Greenwashing - how does language do it?

#languagematters

Language is big and beautiful. And terrifying. It is never lost for words. It follows us wherever we go, while at the same time more or less being the one in charge. It is hard to encompass the scale of its power. A few weeks back I wrote a post called ‘Language is not a truth machine: it’s a reality machine’ - which explains why it can be used for all kinds of ‘washing’, white, black, pink or green.

‘Whitewashing’ is the OG form. In its original meaning of making a fabric lighter, it is over 500 years old. But a couple of centuries into this usage, it became a term for using language in a way so that faults or errors are concealed, or where someone is absolved from blame, or where an undeserving person is given a semblance of ‘honesty, respectability, rectitude’. From 1965, ‘whitewashing’ came to have the modern meaning of excluding non-white people, eschewing or erasing them in history; or in film, to cast a white performer in a non-white role.

And from here, it was short work to take the ‘wash’ part (or ‘morpheme’ as we call it in linguistics) out of ‘whitewash’ and create a range of different semantic veneers. You can ‘straightwash’ and ‘gaywash’. You can ‘pinkwash’ or ‘rainbow-wash’ - terms not yet captured by the Oxford English Dictionary, where ‘pinkwash’ only means turning physical things (walls, tombs) red or pink, while ‘rainbow-wash’ is absent. These terms are defined on Wikipedia as a strategy of pro-LGBTQ+ messaging for insiduous political purposes. Pinkwashing is considered by some scholars and activists to be a manifestation of ‘homonationalism’ - where a nation state aligns itself with LGBTQ+ minorities as a way to justify aggressive nationalist foreign policy.

The act of ‘malewashing’ means to turn achievements by women into a thing done by a male - a word that ought to get a lot more airtime. It turns up in the OED, although I couldn’t find it used much elsewhere. To ‘thinwash’ means trying to make a larger actor appear to be thinner, while ‘blackwash’ refers to a kind of revisionism where blackness is attributed to non-black historical figures. On news that Kamala Harris was the new Democrat candidate for US president, one Republican strategy was to accuse Kamala Harris and the Democrats of ‘blackwashing’ - i.e. of ‘turning’ black, as if this wasn’t part of her heritage.

We also have ‘sportswashing’, which means to use sport or a sporting event for promoting a positive public image for an organization, as a way to distract attention from other activities which might be considered controversial, unethical, or illegal. Attested from 2012, sportswashing is now rife in international sport. And hello, what about this new excellent coinage: ‘sanewashing’? I found this term used by Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo, to describe how the mainstream media turns Trump’s mangled words into pseudo policy statements. That is some serious washing.

As all these forms of ‘washing’ remind us, language is malleable. We can push and pull it in any of the nefarious directions we want, and it will both follow and lead us there. As I’ve written previously, the big companies with stuff to hide have known for a long time the power of language to drive public ideas and thinking in a direction that is favourable to them.

What about greenwashing?

The term ‘greenwashing’ was coined by the environmentalist Jay Westerfeld in a 1986 essay to describe the campaign by hotels to get guests to reuse towels, claiming to be motivated by environmental reasons. He called it ‘greenwashing’ because the real motivation was not to be kinder to the environment but to save on costs. I’ve frankly wondered if this is the best term for the scale of the deception being wreaked by companies promoting environmental credentials to sell more stuff, regardless of its actual environmental impacts and existential threat. ‘Green’ is good, and ‘wash’ is associated with ‘clean’, so how can we use these words to label something that is kind of unconscionable?

The Australian Security and Investment Commission is celebrating its first greenwashing case, against Mercer Superannuation for making misleading statements over the contents of their sustainable investment options. ASIC fined Mercer $11.3 million, and required them to publish an 'adverse publicity order' admitting its conduct contravened Australian’s financial services laws. In this case of greenwashing, Mercer published false information, wrongly claiming its Sustainable Plus investment options excluded alcohol, gambling and fossil fuel companies when this was false. But in reality, six of its seven options were connected to these companies. In their adverse publicity order, the falsehoods are detailed:

The statements on Mercer’s website represented that funds invested in the Sustainable Plus investment options were not, and would not be, invested in companies involved in, or deriving profit from, the production or sale of alcohol, gambling or the extraction or sale of carbon intensive fossil fuels when these exclusions were subject to exceptions. These statements were false or misleading and liable to mislead the public because from 12 November 2021 to 1 March 2023, the Sustainable Plus investment options had exposure to up to:

• 15 companies involved in the extraction or sale of carbon intensive fossil fuels;

• 15 companies involved in the production of alcohol; and

• 19 companies involved in gambling.

This was a case of saying something ‘is’, when it clearly is ‘isn’t’. No fancy spin was used. No rhetorical somersaults.

The scale and panorama of greenwashing is hard to believe. I don’t know what originally motivated the coining of the term ‘chutzpah’ - defined as ‘arrogance’ or ‘impudence’ - but that’s the energy I get from some of these incredible greenwashing scams. It would be a tough call to name the first instance of greenwashing: but certainly an early contender is from the ‘Keep America Beautiful’ organization, a non-profit organization established by the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company - with later corporate additions such as Coca Cola and the Dixie Cup Company (a manufacturer of disposable cups) - to make disposable rubbish pollution a problem caused by careless individuals. In this example, the gameplay was to turn plastic waste into the result of an individual decision, rather than understanding that it is a systemic problem requiring government regulation.

Keep America Beautiful teamed up with the American Ad Council to produce ‘public service announcements’ about littering, most famously, the ‘Crying Indian’ ad in 1970, which combined greenwashing with another kind of as-yet-unnamed washing: the ‘Indian’ in the film was played by an Italian actor.

Historian Finis Dunaway describes the masterful PR greenwashing of Keep America Beautiful in her book Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of Environmental Images. Keep America Beautiful’s advertising, she writes, was presented as politically neutral, while directly serving industry interests:

It was propaganda that did not appear propagandistic. It also shielded corporate polluters from blame by shifting responsibility onto individuals

The ‘crying Indian’ ad may well have produced ‘the most famous tear in American history’, writes Dunaway. The ad won awards and is ‘still ranked as one of the best commercials of all time’, gaining billions of ‘household impressions’, achieving ‘one of the highest viewer recognition rates in television history’. The ad worked to ‘interiorize the environmental critique of progress, to make individuals feel guilty and responsible for the degraded environment’. While developing this and other ‘anti-littering’ ads, the corporates behind Keep America Beautiful were at the same busy opposing the environmental initiatives trying to deal with the structural problem of the rise of throw-away packaging.

Fossil-fuel-splaining

Fast forward to our era, when the connection between global warming and burning fossil fuels is more well known. I’ve previously cited the Yale Climate Communications research, which regularly surveys Americans on their understanding of and attitudes towards global warming. Their latest figures report the number of Americans who think the planet is warming outweighs those who don’t by a factor of 5 to 1. Nearly 60% understand that global warming is human caused, and that the science on this matter is settled. With higher levels of general awareness of global warming, tactics to delay climate action have changed over time. Check out this ExxonMobil YouTube channel with a video targeting children to fossil-fuel-splain what they call the ‘dual energy’ challenge.

You would think that somewhere in this video the company might mention ‘climate change’ - it would be too much to hope they would use the much more specific term ‘global warming’, or ‘global heating’. But the ‘dual challenge’ in the ExxonMobil universe is about juggling ‘energy’ and ‘emissions’. Climate change is not mentioned - as if the ever increasing CO2 pollution is actually doing anything. I have written previously about the kind of ‘invisible violence’ that this kind of language is perpetrating. If you don’t want to talk about climate then just bang on about energy. It’s a form of fossil fuel motherhood statement - who can disagree with you when you are arguing for ‘reliable energy’? And meanwhile you are distracting people from actually making the climate crisis their primary focus.

A new greenwashing case has started: The People of the State of California is coming for ExxonMobil, over its decades of plastic greenwashing, in a case the team over at Heated are reporting on, and in fact supplied some of the research for. Keep an eye out over there by subscribing to that excellent Substack.

Climate literacy

While the planet is heating up, greenwashing is on the rise. Australian businesses, according to the ACCC, are increasingly using environmental claims as a marketing tool. A 2023 study by the ACCC of 247 businesses across 8 different sectors found more than half of the businesses were using marketing tactics that raised greenwashing concerns. This kind of climate disinformation is part of a larger media ecology in which we now live and raise our kids. The ‘information age’ has given way to the ‘disinformation age’, as some scholars have argued, with considerable implications for public discourse:

These ruptures in shared political reality undermine basic norms and communication processes on which democracies depend for policymaking, conflict resolution, acceptance of outcomes, and general civility. What explains these developments? How did facts become unhinged from important public policy debates and assessments of the worthiness of political leaders? Citizens still anchored by established democratic institutions often find these developments hard to fathom and more than a little unsettling.

And yet, a 2023 study led by Associate Professor Tanya Notley at Western Sydney University found fewer than half Australian kids and teens (41%) say they know how to recognise ‘fake news’. Only one in four young people reported that had received a lesson in media literacy in the last year. Only forty percent were familiar with the term ‘algorithm’ in relation to how they might come across news stories. More greenwashing going on, and not enough climate and media literacy training for the next generation.

If you are a educator or parent, start talking about climate literacy. And think about what we should label the ongoing fossil fuel deception that is polluting public discourse and personal minds. ‘Greenwashing’ doesn’t feel strong enough to capture the extent of the ideological harm being perpetrated. It’s a topic I’ll be returning to in the future.

P.S. Thanks for the well-wishing for my recent hiking holiday in the Warrumbungles. Our small group was ably led by two guides from Women Want Adventure, who persuaded us to start our hike of Mt Exmouth at 2.00 am, to be at the peak for sunrise. It was magical.