“The magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse,” they write. “Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.”
Corporations have never been under more pressure to follow through and make meaningful progress on carbon emissions from regulators and amid greater scrutiny around “greenwashing” from environmentalists – and their own employees.
“Carbon markets provide cover for empty greenwashing schemes, and are thus a way to distract from the real action people and the planet need, urgently,” said Rachel Rose Jackson, the climate research and policy director at the watchdog Corporate Accountability, over email Wednesday. “Article 6 is one of the battlegrounds where we are seeing the interests of polluting countries and corporations be pitted against the people’s and the planet’s.”
The impacts of the climate emergency are now so obvious, only the truly deluded still deny them. Instead, we are at the point where everyone agrees something must be done, but many are making only vague, distant promises of ineffective action. As a result, we are currently on track for a 0.5% cut in global emissions from 2010 levels by 2030, when a 45% drop is needed to avoid climate catastrophe.
No country can be allowed to think that setting long-term targets gives them an alibi to not act in the short term. Take Australia, for example, whose 2050 net zero target, announced last week, is accompanied by a 2030 target which puts us on track for a 4C world. Or Saudi Arabia, which is mulling a 2060 target, while planning to increase its oil production over this decade. We cannot stand for such global greenwashing at this summit from our country or anyone else’s.
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