Drowning in Greenwash

November, 2015. A newly elected Canadian prime minister took to the floor of the Paris Climate Summit and proclaimed "Canada's back."  The climate pariah, Stephen Harper, had been vanquished. Canada would again change direction.  Yeah, right.

The Paris summit was notable for the remarkable agreement that global heating must be limited to not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. We were all on the same page.

In attendance was the then head of Germany's Potsdam Institute, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. A reporter asked him if the 1.5 C target was achievable. He said yes but it would require the "induced implosion" of the fossil energy giants. Governments would have to put down the oil and gas and coal giants and rapidly transition to clean energy alternatives. Some cast it as the Marshall Plan for the 21st century. Of course, nothing of the sort has happened.

A new analysis suggests that the fossil fuel industries' claim to be transititioning to clean energy is greenwashing, a polite term for horse shit.

“Until there is very concrete progress, we have every reason to be very sceptical about claims to be moving in a green direction,” said Prof Gregory Trencher, at Kyoto University in Japan, who worked with Mei Li and Jusen Asuka at Tohoku University.

“If they were moving away from fossil fuels we would expect to see, for example, declines in exploration activity, fossil fuel production, and sales and profit from fossil fuels,” he said. “But if anything, we find evidence of the reverse happening.”

“Recent pledges look very nice and they’re getting a lot of people excited, but we have to put these in the context of company history of actions,” Trencher said. “It’s like a very naughty schoolboy telling the teacher ‘I promise to do all my homework next week’, but the student has never worked hard.”

Schellnhuber was right. Governments have to shut down the fossil fuel giants but they won't. That goes for our own Mr. Trudeau with his preposterously overbudget pipeline.