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This term once meant money laundering on behalf of drug cartels, before it became shorthand for environmental propaganda
This week the TCI hedge fund announced that it would dump investments in companies that refused to disclose their carbon emissions and did not provide a plan for their reduction. And it accused fund manager BlackRock of “greenwash” for not requiring the same. Well, everybody loves green things and washing, so why is a combination of them bad?
As a noun, “greenwash” has since 1987 meant commercial propaganda that propagates an environmentally virtuous public image – such as ads for oil companies featuring cute wildlife. Before that, the verb “greenwashing” was sometimes used as a term for money laundering on behalf of drug cartels, because the US dollars being laundered were “greenbacks”. Continue reading...