Global effort to police ‘greenwashing’ begins to take shape

Companies have been calculating their carbon footprints since the early 2000s and just over one in three of the world's 2,000 largest public corporations have now set goals to become carbon neutral or emissions-free by mid-century or sooner.

Even Saudi Aramco - the world's biggest oil major - has pledged to achieve "operational net-zero" carbon emissions by 2050, just days before the United Nations climate summit last year.

But with such self-set deadlines still a long way off and varying definitions of what going "net-zero" actually means for a company, there is currently no global uniform standard for how businesses disclose their carbon emissions.
Indeed, many companies have been accused of "greenwashing," or simply making public pledges that are not matched by their actual climate-related actions.

"Greenwashing is growing and it will continue to grow as long as there are no standards that clarify who does what exactly," said Emmanuel Faber, head of the International Sustainability Standards Board, set up last year and tasked with drafting a universal climate reporting standard for companies.
According to the NGO Carbon Market Watch, a number of multinationals only disclose a tiny fraction of their overall emissions.
It said that Saudi Aramco resorted to the widely used trick of promising to reach net-zero only for its "operational" carbon emissions.

That essentially means greenhouse gas emissions that are produced directly by the industrial sites it owns, but not the vast majority of "indirect" CO2 emissions produced by burning the oil it sells to clients, in their cars, power plants and furnaces.

For Thomas Koch Blank, an expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute, greenwashing has become "blatant" at some...