Greenwashing our way into the future

Ugadi is around the corner, signifying the start of spring, the new season of growth. Homes across Karnataka are engaged in spring cleaning, whitewashing their interior and exterior with sunna. The original meaning of whitewash is quite literal, but there is another interpretation that has passed into popular parlance, now entering the dictionary as well -- an attempt to paint someone or something in a positive light, by covering up stains -- purely cosmetically.

Similar to whitewashing, greenwashing is another term that is increasingly entering common parlance. Our awareness of the harmful impacts of climate change, biodiversity collapse and pollution is growing. There is also a large increase in public pressure on corporations and institutions which contribute to such activities. In the US and UK, for example, student pressure from activist groups has led many university funds to divest themselves from investing in oil and natural gas companies. Yet, greenwashing continues, with its systematic attempts to give environmentally harmful organisations and practices a positive connotation and colour.

In December 2015, 196 countries met in France to sign the ‘Paris Agreement’, an international treaty on climate change that is legally binding, committing signatories to action for climate mitigation, climate adaptation and finance. Mitigation is perhaps the most critical piece at this point. As long as we keep burning fossil fuels and pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the climate will keep warming. We can already witness some of the effects of climate change in Bengaluru’s hot and dry summer.

Yet, a recent report by Carbon Majors, a global think-tank, shows that after the Paris Agreement, 251 Gigatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions were emitted, much of this coming from fossil fuel-burning and cement production. 80% of these emissions comes from just 57 mega-producer companies, private and government-owned, which have expanded their output since 2016, instead of shrinking it to be in line with the Paris Agreement.

Many of the names in the report are familiar. Some companies produce advertisements touting their green credentials, others support museums and zoos, and fund fellowships and awards for researchers. There are many ways to conduct greenwashing, and it is not just the large companies who engage in this. Advertising awards have been given to greenwashing companies, and they have even been the focus of case studies on sustainability in prestigious business schools, expanding their reach and influence -- and making it less and less likely that the world will meet its climate mitigation targets.

The American ecologist Jay Westerveld was probably the first to use the term ‘greenwashing’, when he saw a request from a high-end coastal resort asking guests to reuse their towels “to save coral reefs”. Completely ignoring the fact that the impact of the resort itself, and the footprint of tourism, was far larger than the negligible reduction in water and detergent-use by reusing towels a few times.

Greenwashing is on the rise, in India and across the world. We can see it in many of the consumer products we buy for everyday use – but it can be even more insidious in their influence on investments, and on big business, as the Carbon Majors report indicates. Another recent investigative report by The Guardian in September 2023 also points to another fruitful area of greenwashing -- global carbon markets, where companies can ‘offset’ their harmful environmental impact in one place by planting trees in other distant locations. This report found that many of these claims were false, exaggerated.

But greenwashing is also something that we need to be careful of, in our own lives. We know we must reduce our own carbon and environmental footprints, but it is all too easy to be deluded into thinking that we are doing this merely by purchasing ‘green’ products without reducing our overall consumption, doing ‘green’ five-star tourism instead of locally embedded tourism, or taking an occasional cloth bag to the market but purchasing plastic wrapped vegetables online.

This Ugadi, can we try to honour the spirit of springtime by being environmentally responsible -- instead of mindlessly succumbing to greenwashing?