The Chaser Report - Australia Wins Greenwashing World Cup | Belinda Noble | Polly Hemming

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

Greenwashing makes the world go round. Charles talks with Belinda Noble and Polly Hemming on the best cases of greenwashing in Australia, and why carbon offsets are a scam. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. I'm Charles Foote. And today we have a very special episode all about greenwashing. To give us the download, to share the tea, I think that's how you said. We've got Belinda Noble, who is the founder of Com's Declare, which we'll get to in a sec, and Polly Hemming, who is, what's your title,

you're sort of something at the Australian Institute, you don't you? Yeah, something. I call myself, what others call me, a senior researcher in the climate and energy program. Yeah, I'm very fan. Very fancy, okay, right. So just to give this, the reason why we're doing this, a little bit of context, last week, Alex, a friend of the show,

and, well, actually, Chase her intern and me, went down to Melbourne and awarded the Commonwealth Bank, the Chaser Greenwashing Award of the Year for 2022 because it turned out that they had given $14 billion to fossil fuel projects over the last sort of six or seven years and, well, they'd loaned that sort of money. And yet, they still run things like that they're environmentally friendly and even they give you a little app to track your carbon

to make you feel guilty about all the carbon that you think. But nowhere on their app does they say they massively fund fossil fuel projects. So that's what we did. But then over the weekend, I was chatting to a friend who had liked that Commonwealth Bank thing that we did. And he said there's actually something even more egregious than that, which is that Ampole has done something with their petrol. They've done something very, very environmentally friendly with their petrol. Belinda, what have they done?

What's Ample up to it? Well, Ample has been advertising a carbon neutral petrol. And they've got a great Facebook ad which shows trees and has the word carbon neutral on it. And they claim in that Facebook post that they can offset all the emissions from their petrol and diesel for business customers for a price. And we complained about that ad to ad standards. That's the advertising regulator. And thanks to the miracle of self-regulation, that complaint was dismissed. Oh, right.

So they're allowed to call their petrol carbon. Now, just for the sake of absolute balance here, have they come up with a special formula for petrol that means that it doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere when you burn it? Is that what's happened here? So what they say is that, so just for context, like annually the emissions from Ampola are about 54. million tonnes a year.

The emissions from combusting their products, their petrol and their oil, is about 41 million tons a year. Ampole is in the same way that when you get on a plane and like tick that box saying I'm offsetting my flight or do you want to offset your flight, Ampole is offering its customers the opportunity to offset their petrol by purchasing carbon credits on their behalf. And to date, like as of as of now. Ampole is saying they've purchased about 84,000 carbon credits. Right.

Haven't necessarily, like, that sort of... So what you're saying is, you know, of the 41 million tons, they've done 84,000, which means only 40,900 and 60 to go, million to go. And then it'll be carbon neutral, like they're at six. Well, they haven't actually, there's sort of, without getting too technical, like you actually have to effectively cancel out a carbon offset when you buy it, like you sort of tick it off so no one else can use it.

So they haven't necessarily cancelled them all out. They've just purchased them in anticipation of their customers saying, yes, we do want to offset our fuel. So that's how they do it. The other thing that they've done is that they've said, look, this is legit. We've been certified by the Australian government. The Australian government, through its carbon-neutral certification project, has said,

yes, this is a legitimate carbon-neutral product. What the fuck? This is just like, this is, that is not true. I'll hand back over to Belinda, but this is, like, you're talking about, Ampole is the tip of the iceberg with this stuff. Like in Australia, a gas company can say it is a carbon-neutral organisation for offsetting its offices and it is certified by the Australian government. Well, actually, funny you should say that, because that was the subject of the first, the inaugural Chaser Greenwashing Award, which was last year, which is that NAB, the Bank, National Australia Bank, they loaned $500 million to the port of Newcastle, which by law is only allowed to export coal.

It's actually, I think, the biggest coal port, certainly one of the biggest coal ports in the Southern Hemisphere. and the reason why that was called a sustainability loan and actually got like environmental credentials from the NAB was because they put on solar panels. The loan was to put solar panels on the top of the port of Newcastle. So there you go. Perfect. It's rampant.

But what's really interesting, Blinda, you should mention this. In the Netherlands, an almost identical complaint was made to add standards It's about Shell's carbon-neutral petrol, and Belinda, what was the outcome of that? So they made that complaint there pretty much on the same grounds that we made the complaint here against Ampol's carbon-neutral petrol, and that was upheld, and they were requested to take the ad down in the Netherlands. Europe's a lot further ahead on this than we are. I think the problem, though, there was that Shell didn't go and get a certification from

the Australian government to say that their gas was going to. carbon neutral. If they'd done that, then it would have been all over. Actually, like, I don't know if you're being flippant, but that's true. So that was called, like they said, it was greenwash. It's not physically possible to compensate by planting a few trees for geological carbon. Stop using this term. Shell then doubled down and said, okay, well, we won't use carbon neutral, use compensation. And they made a complaint again to add standards. It was upheld. can't use compensation. But you're right, like these claims being made internationally,

and they're everywhere, but they're self-made or they're made according to some like little dinky voluntary framework saying, yeah, we'll give you a stamp of approval. Again, it's that self-regulation thing. Australia is pretty unique in that it's the government rubber stamping these claims. I think it's quite likely that had it had some sort of government endorsement that the shell case might have turned out quite differently. So just like, and I know this might be just jumping to conclusions here, but why do I just get the sense that possibly that government certification scheme was set up under the previous government?

Is that what happened? Wasn't set up under the previous government? So it's actually been running for quite a while. It's endured a number of governments, but it really kind of went next level under the coal. So that's when you started to see gas companies, petrol, jet fuel, you can certify. But that's good. You're a communist, don't you?

I mean, that's the nationalisation of greenwashing. That's one of our strategic industries. We are world class. Like, are you sort of talking down Australia and its commitment to greenwashing? No. Because it sounds like we are top. I think Australia is, like, literally, state-sponsored greenwash. Australia is leading the world in this field, like with begrudging respect.

For decades, we have greenwashed our accounting, like our fossil fuel expansion. I went to Oxford a couple of weeks ago, offset my flights for that. Oh, so suddenly offsetting is all right. I harbour a lot of guilt and I leave myself open when I acknowledge that I went overseas. But people at this conference in Oxford were going, oh, shit, I didn't realize how. bad it was over there like you have this entire policy framework dedicated to carbon neutral claims by fossil fuel companies but but also Australia is unique in that we generate the carbon credits in Australia that industry can use so you've got two

arms of government like one certifying the offsets and by Ampol and Ampol is using credits that are currently under review because they've been exposed to be so dodgy and then we give it at like a next level then we certify the the accounting so yeah no i like full respect to australia we do this so well so belinda let's just talk about offsets for a moment like they they're just bullshit aren't that like isn't the whole point that you got the petrol you burn it you can't really unburn it's like i don't know being a murderer and then offset, like going, okay, well, I've murdered somebody, but I went and I helped an old person cross the road. So therefore, you know, the bad deed that I did yesterday.

Avoided death, actually, no, that's how offsetting. It's a bit like Catholicism, isn't it? You do a bad deed, then you make up for it with the good deed. Well, it's like infidelity, you know, if you, you, you know, if you, you chew on your wife and then perhaps buying her flowers afterwards is, is the offset. And should we, seeing as Australia is such a world leader in this, should we be extending it beyond carbon to all aspects of morality? But maybe we just lean in to that's who we are as a nation. I think we've done that.

I mean, certainly the federal government's positive energy campaign was leaning in in terms of greenwashing. And we actually awarded that a community disservice award for greenwashing, which was pretty good. Yeah, and in terms of ad standards and how they regulate claims about offsets, in dismissing the complaint about the Ample Carbon Neutral Petrol, they actually said that they don't rule about whether offsets are effective or not.

That's not their job. Their job is only to rule whether an average person would be deceived by that ad. So the less the audience knows about offsets, then the less likely they are to be deceived, therefore ignorance is the best policy there. In fairness, though, like 95% of ads rely on ignorance. You're talking about the catastrophic collapse of the entire advertising industry. You'd have to hold people to sort of knowledgeable.

Well, yeah, certainly. But I think green watching is a bit more serious. I mean, an EU study found they did a sweep of websites and found that 42% of green claims were dodgy. So we're really flapping around in a whole world of greenwashing bullshit at the moment. But what do we do? So say we wanted to save the planet from extinction and disaster, don't you need offsets to sort of offset some of our bad behaviour?

Things like, sure, you know, so most offsets come from, either renewable energy, great, sure, they're avoiding emissions elsewhere, or increasingly they come from not planting trees, which is a really good activity, but from not cutting down trees. So you were talking about not killing an old person. That's an avoided death, so that justifies your murder. Most of us it's come from avoided emissions, so you don't cut down trees that you um so wait a minute i'm generating i'm generating offsets right now because i'm not cutting down a tree you're not cutting down a tree yeah and and you're right like that counterfactual it's really hard to prove yeah it's really hard for me to say to you charles you were never going to cut down

that or actually it's really i know but i was yeah exactly i was literally you actually just stopped me like i was about to cut down a tree and then our producer lockland said hey come on you've got to do an interview. The Chaser Report, news you know you can't trust. So how much money can I sell? Oh, shitload. I'll get to that so much. People are making millions from this.

But the issue is, okay, it's great to not cut down trees, it's great to plant trees, it's great to have renewable energy. The issue is that when those activities are used to justify burning more fossil fuels, because, you know, in the case of someone like Ampole, they can now say they're a climate leader and they're literally promoted by the government as a progressive climate leader. But all they're doing is offsetting that tiny proportion of their emissions. But now on their website, they can have trees and they can have a green stamp and they're getting social licence.

So consumers and investors think, well, it can't be all bad. Like maybe Ampole is leading on climate, you know, in the same way that they've installed like five EV charges or something, they can say, oh, we're transitioning to be a renewable company. but you look at their projections, you look at what they're actually doing at their actual climate plans, they're taking account, you know, broadly, they're taking responsibility or saying we're going to reduce about 2% of our emissions all up. And so it's just part of that misleading claims. Like actually, no, I think the way they're being used now is that offsets give social licence to increasing emissions. So if you didn't even have offsets as a concept or a product,

then it would expose these companies who are using them for nefarious means a lot more. You know, they wouldn't have that fig leaf to hide behind. And you'd say, well, Ample, what are you doing to reduce emissions? Well, because I've got a friend who is doing a sequestration project in California, right, which where you go. So that's about capturing carbon usually at the source and then pumping it into the ground. And I know that there's a lot of, I don't think it's ever actually happened anywhere successfully, right? But aside from that, what interested me was that the government in California,

all their inputs, if they use gas to run their sequestration project, then they can't offset that with anything. That's just counted as, oh, this creates carbon. Like, they're really strict on these projects so that they're genuinely, you know got to reduce carbon to actually be carbon we don't seem to be on that same wavelength like it seems here offsets are the equivalent of literally burying like yeah i suppose what i'm saying is it's the perfect like offsets are the perfect crime here in australia aren't they yeah we have no requirement from any business at all to to reduce offsets are synonymous with

reduction and even under this won't go into it like we've got this thing the safeguard mechanism which is a key part of the government's climate policy that's meant to tackle emissions from our biggest emitting industries, although they only have to offset, they don't have to reduce. But, I mean, something interesting about carbon capture and storage, like that geological sequestration, the coalition actually developed a way of generating offsets from CCS, carbon capture and storage, attached to gas developments.

Yeah, I can go into it if you want, but the interesting thing was that Angus Taylor then said, this carbon credit method, CCS being able to generate carbon offsets to sell to polluting industry will help the gas industry scale up in Australia. So you have this perverse situation where a gas company extracting gas out of the ground captures some of its reservoir CO2, buries that theoretically, it doesn't work, gets carbon credits for doing that while producing its gas, sells those carbon credits to another gas company who uses it to offset its emissions.

So you can have a gas company saying it's carbon neutral on the basis it's bought carbon offsets from another gas company for producing gas. Like, that's where we're at in Australia. I think it sounds like you're in the wrong side. Like, because you know how it all works. Why not just make some money out of it rather than... Ah, I think about it sometimes. Yeah.

So what I was promised. My friend said, they've got tons of great examples of greenwashing. This is all getting depressing. Can I just get some more funny, you know? Happy examples. Yeah, greenwashing examples. Yeah, so the Glenn Corr's latest brand campaign, we've also made a complaint about to add standards.

Why? Add standards, you just said add standards of bullshit. Why bother? Well, that's true. There has been 50 complaints made to add standards It's under the environmental code, and only one has been upheld. Oh, what was that? Yeah, it was probably against Greenpeace or something.

It was Australian gas networks, and the mistake that they made is that they had a picture of a guy making pasture on a gas stove right. He's making his bolognese, and the tagline over that was greener than anything you're cooking tonight, and the reason that was upheld was because they said greener than anything, right? So normally they just say clean or cleaner or green or greener. But because they said greener than anything... It could have been paint. It could have been green paint.

It could have been green vegetables in the Spag Bowl, you know? And we can't test how many vegetables are in the Spag Bowl. So, yeah, that ad got pulled. That's the only one. But meanwhile, Glencore, which is, of course, is the world's largest coal exporter of thermal coal, has a lovely campaign at the moment. which doesn't show coal. It shows EVs, wind turbines, forests,

and talks about advancing everyday life. So we've complained that, yeah, that's misleading the public into thinking that Glencore is a clean energy company, but naturally that will be dismissed because as long as the public doesn't know what Glencore does, then it's not a problem for the advertising world.

And, yeah, customers are successfully being protected from the facts by this advertising self-regulation. Are you sure that Glingor wasn't showing all the things that they hate? Like it was almost sort of like a, you know, he's a forest. Let's cut it down. Yeah, there was no sort of koalas or, you know, native wildlife or anything. Get it in the neck. The koalas need to get it in the neck.

Coming for you. Well, if you had an accurate fossil fuel ad, it would have dead koalas in it, let's be honest. Glencore, I remember, because we got into trouble with the Glenn Corps, I got served with defamation notices from their sort of American Legal Council because we run some anti-ads against Glencore about 10 years ago. And that was because they were running slaves. Like, I don't know whether they do it anymore, but they, in, like, Southern Africa, they used to run slaves.

I mean, that's within our lifetimes. They offset those slaves by giving people in Australia in offices a lot of money. Yeah, that's right. Their executives earn a lot of money down in Melbourne. Actually, it probably does balance out, yeah. On average, those slaves get paid quite well across the company. Yeah, it probably does. Well, that's good.

So Glingor. Anyone else? Have we got one last example? Oh, look, my personal favourite was the Santos Tour Down Under video. So Santos, which is the gas company, sponsors the Tour and Undercycling event in South Australia. And that had pictures of people standing next to bicycles, including a pregnant woman standing next to bicycles,

talking about how using gas results in more blue skies and cleaner air. Right. Well, and did they get in trouble for saying that? No, no, that was absolutely fine. Is it because the gas, the methane, pushes all the clouds out of the way so that you actually literally get bluer skies. Yeah, I don't know.

Or the gas creates this sort of hallucinogenic effect as you breathe it in. Oh, the blue is so blue. That's a really blue blue today. Maybe the community panel at Ad Standards has been having some of their gas along with the Reiki and the crystals or whatever or the micro-dosing

or whatever it is that they use to make these judgments. Do you have a list of these? Because this sounds hilarious. Like, is there a website we can go to to see all these egregious examples? We do list some of them on our website, comstoclair.org. And we also have a campaign called Fossil Ad Ban, where we're trying to get legislation to ban fossil fuel ads because self-regulation hasn't worked and will not work.

So we're trying to get tobacco-style legislation to ban fossil fuel ads and sponsorship. So that's fossil adband.org. That's a great idea because that was the key to getting rid of tobacco was they started off with the ad bands and then suddenly the media aren't getting money from these companies. Then suddenly they don't need to take. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, when the Australian's not getting, you know, money for 16 full-page liftouts

from the oil and gas lobby, perhaps their tune might change. Yeah, okay. So what was the name of that website again? That's a fossiladband.org. So anyone can go there and write an email to their local politicians asking for fossil fuel ads to be banned. Linda, what is Com's Declare? So we're a group of 360 plus people that work in communications and marketing and PR who advocate for climate action in those industries.

So we started sort of doing surveys and so forth of the agencies. We have a thing called the F list where we name and shame agencies that work with fossil fuel clients, which is on our website. And then last year we started the fossil ad ban campaign because we gave up talking and we've only got seven years to half a mission. So it's legislative action is required. And Polly, you're on that committee, are you, the 300 people, come to declare it? Yeah, yeah.

So I try and sort of help out where I can. The Australia Institutes are public policy think tanks, so I look at the stuff. like the state-sponsored Greenwash and our regulators that, actual regulators, not add standards, who should be addressing Greenwash. And to be fair, are cracking down on it. But so I sort of come at it from the public policy

and research perspective that sort of, I hope, helps inform Belinda's work. And then Belinda is sort of the rat bag representing civil society and industry and stuff that's pushing from the other side. as well. So actually the work, you are saying, you know, what's the point? The work that she's doing is incredibly important because, yes, ad standards needs to change its standards, like they're clearly behind the rest of the world. And seemingly has very low climate literacy, I'd say,

but, you know, we have regulators in Australia like ASIC and the ACCC and APRA who have committed to cracking down on greenwashing in a regulatory sense. What's really hard to see is how they'll be successful when, you know, it's other arms of government that are sanctioning the greenwash. So you sort of have this standoff here. So it's really important that Belinda's organisation is kind of holding those regulators and organisations like Ad Standards to announce, to account, sorry, and making noise and being ultra-annoying, basically.

It sounds like Ed Standards Australia is a complete joke and needs to be replaced with a proper government independent arm that doesn't sell regularised. I don't know. That seems like they're doing a fine. job, if it was a government organization. If it was a government regulator, I don't think things would be vastly different. Oh, really? Oh, okay, yeah, right, okay.

But then they need real teeth. They need to not be, like, it's sort of like going, it's like the cops going, investigating themselves for corruption, isn't it? Like, it's the same thing. This sort of, you know, oh, let's investigate ourselves. Never works in any industry. No, self-regulation doesn't work. Except the satire industry, I think.

The latest investigation into the chaser was cleared very much by the chaser. I was going to say Liz Trost is probably going to look for a job soon. Maybe she can come in and sort out our standards. Well, she's done such a good job as promised. Thank you very much, Polly and Belinda. That was wonderful. And that website again was Fossiladband.org. Yeah, and Polly, I hope you enjoy going around the world, burning all those fossil fuels.

Yeah, I'm on a kintiki tour to I beat the next week just to tell everyone how bad a show there is. For work. Yeah, for work, for work. Our gear is from road microphones, and we are part of the ACASTCRETA network. Catch you tomorrow.