The Long, Glittering, Empty History Of Greenwash ("You Don't Need To Change A Thing, Citizen!")

[hatrack]

Forget the youth activists capturing the country’s imagination with calls for a Green New Deal and the progressive politicians pushing for it: The clearest signal that climate change demands action comes from the planet’s corporations. Corporations worldwide are announcing new plans to eliminate climate impact from their operations, and would have you believe they are well on their way to building the green economy voluntarily, no need for major economic reform.

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The picture once seemed rosier. In 2000, FedEx teamed with the Environmental Defense Fund to develop a “revolutionary” hybrid truck design to bring down greenhouse gas emissions by 30% while reducing air pollution. FedEx planned to start replacing its dirtier-burning diesel trucks in 2003 with the potential of rolling out 30,000 new vehicles in a decade. “I can’t envision any reason why we wouldn’t roll this out over the whole fleet,” one executive said. “By making this commitment, they are taking a giant step forward for the environment in the United States,” Geroge W. Bush’s EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, told the New York Times. The revolution never took hold. By 2010, FedEx had added only a few hundred electric and hybrid vehicles, citing the “daunting” costs of purchasing or converting vehicles. Today, the company has fewer than 4,000 “alternative energy vehicles” on the road—about 2% of its ground fleet of 180,000+ vehicles worldwide, lagging behind UPS (with more than 10,000 alternative fuel vehicles in its total fleet of 123,000).

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Since the mid-2000s, some airlines have offered passengers a chance to assuage their own carbon guilt by purchasing carbon offsets: For an extra fee, flyers buy into forest management and other environmentally friendly projects to balance out the carbon they’re using. Virgin Atlantic Airways helped lead the charge—on the public relations front, at least. Promising its carbon offsets are tested against “strict criteria about what counts as a carbon reduction,” Virgin assures customers that carbon credits support environmental conservation and improve “people’s lives by delivering household savings, health benefits and improving water resources.” But at least one offset project advertised by Virgin has proved to be a sham. The environmental and social justice organization Fern issued a failing grade, in 2017, to Virgin’s offset credits for forest conservation in Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia. An investigation found that nearly half of the forest that was supposed to be protected had been clear-cut. Fern’s Julia Christian told the Phnom Penh Post those carbon credits “are bogus—they are based on emissions savings that never happened, because the forest was destroyed, not protected.” A few months after Fern’s report made international headlines, Virgin stopped selling the Oddar Meanchey offsets.

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Producing plastic bottles and shipping water from Fiji to the rest of the world comes with a heavy environmental cost, and Fiji’s promise to neutralize “120%” of its carbon emissions was based on so-called forward crediting, a scheme that allowed the company to tout its carbon-negative status in 2008 even though its emissions wouldn’t (theoretically) achieve that status until 2037, according to calculations by the international nature group, Conservation International (CI), that partnered with Fiji on the project. The idea was to rely on conservation projects in Fiji—which, we know, is no guarantee of forest preservation. Billionaire Stewart Resnick, who co-owns Fiji Water, happened to be a longtime CI board member, and CI worked for Fiji Water in exchange for conservation funding. (Full disclosure: This author briefly worked for Conservation International in 2006, which led to her whistleblowing book, Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.)

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/21995/6-corporate-climate-schemes-bp-cargill-fedex-virgin-adm-bunge-fiji

[DanieRains]

1. We Would Have To Change OUR BEHAVIOR To Save The Planet

Stop flying and burning gas?

Aint gonna happen.