Greenwashing

Environmentalists have a shaky relationship with corporations. Corporations are the biggest, most powerful, most unified force fighting to destroy the environment. Business gets a lot cheaper when you can just dump your waste in the creek, as it were.

Corporations have a shaky relationship with environmentalists. Corporations like the environmentalist seal of approval because it gives them good PR. But environmentalists demand that corporations actually do something good for the environment before getting support.

This is where the concept of "greenwashing" comes in. To whitewash a problem means to do something very superficial that makes everything seem better without solving anything. To greenwash is to do something superficial to make yourself appear environmentally responsible without putting anything behind it.

A classic example of greenwashing is so-called "clean coal".

This ad from GE last year is disgusting on a number of levels, not least of which is that it combines a folk song about the horrendous exploitation of coal miners over the last couple centuries with Zoolander-style models strutting around. All for the sake of a "coal is great" message. But the real issue here is portraying coal as clean. Granted, there are ways to filter out some of the most disgusting particulate burn-off (aka soot) that coal plants generate, but they still generate huge amounts of CO2. It might be possible to have cleanER coal, there will never be any such thing as clean coal.

This morning, evil energy giant TXU, which had been aggressively trying to build more coal power plants without even pretending to make them clean, has been bought out. Not only that, but the new owners are pledging to stop building (so many) coal plants. Not only that, but they are also pledging to support government regulations capping CO2 emissions!

The head of one of the equity firms involved is also on the board of the World Wildlife Fund. So someone in the process has an environmental conscious, which pretty much explains why the deal worked out as it did.

Do we need to worry that this deal is just greenwashing? TXU was originally going to be building 11 coal plants, and now they're scaling it back to 3. That's cool and all, because it's a big reduction. But if it's a bad idea to build 11 new particulate-spewing, climate destroying power plants, why is it still a good idea to build 3?

In the end, I don't think this deal is greenwashing. It's not as great as it would be if environmentalists conceived and executed it from start to finish, but it's tremendous progress. The interests behind this have involved more people, and made more serious commitments, than they would have if they didn't mean it. And, as the Post article quotes an anonymous source saying, getting a big energy concern like TXU to do this may go a long way to changing a lot of minds among traditional opponents of the environment.

Update - 2/27:
The Christian Science Monitor has an article today pointing up the increased relevance of environmental costs for Wall Street. I take this as partial confirmation that the TXU deal is more than simple greenwashing.

Update 2 - 2/27:
Yes, I'm aware that the GE video is strikingly similar to this idiotic (hot?) techno video from several years ago: