Read the full story in Time Magazine.
Today, we understand what “greenwashing” looks like: A company makes a deceptive claim to appear more environmentally friendly and mislead consumers. This has been going on for decades. In the 1990s, for example, Conoco ran an ad campaign that featured seals clapping for the company’s new environmentally-friendly oil tankers. All the while, Conoco and other oil giants allegedly hid the risks of fossil fuels that they knew about and were discussing internally at the time.
More recently, media critics have attached this moniker to corporate purchasers of nature-based carbon credits, a way for companies to “offset” a fraction of their emissions by funding conservation projects through the voluntary carbon market (VCM) that protect and restore natural carbon sinks. A recent deluge of media criticism paints credit-buyers as lazy, even nefarious. These stories repeat a now familiar narrative: “They are not interested in decarbonizing, and credits are a way to virtue-signal without meaningfully reducing emissions.”
A comprehensive new study from Ecosystem Marketplace, a D.C.-based nonprofit that researches environmental markets and financing, presents evidence that those broad-brush assumptions are wrong. It finds that most companies that participate in the VCM are climate leaders, not laggards.
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