted with the contemporary issues we are facing today.
The copyright on this book is so tight I have real concern about what I am doing now.
What Barry Jones has done is write an equivalent Gettysburg Address, limiting his work to 500 words like Lincoln’s Address.
In this homage to one of the greatest of the American Presidents, he includes some of Lincoln’s words, adapting them to the present.
‘A score of years ago, we entered a new millennium, facing great changes.’
He goes on to the world population in rich and poor countries.
He goes on to the finite nature of the Earth’s raw materials.
He goes on to the gap between inconceivable wealth and poverty.
And to what that gulf is doing creating hatred and its consequences.
He goes on to the international, weather-based science obliterating borders and the withdrawal of nations that are turning inward, rejecting life-saving global collaboration.
He lists them all, describing all the attitudes that are ‘poisoning democracy’s wells.’
He says clearly how ‘evidence-based policies are displaced by appeals to fear and anger.’
Then he lists the tasks before us, the ‘fragile species’ – as Lewis Thomas also describes us.*
He says, ‘We must consecrate ourselves to the unfinished work of saving Planet Earth, our home, where our species, Homo sapiens, lives and depends for survival.’
I wish I could have put here the whole of Barry Jones’ 500 word adaptation that honours President Abraham Lincoln who looked beyond the American Civil War to the future. See pp 352 – 353 of ‘What Is To Be Done’. This great Australian, one of our national treasures, asks us – having gathered the evidence, not to be silent, but to speak truth to power again and again and again.
His book is subtitled – ‘Political Engagement and Saving the Planet.’
And this is ‘What Is to be done’ at the UN International Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Democracies, like Australia and America and the UK, have the opportunity to present their credentials for all to see.
Concluding his book,
Barry Jones tells us not to fall into despair or to ‘retreat to the caves’.
He says – Citizens have to be informed, then challenge and speak truth to power.
He tells us it won’t be easy. He tells us it will be exhausting. He tells us it will not be comfortable. But he has given us the evidence and it must be done.
And, as just an ageing patriotic Australian citizen in a democratic country, with the right and duty to vote, who cares about what kind of future we leave for the children, I know Barry Jones is right.
Instead of the approach to ‘growth’ that has cared nothing about waste, nothing about degradation. We are being encouraged to change our whole approach.
Our Australian public universities are doing so much for the future focusing on this move towards a circular economy, in place of the present one built on winners and losers.
This is despite the impact of the cuts Australia’s public universities had forced on them by the refusal of our national Coalition government to support them with Job Keeper during the 2020 pandemic. Instead, the Coalition put Australia’s public revenue into four private universities and into private schools. Such a contrast to the climate change approach being taken in USA by President Biden.
Listen to these audios from our wonderful, trustworthy, public Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Science Show presented by Robyn Williams taking us to the way we can go towards a circular economy where we recycle using clean energy.
No more of those hungry corporations – ‘The Waste Makers’ – doing everything to increase profits regardless of their impact on the world the young will have to try to survive in.
We were warned about them back in the 1960. We were also warned about ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ by the same author – Vance Packard.
Contrast the linear economy with its waste, its pollutants, its terrible armaments, its degradation being pursued by our Australian fossil-fuel, carbon capture and storage Federal government with so little care for tomorrow. Its destruction of people, of land, forests, environments and oceans. Australia even has a new company that calls its ‘renewable’ intending to make money through exporting wood chips from Newcastle! That is instead of recognising that regeneration of forests needs the logs that fall to become homes for bio-diversity.
The difference between design for renewal and dumping waste – like a Chinese tailings waste dump the Tasmanian government wants to put in an old growth forest!
BUT
We need enlightened politicians. We need to choose those who care about the future.
Those we have now are tied to the past, including people in power who have been climate sceptics and deniers and who, with too many others, have made their wealth through denying climate change since well before the 1990s. As David Harris would put it in his book, they have ‘Outsourced their consciences’.
Rupert Murdoch, who owns so much of the commercial media outlets across Australia’s island continent, at last says he is prepared to accept zero emissions by 2050 when we now know that we need to do much by 2030! At last! But he still funds those who would destroy rather than design for connections. See the destructive goals of the Institute of Public Affairs that is the Australian equivalent of the worst of the Republican approach in the United States of America.
Australia’s Prime Minister is very pleased with himself. He had just got Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, to remove any concern or limitation about climate change and Australia’s behaviour in that regard from the trade treaty ‘Brexited’ UK is eager to make with Australia.
From ‘Greenpeace: Australia Pacific
‘The Morrison government pressured the UK to drop references to commitments to Paris Agreement temperature limits in order to get a post-Brexit trade deal over the line, in a leaked email obtained by Greenpeace.The revelation comes with The Morrison government expected to come under further pressure over climate policy when the foreign minister and the defence minister meet face-to-face with their US counterparts in Washington next week.And federal resources minister, Keith Pitt, will press ahead on plans to open up the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory to fracking by giving taxpayer money to oil and gas companies despite a legal challenge to the government’s program.‘ British ministers bowed to Australian pressure to drop key climate commitments for trade deal
Sciences and Humanities 