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? 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? 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 two 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Whatever it is, the whole population of the
world make big numbers. How much carbon I
produce. 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. BP crafted the carbon footprint as
a way to get people to blame themselves for
climate change instead of oil companies.
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. 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? 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. 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. I mean, when when they
were pretending like they were saying how
green they are, how wonderful they were.
Right. They were just complying with the
regulations. It wasn't them being like,
look how great we are. 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. 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. Well, that's
just a ghost gas guzzler. Just say emissions
emitter. 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. Yeah, I mean,
that's we know. Really rare. 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. 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. 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. 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.
There's labels around organic is
different. 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. 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. 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. Yeah, that's shameful. That's the
LG. Yep. 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. 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,
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. 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. 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? 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. Exactly. And on that
plus what Luc? Nice talking to you. I think we
see ya Luc. See you.