By Chris Lang | REDD Monitor
On 8 October 2022, the Guardian published an extract from Greta Thunberg’s “The Climate Book”. Thunberg argues that we’ve been greenwashed out of our senses. No world leader from anywhere on the planet is genuinely attempting to address the climate crisis. Instead, she writes, politicians “turn to communications tactics and PR to make it seem as if real action is being taken, when in fact the exact opposite is happening”.
Thunberg points out that offsetting is not meant to clean up the problems created by historic greenhouse gas emissions. “It was never created for us to clean up our mess,” she writes. “Far too often it has been used as an excuse for us to continue emitting CO2, maintain business as usual and meanwhile send a signal that we have a solution and therefore we do not have to change.”
The tsunami of greenwash in the lead up to COP27 threatens to drown out any meaningful solutions to the climate crisis. Such as leaving fossil fuels in the ground, for example.
Greenwashing pollution
This week saw the pre-COP27 meeting, held in Kinshasa in Democratic Republic of Congo. This meeting was the final meeting before COP27 in November 2022.
António Guterres, UN Secretary-General gave a press statement about the pre-COP27 meeting. “The work ahead is immense,” he said.
As immense as the climate impacts we are seeing around the world. A third of Pakistan flooded. Europe’s hottest summer in 500 years. The Philippines hammered. The whole of Cuba in black-out. And here, in the United States, Hurricane Ian has delivered a brutal reminder that no country and no economy is immune from the climate crisis. While climate chaos gallops ahead, climate action has stalled. COP27 is critical – but we have a long way to go.
But Guterres mentioned fossil fuels only once. “We even see backsliding in some areas of the private sector – namely, around fossil fuels”, he said.
He didn’t mention that the International Energy Agency anticipates that coal demand this year will equal the all-time high reached in 2013. This isn’t only because of the problems of energy supply in Europe coming from the war in Ukraine. Global coal consumption increased dramatically in 2021: by 4.6% in China; 12% in India; 15% in the USA; and 14% in the European Union.
Guterres referred to the “importance of my high-level group on the net zero commitments of business and others” and the need for “concrete climate actions for net zero”.
But the High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities will only produce recommendation for “stronger and clearer standards” without any mechanism to ensure that companies meet the standards. The group will not name corporations that are using net zero to greenwash their on-going pollution. It is merely legitimising the net zero con.
Greenwashing oil in the Democratic Republic of Congo
In July 2022, the Democratic Republic of Congo announced that it was offering 27 oil exploration blocks and three gas blocks in an auction.
During his visit to DRC for the pre-COP27 meeting, John Kerry asked Felix Tshisekedi, President of DRC, to stop bidding on oil blocks “to protect the forest”. Kerry was referring to six blocks that overlap with peat land and the Virunga National Park, according to DRC’s Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Minister Ève Bazaiba.
In fact, as Greenpeace points out, three of the concessions overlap peatlands and at least 13 overlap protected areas.
Kerry’s interest is transparent. He’s not particularly concerned that DRC is planning to drill oil. Instead he’s worried about damage to DRC’s forest that the USA could use in the future to offset its own greenhouse gas pollution.
Bloomberg reported that Kerry told journalists in Kinshasa that,
“We are very, very convinced that you will have adequate space for development, creation of jobs, sustainable use, but at the same time protecting the most sensitive areas of the basin, which are really an important asset for everybody in the world.”
DRC rejected the US request.
Al Jazeera reported that DRC’s Environment Minister Bazaiba asked “if the government should let children die rather than profit from its fossil resources.” Bazaiba said, “As much as we need oxygen, we also need bread.”
Bazaiba told Reuters that, “Nobody can put pressure on us . . . no convention in the world, not even the Paris Agreement, forbids a country from emitting CO2 for development reasons.”
Bazaiba has made little or no effort to find out what the people living in the areas of these concessions might think about having their environment polluted by oil and gas exploration. A recent report published by Greenpeace Africa highlights the fact that the oil and gas auction launched in July 2022 was done without the knowledge, far less the consent, of local communities.
One local community leader told Greenpeace that,
“The government project is not the model of economic activity compatible with our environment. It is harmful to us who live here and everything around us. We breathe fresh air, we live in a healthy environment – why destroy all this and our fish?”
Greenwashing a police state
COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh will be sponsored by Coca-Cola. In 2019, Coca-Cola used three million tonnes of plastic packaging for its 500 brands of fizzy drinks, juices, and water. Coca-Cola actively fights against mandatory waste collection and deposit return schemes worldwide, as leaked documents show.
A petition on change.org aims to remove Coca-Cola as sponsors of COP27:
I’m guessing that WWF won’t be signing the petition.
WWF has partnered with Coca-Cola since 2007. This is one of WWF’s private sector partnerships that are supposed to “reduce footprints and reach scale in tackling the problems of water scarcity, climate change, and loss of nature.” In 2013, Coca-Cola announced that it would reduce its carbon emissions by 25% against 2010 emissions by 2020. But Coca-Cola’s emissions have remained pretty much the same for the past decade. In 2021, the company was responsible for almost 5.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
Naomi Klein recently wrote about the problem of holding the UN climate meeting in Egypt. Under General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who seized power in a military coup in 2013 and has remained in power ever since, the country is “one of the most brutal and repressive in the world”, Klein writes.
Egyptian authorities have prosecuted human rights and civil society activists. Nearly 60,000 political prisoners are detained in Egypt. Human Rights Watch describes a “relentless government crackdown” on civil society in the country.
Any UN climate meeting contributes to the greenwashing of a polluting state in which governments claim to be acting on the climate crisis while continuing business as usual. “This summit is going well beyond greenwashing a polluting state,” Klein writes, “it’s greenwashing a police state. And with fascism on the march from Italy to Brazil, that is no small matter.”
Greenwashing war
Only 50 state representatives turned up to the Pre-COP27 meeting in Kinshasa. Among them was John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate.
But Kerry didn’t take part in the group photo at the talks, because a Russian official was in the group.
Bloomberg reported Kerry as saying that,
“I don’t know if it was a big decision on the part of everyone, but I know very well that all the ministers of these countries are very bothered by their presence. Russia is not a country at this moment that’s treated like others, and they didn’t want to be there for a photo.”
In response to a request for a comment from Bloomberg Russian Special Presidential Representative on Climate Issues Ruslan Edelgeriyev said,
“If we discuss international conflicts instead of following the agenda of a particular conference, we will not achieve the result that the conference was meant to bring about. Wasting time discussing matters irrelevant to climate change will get us nowhere and will benefit no one.”
The irony appears to be lost on Edelgeriyev that a week before, as part of the proxy war between the US and Russia, the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up resulting in a release of methane that amounted to a “climate bomb”.
Because of the war in Ukraine, US exports of fossil gas to Europe are booming. Prices are soaring and energy companies and traders are making enormous profits. Laurent Segalen, an energy investment banker, told Business Insider in August 2022 that companies can fill a large ship in the US and send it to Europe for about US$60 million. Once it arrives in Europe, the gas is worth US$275 million.
On 30 September 2022, shortly after the leaks were reported on the Nord Stream pipelines, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the damage to the pipelines was a “tremendous opportunity” to reduce European gas imports from Russia. The US has been trying to persuade Europe to buy its gas rather than Russia’s cheaper gas via Nord Stream. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponisation of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs,” Blinken said.
Egypt is another country positioning itself as a fossil gas exporting country to replace Russian gas in Europe.