As climate talk turns to climate silence, Bjorn Lomborg warns in the Telegraph that green-hushing is just the latest gimmick – unless it leads to real change. Here’s an excerpt:
After years of bragging about their climate policies, multinational businesses and international organisations are now going silent about their sustainability goals. They are no longer green-washing but “green-hushing”. Yet, green targets are bad for business and a terrible way to help the world. These actors shouldn’t just be quieter about them. They should stop this waste.
Perhaps the most blatantly self-defeating attempt to go green was by the fossil fuel industry. Back in 2020, BP made the extraordinary promise to slash oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, boost renewable energy generation twentyfold, and even become a Net Zero energy company. Since then, it has performed the worst among big oil, and two CEOs later, BP has now abandoned its green promises and recommitted to fossil fuel. Other big western oil companies are also returning to their roots – while state-owned oil giants like Saudi Aramco, Sinopec, Petrobras and Rosneft never made dramatic green promises in the first place.
These green pledges were always silly. Humanity has spent trillions on climate policy, but more than four-fifths of global energy is still supplied by fossil fuels. Over the past half-century, fossil fuel energy has more than doubled, with 2023 again setting a new record. Consumers and businesses want more energy. It is a foolish company that declares it will supply less. …
Yet, there are worrying signs that many companies are only changing their language, not their actions. A recent global survey of 1,400 corporate executives found that 58% of companies “are deliberately planning to decrease their level of external communications” about climate policies, even though most intend to spend even more on climate policies than before. In other words, for many companies greenhushing amounts to going greener, while lying about it by omission. Shareholders need to ask hard questions. …
Pivoting on language is easy. The real test is whether organisations like the World Bank and African Development Bank will dump poor ideas like ringfenced funds for climate mitigation. They need to return to the far-less glamorous basics: spending that improves nutrition for children; investment in agricultural research and development; tuberculosis eradication; improved learning outcomes for pupils.
The time for bad, green promises is over. For years, corporate and international organisation leaders were cheered loudly in Davos and beyond for promising to do silly, inefficient things. Now, fear of being called out by the Trump Administration appears to be a powerful motivator. But if they are only greenhushing, then shareholders need to make sure companies actually return to their core purpose. Similarly, policymakers in the UK and abroad must use their own shareholding power to get development banks back to actually helping the world’s poor.
Worth reading in full.
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No wish to be overly critical, but the same Dr Lomborg who only two weeks ago was reported in the Daily Sceptic as preaching “green innovation”.
Do us all a favour please, and publicly condemn the “climate emergency” for the voodoo pseudoscience and economic con-trick it blatantly is.
Lomberg is a moderate i think. He does not buy into a lot of the lunacy and stupidity because it is unrealistic technology and makes the point that we need to keep countries rich. He also makes the point we should spend money on sea defences to combat sea level rises (which has been happening to some degree for well over a century). But he makes more of an economic argument and not scientific argument. he his perhaps not a very good climate scientist. So not all bad I think.
Understood – in effect, fighting on ground of Enemy’s choosing.
Where have the sea levels been rising? All the coastline I am familiar with is exactly there where plenty of photographic evidence says it was 100 years ago.
I am aware coastlines change. Pangaea, after all. But there seems to be plenty of evidence that when coastlines change, it is because the crust rises and falls, or because of localised erosion owing to wave action.
good question, and very hard to measure as land can rise and sink. Anyway i think it is lower than in medieval times eg Beaumaris in North Wales. Also Harlech, but mostly silting from the estuary. but has risen since the mid 19th century. but it complicated by places like the uk where Scotland is rising and England is sinking.
Precisely. What does “sea level” even mean? Is there a “correct sea level”?
The sea level on one end of the Panama Canal is very different from that at the other end.
The land around the northern extent of the Baltic Sea is also rising now that the ice sheets have melted.
I think the contributor mistakes rising sea levels for the geological change that many countries with a coastline experience. This is a two fold experience, firstly the land is still shifting due to heave after the withdrawal of the ice age glacier fields. This unequal movement mostly sees land masses rise, but as one part rises, like a seesaw, the other side lowers, so for the British Isles the North is rising while the South is falling, causing sea levels to appear to rise, when of course they are not, it’s the land moving. Incredibly, this is exacerbated by the growth of towns with ever weightier buildings pressing down on the land. The other cause is plate tectonics, which can cause ocean floors to rise and land masses to fall, again giving the perception of sea levels changing
I explain that in the previous comment.
Cley next the Sea.
There are two large churches just 607 metres apart across a shallow valley. St Margaret’s in Newgate and St Mary the Virgin in Wiverton. The valley used to be a large sea inlet and the churches were many hours journey apart – now just a pleasant stroll. The sea coast is now 2.7km away.
Land level rising or land reclamation and silting up of harbours in one place is offset by erosion and inundation in others.
A pleasant place for a holiday. I recommend the Wiverton Bell and the Three Swallows (Newgate) pubs/restaurants.
Yes. Netherlands, too. So many people I know think that the Netherlands are being slowly flooded because of man-made climate change. These days I just laugh.
I would agree with you on this M A k. So called rising sea level is largely bluster.
😀😀😀
“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
There is no point being “moderate” when the policy errors are so destructive.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/the-ghost-of-maurice-strong-haunts-canada-with-mark-carney-technocracy
I read this article earlier today which concentrates on Mark Carnage Carney. It certainly provides useful background information on the very destructive impact this POS has had over many years. The climate crap is central to all that is happening.
Worth a read. Courtesy of UK Column. Author Matthew Ehret.
“The Green Bankers Climate Compact which Carney pioneered would ensure that companies that are considered ‘dirty’ would never receive loans from banks, and any insurance they received would come at impossibly high premiums as punishment for their climate-offending ways. As a shining role model for ‘good green behaviour’, Carney has cited that his former employer Goldman Sachs has already ruled out any future financing for oil drilling, thermal coal projects, or Arctic development.
In his paper “EU Taxonomy Is Binary – We Need 50 Shades of Green”, Carney stated that all dirty (brown) companies with poor climate grades will either not receive loans or receive loans at such high levels of interest that they will be artificially bankrupted (taxing polluters to death).
As Carney said in September 2019, ‘Firms that anticipate these developments will be rewarded handsomely. Those that don’t will cease to exist’ [emphasis added].”
I wonder why the article was led with a photograph of steam from cooling towers at a hydrocarbon powered generating station.
It doesn’t matter the money has already starting shifting it started a year ago and has accelerated. Doesn’t matter what this or that person thinks there is no going against the market.Disnivestment on a mass scale can only mean one thing. Governments will remain aligned through sheer inertia but the inertia is quickly broken when it needs to be. This really is a case of sit by the river long enough and you will see the heads of your enemies come floating by.