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FILE PHOTO: Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attends her end-of-year press conference in Rome, Italy, January 4, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Meloni suffers Sardinian blow, Russia jails another critic, Japan’s baby bust continues, Big Oil pumps Big Money
0.4: The rugged island of Sardinia has dealt rightwing Italian PM Giorgia Meloni the first serious electoral blow she’s suffered since taking office in 2022. In local presidential elections (Sardinia has special autonomy from Rome, and its own president) a candidate from the left-leaning anti-establishment 5-Star Movement beat the Meloni-backed candidate by a mere 0.4 points. Alessandra Todde will now become not only Sardinia’s first female leader, but the first 5-Star member to head any of Italy’s 20 regions.
30: It must be election season in Putin’s Russia! Leading human rights activist Oleg Orlov was sentenced to 30 months in prison on charges that he had “repeatedly discredited” the Russian army by criticizing the invasion of Ukraine. During the sham proceedings, Orlov – whose Memorial human rights group shared a 2022 Nobel Peace Prize – sat quietly reading Kafka’s The Trial. In his statement to the court he said he regretted nothing, and asked the presiding judges “Aren’t you afraid?”
758,631: Last year only 753,631 babies were born in Japan, a fall of more than 5% from 2022, reaching a record low for the eighth straight year. The Japanese government is struggling to turn around a slow motion demographic crisis that could see the world’s fourth largest economy lose a third of its population in the coming decades, strangling the economy and straining social safety nets.
313 billion: It’s no secret that Big Oil isn’t a Big Fan of Joe Biden, whose climate agenda has antagonized the fossil fuel sector. But the industry can complain all the way to the bank these days: top US producers are on track for net income of $313 billion since Biden took office, triple what they made during the same period of the preceding Trump administration, which was overtly friendlier to the sector. The lesson? Presidents matter a lot less than pandemics and wars when it comes to energy sector profits.Extinction Rebellion protesters dressed as 'Greenwash Busters' outside the Science Museum in South Kensington, during the protest. Protesters and scientists gathered both inside and outside the Science Museum to demonstrate against oil giant Shell's sponsorship of the Our Future Planet climate change exhibition.
Busting greenwashers
If you're watching what's happening this week at the COP26 climate summit, you'll probably hear this buzzword a lot: greenwashing. But the term is often thrown around carelessly, so let's take a minute to explain what it actually means, why corporations do it, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
So, what is greenwashing? In very simple terms, it's when a company or an organization willingly misleads the public about what it's doing or plans to do to better protect the environment through its business practices. A good example is Coca-Cola, which markets its packaging as sustainable despite being the world's top plastic polluter.
Governments, for their part, don't greenwash directly but often enable it — for instance by protecting the greenwashers themselves. In the lead-up to COP26, leaked documents revealed how Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other powerful nations lobbied the UN to downplay the need to cut fossil fuel consumption in order to fight global warming, precisely one of the COP26 main goals.
Greenwashing isn't new. It's been around since 1986, when an American environmentalist coined the term to describe how hotels often encourage guests to reuse towels as a way to save the environment — when it's really about saving the hotels money on water and laundry bills. Much has changed since, but the principle remains the same: some companies are being sneaky about what they're actually doing on climate.
What makes greenwashing worse than corporations dragging their feet on curbing emissions because they can't afford it yet, which is legitimate, is that greenwashers are dishonest. For instance, the world's top banks boast their ESG bonafides for eco-conscious investors while putting money into agribusinesses that destroy the Amazon.
For there to be greenwashing, though, there must be intent. Failing to meet your emissions reduction targets is not greenwashing, but setting fake goals you know are not achievable, is.
A company that fails to meet its 2050 net zero emissions targets because of supply chain factors beyond its control may be poorly run, incompetent, or just plain unlucky. But that's different than, say, Big Oil majors deliberately omitting the dirtiest parts of their operations in order to claim that they'll become carbon-neutral by the same deadline. (No wonder the entire industry has been shut out of COP for the first time.)
Why is greenwashing so effective for corporations? For one thing, it's much easier to change perceptions of what you do than to change your own behavior, which will cost you time and money. The best way to continue polluting like there's no tomorrow is to gaslight your customers and shareholders worried about the climate crisis.
In other words, you only pay lip service to your own pledges to de-carbonize, but as long as people buy your product and the stock price goes up, who cares if only some tree huggers say you're greenwashing?
For another, greenwashing is hard to police because regulation hasn't kept up or isn't being enforced. What's more, what qualifies as "sustainable" is often up to industry-wide bodies that treat greenwashers with kid gloves. Take for example the Forest Stewardship Council's 2020 decision to certify IKEA's illegal Ukrainian timber as "green."
Still, greenwashing is becoming harder to pull off these days. Playing fast and loose with environmental pledges is now a serious risk for companies as national enforcement gets tougher, and investors grow a conscience.
Earlier this year, a court in the Netherlands ordered Shell to slash its emissions by a whopping 45 percent over 2019 levels by the end of the decade for violating the human rights of the Dutch people by extracting fossil fuels. Activist investors are now pushing to break up the world's fourth-largest oil and gas company to force Shell transition to clean energy.
Moreover, it's becoming increasingly popular for governments — which likely won't agree on much in Glasgow — to go after individual greenwashers instead of making all businesses go green. At a time of growing outrage at greedy corporations burning the planet to fatten their profit margins, scapegoating them for the worsening climate crisis is an easy sell.