Greenwashing: Multiple Lessons From The Recent Past, Given Just How Much Corporations Care Of Late

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In 2000, FedEx teamed with the Environmental Defense Fund to develop a “revolutionary” hybrid truck design to bring down greenhouse gas emissions by 30% while reducing air pollution. FedEx planned to start replacing its dirtier-burning diesel trucks in 2003 with the potential of rolling out 30,000 new vehicles in a decade. “I can’t envision any reason why we wouldn’t roll this out over the whole fleet,” one executive said. “By making this commitment, they are taking a giant step forward for the environment in the United States,” Geroge W. Bush’s EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, told the New York Times.

The revolution never took hold. By 2010, FedEx had added only a few hundred electric and hybrid vehicles, citing the “daunting” costs of purchasing or converting vehicles. Today, the company has fewer than 4,000 “alternative energy vehicles” on the road—about 2% of its ground fleet of 180,000+ vehicles worldwide, lagging behind UPS (with more than 10,000 alternative fuel vehicles in its total fleet of 123,000). After balking at the cost of a new green fleet, FedEx (like much of the ground shipping industry) has refocused its “sustainability” work on relatively low-hanging fruit such as making improvements to its existing fleet’s fuel efficiency (which can save money without major new investments). FedEx has made strides, improving fuel efficiency 39.6% from a 2005 baseline, and claims to still be “revolutioniz[ing]” the industry. But none of this moves to transition corporate ground fleets to renewable fuel.

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Aviation makes up roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, one of the fastest-growing sources. Since the mid-2000s, some airlines have offered passengers a chance to assuage their own carbon guilt by purchasing carbon offsets: For an extra fee, flyers buy into forest management and other environmentally friendly projects to balance out the carbon they’re using. Virgin Atlantic Airways helped lead the charge—on the public relations front, at least.

Promising its carbon offsets are tested against “strict criteria about what counts as a carbon reduction,” Virgin assures customers that carbon credits support environmental conservation and improve “people’s lives by delivering household savings, health benefits and improving water resources.” But at least one offset project advertised by Virgin has proved to be a sham. The environmental and social justice organization Fern issued a failing grade, in 2017, to Virgin’s offset credits for forest conservation in Oddar Meanchey, Cambodia. An investigation found that nearly half of the forest that was supposed to be protected had been clear-cut. Fern’s Julia Christian told the Phnom Penh Post those carbon credits “are bogus—they are based on emissions savings that never happened, because the forest was destroyed, not protected.”

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https://inthesetimes.com/article/21995/6-corporate-climate-schemes-bp-cargill-fedex-virgin-adm-bunge-fiji