Greenwashing

Rather than look at an article this week, I thought I would be interesting to talk about adverts. This was prompted by the Shell #makethefuture campaign currently running. Its main adverts feature a number of celebrities and cute cartoons of multiple renewable energy projects Shell are currently involved in.

When I first saw the adverts, I was pretty impressed. Burning fossil fuels is the single biggest contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. We need investment in renewable energies to allow us to transition away from fossil fuels without corresponding reductions in quality of life. Furthermore, many of the projects featured can be used in areas without an extensive or reliable energy infrastructure, and so potentially could play a huge role in aiding access to electricity in these areas.

However, a little research has made me somewhat more sceptical about these adverts. They’re not advertising a specific product or service, but are instead a PR exercise aiming to improve the brand’s image in the public eye. In fact, it’s a classic example of what has come to be called ‘greenwashing’: a PR technique used to paint a company as environmentally friendly despite its activities being anything but.  

So what led me to these conclusions? A quick look at some figures is pretty revealing. In 2016 Shell created a ‘New Energies’ division to invest in renewables. Great! Except that this branch of the business receives investments less than 1% the size of Shell’s investments in extracting fossil fuels. That’s an annual expenditure of £200milllion vs the £30 billion spent on oil and gas extraction.

Shell doesn’t have a good record on this front. In 2009 it was reported that despite running adverts mere months before promoting its green credentials, Shell had withdrawn funding for most renewables due to their lack of profitability. In 2008 Shell was reprimanded by the UK Advertising Standards Authority for a ‘misleading’ advert in which it appeared to label its exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands and the development of the largest oil refinery in the USA as ‘sustainable’.

Figure 1: Shell's 2008 advert deemed 'misleading' by the UKASA.

It’s worth pointing out of course that Shell is FAR from the only offender in this area. See also BP (formally British Petroleum) rebranding itself ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and ExxonMobil running adverts about how green it is while funding climate change denial on a grand scale.

The fact is, these companies’ profits and viability depend on extracting and burning fossil fuels. That’s how they’ve always made their money, and that’s how they hope to continue to make their money. Why not? They know how to do it and there are incomprehensible profits to be made.

The problem for us is that world cannot go on burning fossil fuels at this rate if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. In fact, a 2015 paper in Nature estimated that in order to give us a chance of avoiding 2˚C warming, 80% of known coal reserves, 50% of known gas reserves and a third of known oil reserves cannot be burned. Carbon Tracker’s 2011 Unburnable Carbon Report introduced the idea of a ‘carbon bubble’: the fact that if any meaningful action is taken to avoid climate change, the assets on which these companies base their business models and financial reporting will become stranded. To put it another way, these companies can talk about renewables all they want, but as it stands their viability is reliant on us burning enough fossil fuels to cause climate change far far exceeding 2 ˚C.

So what can be done? Shareholder pressure is having some success, for example leading to ExxonMobil agreeing to stop funding climate change denial (not that they stuck to it).  Many fossil fuel divestment campaigns are also gaining traction , following the success of boycott movements in the past (if you’re interested, UCL has its own campaign).

I personally think that ultimately these companies are too large and too powerful to have to respond to anything but globally coordinated regulation by governments. And that’s unlikely to happen (in democracies at least) until the public demand it. And as long as the fossil fuel giants are keeping us happy with pretty films about how they’re going to change the world, we don’t seem that interested in demanding that our governments take bold action to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It may seem petty, but greenwashing is an incredibly powerful weapon in the arsenal of these companies. Don’t fall for it.