Deceitful Deeds and Disseminating Disinformation

Greenwashing your corporate behaviour may turn your sustainability narrative into a horror story

“It was long past time for me to come to grips with the other elephant in the living room — the profit motive …. Billionaires, bankers, and corporations profit from it. [That is] the reason we’re not talking about [what] would be bad for business, especially the cancerous form of capitalism that rules the world — and now hiding under a cover of green.” — Jeff Gibb

Even if you think that Michael Moore’s ‘Planet of the Humans’ is an over-the-top way to gain publicity, the movie certainly has everyone talking about the very real problem of greenwashing.

Greenwashing may take many forms, ranging from exaggerations of environmental performance to outright lying and even fraud to cover up environmental harm. The continuum of what greenwashing encompasses is reflected in the variety of definitions provided by dictionaries like Cambridge and Oxford, which include:

• making people believe that your company is doing more to protect the environment than it really is;
• disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image; and
• activities by a company or an organisation that are intended to make people think that it is concerned about the environment, even if its real business actually harms the environment.

It is sometimes difficult to draw the line between exaggeration and deliberate misrepresentation.

Conspiracy and collusion

Some may ridicule and dismiss conspiracy theories, but several of the biggest greenwashing efforts have required substantial plotting and colluding — some of them worthy of competing for the world’s best thriller script.

One example from a couple of decades ago gave literal meaning to the term ‘smoke and mirrors’. The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, a now defunct industry-funded body, was initially created and funded by the tobacco industry to discredit research that secondary tobacco smoke increased rates of cancer and heart problems.

The Coalition was later funded by a major player in the oil industry to produce biased research reports that denied climate change and to influence legislation that sought to limit corporate activities with adverse effects on the environment. The corporation funded over a hundred organisations that denied climate change, creating the impression that the scientific community must be split on the debate if there were so many organisations which doubted the existence of the phenomenon. Even the term ‘sound science’ in the name of the coalition is intended to imply that climate change activists did not base their research or findings on sound scientific principles.

The oil company in question currently still faces multiple lawsuits over its misleading accounting and deceptive behaviour regarding climate risks.

The truth will out

We know that data can be presented to mislead, and that discourse can be manipulated, but authorities and even the public have access to more information than ever before. The fact that a corporation’s sustainability report is hundreds of pages long does not deter people from scrutinising it and checking its claims and assertions. Governments and agencies also share information, and comparisons can be made between reports and submissions in different countries or regions.

Take the case of a major car manufacturing company whose sustainability report referred to the group’s ‘long tradition of resolute commitment to environmental protection’ and claimed that they ‘intend(ed) to put (their) creative powers to good use for the benefit of people and the environment’. The following year, the car manufacturer was exposed for installing software in its vehicles that enabled it to cheat on NOx emissions tests.

In the last five years, the corporation has paid out tens of billions of Euros in fines, compensation and legal costs in different jurisdictions world-wide, and still faces new lawsuits for compensation. It also hasn’t quite gotten over the reputational damage, with current media reports often referring to the emissions scandal whenever the company’s name is mentioned in the context of sustainability.

Advertising in the age of accessible data and social media

The current era has seen two major developments in respect of advertising:

• Corporations can no longer get away with merely saying they are the biggest, best or greenest company when these claims are not supported by data. Advertising standards authorities in many jurisdictions take claims made in advertisements rather seriously. The result: not only is the advertisement pulled off air or publication, but the advertiser may face hefty fines, as well as claims from consumer bodies in respect of damages for misleading advertising. Examples of corporations that have faced this fate include an airline that claimed it had the lowest emissions in the country based on outdated data and statistics from almost ten years ago, a car manufacturer that claimed one of its vehicles produced zero-emissions when it actually didn’t, and a giant agro- and biotech company that made false claims about genetically modified organisms.
• Decades ago, advertising constituted a one-way discourse — the advertiser produced or published the advertisement, and the consumer received it via radio, television, or print. With the advent of social media, consumers are not just recipients of a corporation’s sustainability discourse or narrative. They have also become producers of alternative discourses, that can easily be disseminated to thousands or millions of other consumers.

These developments have made it easier for greenwashing to be called out in a public and reputation-damaging manner.

What does this mean?

From a sustainability storytelling perspective, greenwashing threatens to taint months or years of work because an organisation wants to look its very best, and is prepared to lie or mislead the public in doing so.

Inevitably the truth comes out, and the organisation looks worse than before, suffering irreparable reputational (and often financial) damage.

The bottom line

A corporation does not have to be perfect, just genuinely trying to do the right thing. During these times of fast-paced innovation and uncertainty, it is difficult to anticipate all the consequences of our actions or behaviour. It is inevitable that we’ll get it wrong sometimes. In those cases, it may be wiser to spend resources making it right instead of covering it up or lying about it.

“Let excellence be your brand… When you are excellent, you become unforgettable. Doing the right thing, even when nobody knows you’re doing the right thing will always bring the right thing to you.” — Oprah Winfrey