Ema Howard Boyce is addressing the UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment’s annual forum today. her focus is on the false impressions that businesses are giving by suggesting that they are addressing the climate crisis while, in truth, very little is being done. She sees the danger being that people . . .
. . . won’t realise the deception until it is too late.
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We know how this works. We’re used to the idea that lighting should be at the forefront of improvements in the way that we live, whether it be health and wellbeing – still a fairly new concept; energy reduction – a process going back decades; or acting ethically in the work that we do – fresh out of the box for some; a given way of behaving for others – something that comes with the territory.
Last week’s report by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) pointed the finger at government ministers threatening to renege on legally binding commitments to achieve net zero gas emissions by 2050, noting ‘major policy failures’ and ‘scant evidence of delivery’. Lord Deben said that ‘the government has willed the end s, but not the means. This report showed that present plans will not fulfil the commitments (to net zero).
I sometime think that we have ‘government by marketing department’. That’s it more important to make a claim that gets a lot of publicity before then moving onto the next ‘new thing’ than it is to actually double-down and get the promise things down. Greenwash in the lighting industry sits very well in its approach to ‘management by marketing department’. And as a result, we read that companies are contributing to the net zero effort, claiming in the process that they are amongst the greenest companies in the sector – if not in the entire world.
The extent of the problem comes when someone does the hard yards of looking at those companies’ financial figures. Its then that you realise that their actual efforts are merely skin deep; beyond the marketing headlines its just business as usual.
Does it matter?
Emma Howard Boyd uses the word ‘danger‘ quite deliberately, because our lack of real effort will lead to environmental destruction for many and degradation for everyone. Maybe we can get away with hyping health and wellbeing while doing very little to effect any true change on the basis that no one will really call us out if our tunable-white products make little or no difference to anything. The climate crisis is not like that.
The CCC’s Adaptation Committee reported four years ago that over 500,000 homes in England are at risk from coastal flooding. ‘Managing the coast in a changing climate‘ reported that some coastal communities are likely to be unviable in their current form, but further noted that adaptation is possible provided that we make a long-term commitment and take proactive steps to facilitate change. That was four years ago – nothing has been done. And before we point at the Covid pandemic (which waits for no man), there has been no let-up in our production of carbon over those four years.
Its important that we understand that the impact of Climate Change is not limited to foreign people living half a planet away. Taking just one aspect, and I write as we have reports that a glacier in Italy has collapsed, killing walkers in the area, melting ice shelves in the arctic and the antarctic are advance warnings of sea water lapping over doorsteps in towns and citiesa around our coastline .
There are two immediate dangers from Greenwashing:
1 Companies start to believe their own hype and start to believe that they are making a difference;
2 Other companies see the greenwashing tactics employed by competitors and level-down to match the hype, foregoing whatever efforts they were trying to make.
I’ll repeat the urgency from the CCC: that we must make a long-term commitment and take proactive steps to facilitate change.
There’s no question that the kind of efforts that need to be taken are not simple and some of them are costly. But do we really have a choice when doing nothing will surely deliver so a grievous future?
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If you’d like to learn more about greenwashing, visit greenwash.earth
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