What does this say about how to understand the language of
climate politics? Moving forward, journalists—and citizens as well—should
recognize that and gas producers increasingly sound like climate advocates,
using the same words and phrases that call for the end of the fossil-fuel era. This
is their new greenwashing strategy. It is all the more important never to take
anyone’s words at face value, but to interpret them in the context of an entire
statement—whether an industry advertisement, a think-tank report, or a text
from UN climate talks—assessing that statement in relation to both the
latest climate science and actual industry investments. Propaganda
shouldn’t be amplified. It should be exposed.
Climate advocates can take a slightly different tack. If
fossil-fuel producers are appropriating the language of advocates for their
greenwashing, advocates can steal their language right back again. As Bill McKibben
said in
his commentary on COP28: the phrase “transition away from fossil
fuels” is now “a tool for activists to use henceforth.” No
longer are the hippies the only ones saying that the fossil fuel era must end.
The world’s nations have now publicly acknowledged that too, giving advocates
new legitimacy and power in “every discussion from now on—especially the
discussions about any further expansion of the fossil fuel energy,” as
McKibben put it.
Anyone who cares about the future can get even more targeted,
by grasping one little word out of the COP28 text as a rhetorical weapon
against fossil-fuel propaganda: the word “away.” That evocative word,
which describes leaving something behind, offers civil society and governments
a hard benchmark for both climate speech and climate action. Does that speech
and action sustain, justify, excuse, or promote fossil fuels? Or does it
transition, move, innovate, or legislate away from them? These questions
can be answered with a clarity that not even the phrase “phase out”
can provide. The text countries agreed on at COP28 may be a masterclass in
greenwashing, but it may also contain the seeds of its own undoing.