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On this inaugural episode, Ralph and Luc briefly describe the practice of greenwashing, with examples ranging from:
- BP's popularisation of the carbon footprint, to
- the labels on water bottles, to
- Volkswagen evading emissions tests, and
- the practice of carbon offsets…
Creators & Guests
What is Your Planet, Your Health?
"Your Planet, Your Health" strives to summarise the science behind earth's climate and our existence on it –
Our aims are to contextualise the history of discourses and ideas about the environment and to debunk misinformation –
We share positive stories, and explore the knowledge and tools that we can use to be good earthlings.
This podcast on planetary health is hosted by Ralph Levinson, MD Health Sciences Professor (emeritus) School of Medicine, UCLA, and Luc Lewitanski, a journalist covering technology, politics and power.
Planetary health is about how the environment affects us and the people and the beauty in the world we love.
Read more at https://www.planetaryhealthforbusypeople.com/
Ralph Levinson: Hi, welcome to the Planetary Health for Busy People podcast. This is a series of short podcasts to inspire hope and empower you as an agent of change. I'm Dr. Ralph Levinson.
And I'm Luc Lewitanski. And today, let's start by talking a bit about carbon footprints. Luc, have you ever done one of those, one of those calculators for your carbon footprint?
Luc Lewitanski: Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. I did the whole tool and everything. I filled out how much carbon I'm responsible for. And I got a number at the end. It was quite scary. They said, if everybody lives like me, we'd need 50 planets. You know, I thought, oh my, can we really live like this?
Ralph Levinson: I'm guessing a little hyperbole on the 50. But yeah, it is an interesting exercise. I did it with a group of us doing it and comparing notes. And I did actually two and got two very different answers. My carbon footprint. Yeah, yeah, my carbon footprint came out pretty good. I mean, more, more than, more than one Earth, although one, one of them said just a hair more than one Earth. So okay, not bad.
But the other one said 2 Earths. And mine are on the low side, because I haven't been traveling lately. So I don't have the jet air. I did, I did one where I, where I looked at before I got solar on my house before I had an electric vehicle back when I used to travel. And I got over 3 Earths at that time, which is close to the American 4 Earths, they say is what it takes to keep Americans below.
Luc Lewitanski: So I think in relative terms, it seems like it's interesting, you can track an evolution, right? You can you can see perhaps the tools on the sort of objective marker. But but in relative terms, you said the EV vehicle change clearly impacted your score. So so it's not entirely disconnected from no, absolutely.
Ralph Levinson: And, and there are some explanations for the differences between these two, although neither was totally transparent. I mean, I'm not saying if I really contacted them, I couldn't have found their assumptions. But it wasn't always really clear, nor needed to be what how the sausage was made, right? There's not like, how do they weight this versus that one asked for process foods.
And I wasn't to me, that's like salami or something, you know, or, but you know, then when I looked up the definition process foods, almost everything I eat is process foods, almost anything most of us eat as process foods, you know, past let's say an apple. So again, it was it was is a little bit like that one, the one that came up with the higher number also made an assumption that there's a certain amount of energy I as an American in South Southern California use. And that's not unfair, because that's the problem of the commons, right? It's the energy that it takes to keep up my grid, that energy it takes to keep up my roads.
And so it you're right, as a as a comparative thing, as a relative thing, not bad, just not precise. The one from our power company was was really busy asking us things like, All right, do you use efficient light bulbs? Okay, now would you promise to use efficient light bulbs?
How many do you think you'll use this year? That's what it was really all about. It was kind of manipulating people into promising to use better light bulbs. Probably not the most important thing in the world. But, you know, that was that was their bias.
Luc Lewitanski: I mean, if you're selling light bulbs, if you're in that business, it might be particularly important speaking to the these metrics, you know, possibly being game or gameifiable.
Ralph Levinson: But yeah, no, that's right. It's it is a matter of that kind of perspective, isn't it? And their perspective as a power company is, well, they're selling you power, they want to, you know, they want everybody using the best light bulbs and, and, and the most efficient utilities, washing machines, you know, and all that, and being careful about whether you use it in high power. So it had an educational purpose, clearly. But then again, you know, talking to you about this, you told me something that kind of really blew my mind about where these carbon footprints come from, Luke.
Luc Lewitanski: Why don't you share that? That's a thing, right? As I was looking a little bit further into this, something sort of didn't sit quite right with me because it was so hyper individualized. Even the solutions you're thinking about with the example of the power company, it's like, oh, you can buy these different light bulbs.
And I'm thinking, you know, your figure of like each American consumes about four planets. You know, this, this ultimately is the product of like infrastructure spending and sort of larger structural forces. And so I'm thinking, like, why was this research spotlighted?
And it turns out that this was sort of an obscure piece of academic research that that wouldn't be in common parlance. If it were not for this initiative, this this major ad campaign that British petroleum ran in 2006, actually part of their rebranding for British petroleum to beyond petroleum, which is a classic form of them trying to green up their image, let's say, as the classic term goes. But so anyways, they, they did this massive sort of ad spend where they had testimonials of people saying, Oh, am I really responsible for the climate? You know, asking people what the carbon footprint is. What size is your carbon footprint? Ah, the carbon footprint there.
Ralph Levinson: Whatever it is, the whole population of the world make big numbers.
: How much carbon I produce.
Speaker 4: You mean the effect that my living has on the earth in terms of the products I consume?
: BP made a calculator that let anybody work out their own carbon footprint. And they made sure people knew about it.
Speaker 4: BP crafted the carbon footprint as a way to get people to blame themselves for climate change instead of oil companies.
Luc Lewitanski: You know, asking people what the carbon footprint is popularizing this idea in people's mind, because ultimately, it was a very good tool to get people to think of their main relationship to environmental issues as being about individual consumption choices, not about thinking about larger political investment decisions, but rather about individual choices. And that's probably why BP had this vested interest in popularizing this tool.
And ultimately, it's not to say that the science is bunk. You know, as we've said, there's some, there's some range in terms of how useful or, or, or measurable, what are some or what are all these tools are. Yeah, exactly about the assumptions that you were listing. So, so we can criticize the methodology, but ultimately still find use in this.
But as you say, there's something about the origin, or at least the popularizing of this particular tool that should, you know, give us a pause for thought. That's at least. Yeah.
Ralph Levinson: Oh, absolutely. And, and I really had no idea. And you mentioned sort of greening up BP, which of course brings us to the topic of greening up things, sort of upcycling the greenness. And, and that brings us to greenwashing. An amazingly important topic. And, and something that is just really ubiquitous. I mean, it's all over the place. So let's talk about greenwashing and, and look, how would you, how would you define it? There are several definitions, but what do you think?
Luc Lewitanski: So to me, I think this is, this is the idea of companies after initially trying to spread doubt about the reality of climate change, you know, the fossil fuel companies initially, internally did research on the impact of their activities on the climate, realized they were doing horrible things for the earth, but then tried to convince us of this not being an issue for a few years. And after they sort of lost that battle, they realized that in order to continue attracting shareholder investments, and just in general, in order to continue having a positive reputation as brands, that they needed to redefine themselves as not being the major contributors to climate change and the people who suppress the information, but rather as being on the forefront of the vanguard of energy transitions.
And you'll often find this sort of BS language to try and cover up the activities, right? So I think the classic example of thinking of, you know, what happened when British petroleum changed their name to beyond petroleum? Well, you know, they had to like redo their logo.
: That's basically what happened. It's not like they restructured the whole business, you know, they had a few press releases. But ultimately, that's, that's the real thing with greenwashing. It's about keeping up appearances.
It's once, once these fossil fuel producing companies have understood that the tide has turned and people are going to be upset at them, if they think of them as polluters, they need to have some type of opposite reaction to give themselves a better reputation. But it's just sort of just like money laundering that they're taking this, this investment and they're using it in order to make themselves look good. And it often seems like programs like carbon offsets, you know, a large amount of what's actually spent in the carbon offset programs is popularizing and spreading the good word about the programs that are being used. There's a lot more money spent on communicating all these good things that companies are doing for the climate than they're actually spending. They're more interested in telling you about the good things that they're doing than actually doing good things to the environment. And ultimately, who can blame them? You know, if their goal is to maximize shareholder value, then that's just them fulfilling their purpose. But perhaps we can think there's something a little cynical about this structure. I was not sure.
Ralph Levinson: Yes, I, I think a little cynical is very kind, Luc. And it's interesting how much in, in our world gets justified by shareholder interests. It really is the mantra. And as respectful, respectful as I want to be about the grease that keeps things going, there seems to me there ought to be a limit. And the real fact is, as much as I am happy to agree with everything you've said about the oil companies and their nefarious lies, there is a fact that greenwashing isn't limited to, to oil companies. As a matter of fact, greenwashing, again, is much more subtle in many cases. It's, it's certainly not just even big industries, it's products. It's, it's the, it's the, the nice stream and beautiful evergreen trees on your water bottle, you know, on your plastic water bottle, you know, I don't know that I've seen happy swimming dolphins, you know, on water bottles, but, you know, I guess because it's not salt water.
But, you know, it's, it's, it's, there's so many levels of it. In looking into this, I saw that the EU a couple of years ago decided that half of the oil companies, you know, were going to be greenwashing, you know, I was just over half, 53% of labels, 53% of products had some level of greenwashing. And they were just defining greenwashing as something that makes a claim for being environmentally at least friendly, at least compatible, when it really isn't.
And at least the claim isn't true. It's more subtle when you're looking at the pretty green or some beautiful running creek, you know, for the water bottle when you know that they didn't get it from a beautiful running creek. And matter of fact, in the United States, most running creeks are full of forever poisons and toxic chemicals. And you can't really eat the fish that you, that without risking poisoning yourselves with PFA's in the United States. So a picture of a beautiful running creek on a water bottle is by definition misleading in greenwashing, even if it wasn't for the plastic bottle. Anyway, there's a lot of greenwashing out there. Besides BP, let's go back to the big ones. You know, the one that I think probably is one of the biggest ones that people write about recently is the Volkswagen example.
Luc Lewitanski: I mean, when when they were pretending
Ralph Levinson: like they were saying how green they are, how wonderful they were.
Luc Lewitanski: Right. They were just complying with the regulations. It wasn't them being like, look how great we are.
Ralph Levinson: They were basically on the one hand, they were on the one hand, they were saying we're a green alternative. This is great. Use our diesel. It's efficient. We have this great product. It's not perfect, but it's a great product friendly with the environment. At the same time, they were manipulating the software so that when you it looked like they were green and it looked like their emissions were very low, but they weren't.
Luc Lewitanski: When they were passing the inspections, they lowered the amount of emissions that they were emitting just just for the specific seconds. The software knew how to detect if it was being inspected. And at that time it would be like, oh, this is an economically responsible car and that would be a usual gas guzzler, even though as you're saying it was marketed.
Ralph Levinson: Well, that's just a ghost gas guzzler. Just say emissions emitter.
Luc Lewitanski: Yes, yes. Right. A toxin emitter. I don't know what their gas mileage was, but the emissions were horrible. Or at least nowhere near what they said. I may have still been better than some other cars, but nowhere near where they said. And they got in trouble for this. They got in big trouble. They got a $4 billion criminal finding against them in the United States. So far, I understand it's something like 32 billion euros, which is about the same as dollars worldwide, what it cost them. And two of their executives went to jail.
Ralph Levinson: Yeah, I mean, that's we know. Really rare.
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, white color crime is you could you could tank the entire economy as has happened in 2000, you know, and eight and nobody goes to jail. But they just made that. They just it was just so obvious. It was these guys were responsible. I mean, decisions had to be made and somebody had to actually do this.
You know, they couldn't hide behind. Oh, it's market forces or something. You know, somebody had to write that software. So that's one of my favorite examples. There's lots of others, but that's a big one. I think everybody should know that, you know, it's it's, you know, it's very illustrative.
It really is. It could be as subtle as a label. I mean, and or it could be as major as a corporation just gaming the system totally.
Literally, actually gaming the system. But it's this idea that they're sort of speaking through the corners of their mouth, that then they know that what they're doing is just performative, virtue signaling. They're just trying to seem like they're working to be environmentally friendly because they know that will create a good association with inter-central customers mindsets and they'll they'll feel like they want to spend money towards buying this company's product. But the disconnect there is that they're knowingly doing something completely futile. And therefore it's counterproductive that they're using the attention and the good will that we have around wanting to do something about the climate. And they're channeling it into like performative BS, just to make themselves look good. And then people think that they're acting environmentally by consuming this company's products that is falling for the trick.
Ralph Levinson: And in fact, that's the difference. You know, when we want to say somebody's virtue signaling or performative, you could say, oh, well, I kind of did that earlier because I said, well, I have solar and I'm an electric vehicle.
That's between me and you and the listeners. But when a company does it, it's fraud. It's stealing your money.
It's stealing your goodwill. You know, when it's from my ego, you know, it's a minor social for part, you know, when it's a company, people bought their cars thinking that they had an ecologically sound product.
Luc Lewitanski: People thought they were doing something good. It's praying upon the people. They were doing something good to be environmental. That's the pernicious aspect. It's using people's impulse to want to help and perverting it towards these deceitful ends.
Ralph Levinson: Exactly. Exactly. You know, and this goes all the way down the line. It's it's it's true with the labeling. If it makes you feel better about buying a plastic disposable bottle that nobody's going to recycle. But it's also true for a lot of labeling. I mean, you know, everybody who's listening should be aware that things like the term green, you know, you would think, oh, that must have a technical definition.
: Something is green or and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't. Or if it says, I mean, there's really no definition to it. I mean, I mean, short of that you purposely added a known carcinogenic pollutant, you could call anything green. It is. There's no regulation about that, at least in the United States. I'm not so sure about the EU. The I know they're trying to make organic.
Luc Lewitanski: There's labels around organic is different.
Ralph Levinson: I, you know, just say ecologically friendly or green. That's different from organic. Organic does have fairly strict regulations. And what the companies will often do is they'll get a they'll have a made up company that certifies them. We know how this kind of circular, you know, the Lumber Company does that.
It's just made up by the Lumber companies. Oh, by the way, just to say in terms of legislation, if you think something is really fraudulent, you can in the United States get in touch with the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC. There, I mean, there are mechanisms when it says pathetically illegal and fraudulent as the Volkswagen. But you can't do that about, say, the Lumber Companies made up company because they made up a company.
Luc Lewitanski: Right. It has to be a deal to a judge. And an airtight case. It's hard to prove that there's deceit and fraud, unless they're, as you're saying, in the Volkswagen case, you know, they had to design software that was specifically evading the regulation that that seems it's easy to to see where the fraud would be.
Ralph Levinson: But there are some like you mentioned the organic and there are legitimate organizations that that do regulate that that certify and regulate that. And there is one of the things we could consider doing is, for example, the NRDC has a list of groups that are legitimate. For example, the I-Star energy ratings in the United States are legitimate, although one company was found just frankly lying about their refrigerators. You know, they've just lied, you know, that's different. That's the kind of thing you could call the FTC about.
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, that's shameful. That's the LG. Yep.
Ralph Levinson: Yep. And, uh, yeah, it is, isn't it? They just somebody just decided to lie. I and even legitimate ones can make mistakes. There was an example of, um, uh, IKEA, which did a was was busted for do getting illegal wood from the Ukraine. And, um, they used a legitimate group that was supposed to the group just messed up.
They just, I don't know if it was hidden, but the group just messed up. Now, so there are things like for the organic, you know, I think that it's important to realize that, you know, that they're going to manipulate you. But here's an example I want to give, you know, a typical thing is, for example, toilet paper, you mentioned carbon offsets. And so for toilet paper, they'll say, Hey, we're carbon neutral because we plant trees. What they don't tell you is that the trees will take years to start making up for what was cut down. What they don't tell you is that they may have cut down old growth forest that was part of an ecosystem. And instead they're doing a cash crop stand of, you know, evergreen pines of some sort, some fast growing tree that has nothing near the ecological, umph, the ecological standing that of what they cut down. So in other words, they may well buy some carbon offsets, but it doesn't mean that it's really an equivalent that it really makes up.
Luc Lewitanski: It's because they don't, they don't care about the actual impact. As like you said, they want something that'll grow fast that they can take a picture of and make it look green, right? It's again, it's very much about appearances that there's no earnest efforts to engage with their impact on the climate. This is why it's, uh, you know, um, arguably something. So the bottom line is,
Ralph Levinson: bottom line is if it looks too good to be true, it's probably not, uh, be vigilant and buyer beware because they'll lie to you. Yeah.
Luc Lewitanski: And I'm not pleasant thought. Well, and maybe, maybe there is, you know, not, not to see it as entirely cynical. I, I, I think, uh, part of the reason why these companies are so excited in, uh, in making themselves seem like they're taking matters into their own hands is because they don't want the regulators breathing down their neck, uh, to actually punish them for the climate impacts they're having. And if there's popular unrest against these companies actions, then people might put pressure on their legislators to start, uh, you know, upping the environmental regulations and requirements.
Ralph Levinson: So, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's why we need to keep this vigilant. And you know, we have to have skepticism, uh, with regard to these companies, uh, healthy skepticism. And, and on the positive, another positive note where I thought you might have been going with that is very simply that they're doing this because it sells because a lot of people care, right?
And, and, and they wouldn't be doing this if they didn't, you know, they're not doing it just for fun and they're, they're doing it because they're, they're exploiting the fact that we care. Yeah. The good news being, is that enough people care for them to do that?
Luc Lewitanski: Yeah. That's, that's a silver lining. The fact that it's a good business for them to appear as though they're taking action on the environment means that there is, uh, a lot of people who respond positively to this. And that, as you say, speaks to the fact that people are, uh, aware of the issues with the environment and want to do something about it. We just have to make sure it's channeled towards earnest, uh, efforts to do something about it and not just ways to get good PR.
Ralph Levinson: Exactly. And on that plus what Luc? Nice talking to you. I think we see ya Luc. See you.