Large companies and carbon neutrality: regrettable “greenwashing”

In the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement (2015), international banks and large corporations had multiplied promises to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century. We have to recognize today that we are still a long way from words to action. This is what emerges from a survey published yesterday by the New Climate Institute, which after scrutinizing the climate strategy of 24 major global companies shows how these commitments are rarely carried out. The extent of this greenwashing (“greenwashing”) in the economic world has even worried the UN, whose Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, at the last COP in Egypt, castigated in harsh terms “this attempt at toxic concealment” of companies that “could knock the world off the climate cliff”.

It is not a question here of pointing the finger at this or that group. Simply to take seriously what we are told. Especially since the stakes are high. Reducing our rate of carbon emissions, and therefore leaving the generations that come after us with a livable planet, will not be possible without companies, whose role is essential for the transition. But awareness remains slow in the economic world. It is true that this transition has a cost, particularly in a financial logic that leads to concern above all with production and growth. And that business leaders are not solely responsible. The transformation of our economic model will come from the joint action of three types of actors: companies therefore, but also governments, which can modify the standards, and above all citizens, who have this duty to ensure that the commitments are really followed by effects.

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