Greenwashing

[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. [00:00:24] Speaker B: I'm your co host, Jaron, and I'm your other co host, Lonnie. [00:00:27] Speaker A: And today we're taking a look back at some of our recent interviews as part of the wrong direction mini series. [00:00:34] Speaker B: So far, we've covered three important topics, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and liquefied natural gas. And we've got a few more on the horizon. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Because these are such dense topics, we wanted to take this episode to process and discuss some of what we've heard and also give you a bit of a sneak peak into some extra episodes we'll be adding into the series. You can think of this as a halftime show of the wrong direction miniseries if you'd like. But before we get to that, Lonnie, can you share WEAC's mission? [00:01:04] Speaker B: WEAC's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation and sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices. [00:01:16] Speaker A: Cool. Thanks, Lonnie. So, like we mentioned, the last three episodes, we've talked about. We've talked about three key hydrogen, carbon captured storage, and liquefied natural gas, like Lonny said. And across those three topics, we wanted to take a little bit more time to pull out some of those really important themes and patterns that we noticed when we were listening to those interviews, things that we thought were worth highlighting and talking a little bit more about that really embodied what this whole wrong direction mini series is about. Right, Lonnie? [00:01:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think one of the main things that makes something a wrong direction, false solution is really this greenwashing aspect and false promises. We noticed that so far, that all of these technologies somehow perpetuate or increase the life of the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure. But they're all sold to us as a green way of going about something. I was thinking about, like, hydrogen, for example, having so many different colors, and one of them, like, a few of most of them are all really bad. Like, there's nothing. There's nothing good about them at all. And except for green hydrogen, which has the term green in it. Right. So to make it sound a little bit better. [00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And inherently in there, too, was like, the producing of the hydrogen, like, so many of those different colors that weren't the green one. Rely on actually using fossil fuels to produce the hydrogen, which makes no sense. It's like using a gas powered generator to charge a battery. It's like, okay, I get what you're doing here. But, like, it's kind of, it's kind of against the point. You know, it's a little, it's a. [00:03:01] Speaker B: Little ironic, and they get lumped in it all together. So when you talk about hydrogen, you don't necessarily know which one you're going to get. You might end up with this brown hydrogen. It's like powered by coal. And so, you know, it's, it's important that we recognize that there is some greenwashing going on here. [00:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think we've used this term greenwashing a little bit in some of the other interviews. I think maybe it's worth just taking a moment to really unpack. I think we've kind of gotten into it with examples, but really unpacking. What does greenwashing mean at its heart? You're essentially taking a technology that is not either environmentally friendly or sustainable or carbon neutral. Some of those key factors that we look at that are good for our planet and some dimensions often good in terms of their climate impact and taking solutions that are inherently not good at those things, not very carbon intensive, very damaging to ecosystems and framing them in a way that makes them seem. No, no, these are good. These are good for us. These are good for our planet, good for us. And just essentially, it's a lie. I mean, it's really, I can't remember who said it best, but it's really just essentially lying about what this technology is really built to do and what it delivers on. So. [00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And what it actually does. And does it actually do the thing that we need it to do? A lot of times they're not even really reducing any actual greenhouse gas emissions. And there's still the negative impact that goes on with kind of community colors and low income communities of color in low income communities. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So just sticking for a moment with this, you know, one of these main takeaways that essentially all these different false solutions, all these different technologies that we talked about so far are really leaning into these false promises in greenwashing. Like you said, Lonnie, a lot of it has to do with just perpetuating our reliance on pipelines and infrastructure that, like, really embody, really are a part of the fossil fuel industry. Right. All of our, you know, fossil fuel technologies for the most part, like liquefied natural gas and natural gas and oil. Like we think about pipelines and that as a technology, as a way to move these things to different places and some of these other technologies like hydrogen and carbon capture. So basically, everything we talked about so far it continues to use the fire planets. It's like really just trying to, it seems like trying to continue to build out that infrastructure and excuse to be like, well, we already have it, we should use it. Well, do we? Is that, is that true? Like, should we keep building this stuff out? Because then it's essentially saying, like, oh, we're, we're continuing to invest in it, so we're just gonna use it forever. Right? When do you stop? You know, exactly when you're digging up, you know, a hole in the ground. When you, when do you stop? Like, I've dug far enough. I need to make sure I can get out of this hole, you know? [00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And another piece to that, too, is this idea of focusing on managing carbon or carbon management. And so we're missing some of the other impacts of the other chemicals and co pollutants that are produced in these processes of trying to manage carbon. I even think that's just a funny term, carbon management. I don't know, it just makes me think of an office building structure. We're trying to manage our carbon to make sure it's not too unruly, but it can exist still. [00:06:24] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. That's really a key part of the concept of greenwashing. It's like, oh, yeah, reducing our emissions, you know. See, this technology is helping us reduce our emissions. Well, what's the cost of that? Like that, are you reducing the emissions, but you're producing way more toxic chemicals and, like, releasing those into the nearby community? Like, well, that's a bad trade off. I don't think that's worth it. That doesn't seem like it's really a net benefit. And so that's like a classic example of the greenwashing, you know, but I think a part of that, too. You know, a part of that same, that same thread of trade offs that are really just not worth it at the end of the day. Something that actually, Manny said in our conversation around hydrogen is that some of these technologies, they're being framed as having a reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions, but that's not necessarily true because some of these technologies require additional energy to actually produce them. In the case of hydrogen or in the case, I think we talked about this with carbon capture and storage and a little bit with liquefied natural gas, you know, the extra energy that's used to produce them or to move them to a different state. And essentially, you're just shifting. Like, this is, I think, how Manny said, it's a shell game, you know, you're shifting those emissions from the original use of the energy source to the production of it in a different way. Like, you're still at the end of the day producing those emissions. But you're saying that this technology, whether it's hydrogen or the quite natural gas, that it's less carbon intensive when it's like you're not capturing all the pieces of the process, it's a bit of a lie. [00:07:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good point too, of just like looking at the entire process from start to finish and realizing, you know, where you moving things as shifting things or as a part actually eliminating something at its actual source itself. That's a really good point. And I think one of the things that stuck out to me as well was I think Rochetta was talking a lot about the concept of not really benefiting from some of these energy sources, including like, liquefied natural gas, which she was talking about specifically. The United States has become an exporter of liquefied natural gas as much as we are using it. So we have so much of it and we're producing so much that we can actually export it and sell it around the world. And that's not good either. Now we're shipping and sending this horrible product to places that probably don't need it to begin with and probably were never going to be producing it. And so now we're shipping it around the world and it just kind of adds to that compound effect. [00:08:57] Speaker A: So one more thing that stood out to me on the this concept of like false promises, you know, greenwashing. It came actually out of our interview with Ana. We're talking about carbon capture and storage. And it actually goes against the perception that I had of carbon being captured and stored in the ground. You know, that was my understanding of what that technology was intended to do. You pull it out of the air, you pull it out of an industrial process, and it's supposed to like get stored and, you know, kept in the ground forever. Right? That was my understanding. But she instead, she was talking about the fact that most of the carbon, at least as of now, most of the carbon that's captured through industrial processes, through this carbon capture sequestration is actually used. The last part she was saying is like, carbon capture, storage and utilization, and it's actually used for enhanced oil recovery or pushing it into existing oil and gas reserves to get more of that out of the ground. And that's like really, really not green. That's like the farthest away you could get from being a sustainable technology. It's like literally, we're capturing that carbon and then we're going to use it to get more oil out of the ground. How could anyone hear that and be like, yep, that's what we want to do. That's moving us in a lessen, you know, carbon intensive, a better, more sustainable direction. Like, how is that, how is, how are they getting away with greenwashing that? [00:10:18] Speaker B: I think the problem is that no one's hearing that. No one hears that piece. That piece gets completely left out of the conversation. Again, we talked about it. Like you said, most people are here, we're taking carbon out of the atmosphere and we're taking it, we're moving carbon and we're pulling it to the ground. And that's kind of where their conversation stops. Right. Even some of the images that you see of like, carbon capture and how it works, you don't really get this other piece of like, oh, but we're all, but we're mostly just using it to produce more small oil and gas. [00:10:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:53] Speaker B: But what you do here is you hear, this is the final thing I'll say about this. Like, this promises piece. And one of the things that comes up all the time are jobs and quote, unquote, green jobs. I feel like this has been a political thing ever since the beginning of time of, you know, at all levels of government, politicians really pushing this idea of jobs and working and making sure pulling their county or their city or their state out of some type of economic crisis by making sure that people have ability to work. And so we promised this concept of a job to people within this space. And then now that we have this greenwashing, we can call them green jobs. And so it's like, wow, you're doing something better for the environment and you get to work. There's some economic benefit there. But there are so many downsides to a lot of these jobs, whether they come to fruition or nothing, they don't necessarily produce as many jobs as they say they're going to produce. Also, there's a lot of health impacts of working in some of these spaces as well. And so you have all those occupational hazards in addition to all of the community, the negative community impacts that are going on for those who have to have these facilities or these industries within their backyard. So the jobs thing, it just doesn't cut it. [00:12:03] Speaker A: Of course, one of the other things I think shifting towards one of the other themes that we picked out from our conversations across these different topics was how hydrogen carbon capture and storage liquefied natural gas. One of the ways they're being kind of portrayed, I think, under a sub umbrella of the greenwashing is that essentially they're being framed as providing this global benefit, we're helping to reduce emissions for the US or for whatever country, this global benefit of helping mitigate the impacts of climate change. But in that same thread, totally ignoring the local impacts of those technologies for almost always black and brown communities, low income communities. And that's literally going against the entire concept of environmental justice. And it's ironic because some of this, you know, some of the investments that are coming at the federal government being framed as, you know, intended to benefit environmental justice communities. So, like trying to square like, these investments with this larger threat of, like, we're helping to address climate change but also potentially negatively impacting environmental justice communities. [00:13:11] Speaker B: Right, exactly. And I think that actually connects to almost kind of, it connects to another theme that we saw as well when it comes to, like, those local impacts is there's this lack of engagement with these impacted communities. So anyone's going to get in these facilities or these technology that's going to be put in there, no one really knows when it's coming, what it actually is. The hydrogen hubs are a great example of that, where we don't know where they're actually going to be located. Nobody seems to know. But there's a lot of money and investment in these concepts of a hydrogen hub. And people get excited again, the promise of jobs and this is something green and this is this global impact that we're going to make. But really, no one really understands what that is. When there are attempts at community engagement, they're just inaccessible. You might have a flyer that goes out in English that says we're having a meeting on Zoom for 30 minutes explaining a hydrogen hub. Right. And that may be the entirety of what that company does as far as community engagement. And they can get away with that. They can say, we did community engagement and they have four or five people who are invested in this work, show up like people like us and rant, Rave and yell and all these things, but then they say, oh, well, we've had, we've talked to the community and that's it. Check Mark, and it's done. It's unfortunate. [00:14:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And I remember tally mentioning that even with the hydrogen hubs, that even community engagement from the federal government was oftentimes at times that were inconvenient and really inaccessible for the audience that they're trying to engage. You know, just really not well thought out in terms of who are we trying to reach. And how do we make sure these engagement opportunities are at a time and place that people can actually go to? And not just noon on a Wednesday when people are working always. [00:15:05] Speaker B: It's always noon like a Wednesday. It is one of those moments again. And also doing these things as webinars, not everyone has access to the Internet the same way or knows how to use them. There are a lot of communities where there's older folks that don't necessarily engage in this world of Zoom the way that we all have to in other ways. But, yeah. And it's just. It's kind of sad what people, what a lot of these industries and companies are calling in community engagement. [00:15:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, on that note, speaking of engagement and discussion, we actually, you know, in the spirit of our show, normally we're asking other people questions. This is a rare case that Lonnie and I actually get to ask each other questions. So just to help unpack and really dive into some of these topics that we discussed a little bit more, we had a couple discussion questions that we'll ask each other, but maybe you can even ask yourself at home. These are really interesting and really complex concepts tied into these false solutions. Hydrogen carbon capture and storage liquefied natural gas. I'm just going to keep repeating them both for my own benefit and as a reminder of the technology that we're talking about. But, yeah, we're going to dive into just a couple quick questions for each other. So maybe I'll go ahead and start with this first one for Lonnie. This will be a nice softball question because it's something we've actually talked about quite a bit in the three episodes. One thing that you mentioned a couple of times throughout each of those episodes is the idea of opportunity cost. And for the folks that aren't familiar with that, just the idea that when you're investing in one thing, there's an inherent loss and missed opportunity and not investing in another thing. So let's say I have $5 that I'm going to go buy some cotton candy. It's like, well, I could have spent that money on popcorn or something. Like, there's that inherent, like, cost of, like, oh, was that the better investment? Like, by spending my money on cotton candy, I didn't get popcorn. You know, so really simple. [00:16:54] Speaker B: But, you know, you mention dad analogies. [00:16:57] Speaker A: I just. I'm always thinking about food. That's right. But can you elaborate more on why you think that it's a major concern for federal decisions around energy investments? This concept of opportunity costs and where the money is actually going right now. [00:17:15] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the reason why I think that is so striking to me is because we, as people and taxpayers and our government, fund a lot of different things and subsidize a lot of things, usually to some type of benefit for the greater good. Right. The idea is that we want to move technology in a way that is supposed to help society and help folks. Right. If you think about medicine, certain vaccines, there's other technology that we've created within medicine, as well as a great example in science that we've invested in kind of as a country and as a government. So the government is not its own separate entity with its own money. It's literally us electing people and spending our money, and we're electing these people to spend our money and make those investments. Unfortunately, we've been subsidizing and making investments in fossil fuel industry for a very long time, and this is a trillion dollar industry globally. And why are we still subsidizing any of those and any of those, quote, unquote, innovations for technology if we're trying to move in a different direction and we're moving in the wrong direction, hence the name of this mini series. And we should be putting more investment in things like solar and wind, geothermal, like, we should be. We should be putting money into, like, making the most efficient, the best solar panels that possibly can exist. How do we make heat pumps more accessible? And that can be made in a more cost effective way? Like, these are the kind of things and technologies that we should be investing in. And instead, we're choosing to spend quite a bit of money on hydrogen, liquefied natural gas, and carbon capture and storage. And I think that's just kind of. It's one way to display your priorities, kind of like, kind of as a. As a country and where we want to move. But it's also. It's kind of our money. Like, why are you. I don't want my money invested in things that are harming not just, you know, the planet in general, but also communities of color. Right. We see the negative impacts that are going on for some folks and not seeing much of a benefit for anyone at all when it comes to these, except for a small handful of industries who make billions and billions of dollars more by investing in these technologies. [00:19:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right, Lonnie, hit me. I'm ready for my question. [00:19:33] Speaker B: Ready for your question? [00:19:34] Speaker A: Yes. Let's go. [00:19:35] Speaker B: Give me a softball question. I'm not gonna give you a softball question. Cause that's not how we roll over here. [00:19:41] Speaker A: Come at me. [00:19:41] Speaker B: All right, so something Ana raised in our conversation about the impact of basically these false solution technologies on environmental justice communities is the idea of techno utopianism. It is a mouthful and could be impact on its own, but it's the idea that technology will always come to save us. We see this all over the place in everyday lives. I'm pretty sure everyone sees this at every step of the way, that there's some form of technology that's there to save us. How do you feel like that concept overlaps with climate solutions like solar and wind? Should we count on these technologies to fix everything? Or are there other things we need to do as a society to address climate change and environmental justice? [00:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that is a good question, Lonnie. Thank you. And honestly, that's something that we, I think any true climate advocate, anyone living in an environmental justice community, is also thinking about, like, at the end of the day, as great as solar and wind technologies are, they still take up a lot of space. And anytime you have the conversation of how do we scale these up at the level that we need to meet our current energy demand and the way that we're using energy now, we would cover the whole planet. We would just cover every inch of the earth with wind and solar. And that's not the vision that anyone has, I think, for living on this planet. Right. So I think that's where you start to get into some of the conversations around reducing, like the classic triangle, reduce, reuse, recycle. It starts with reduce. You know, the first piece of that is reduce. Reducing our usage of energy, reducing our usage of products, reducing. Reducing all of that. Reducing our footprint, essentially, because you can't expect that you can continue this same level of energy use or same level of product use forever. It's just not sustainable in the true sense of the word. And at some point, we have to think about, first of all, just reducing our usage. So thinking about active transit, using walking, biking, other forms of commuting, getting around instead of single passenger vehicles or vehicles, cars, and then also the efficiency piece of it, how do we. I mean, that's getting a little bit into the technology side of things, but like this, how do we be a little bit more efficient about how we use those things and designing spaces? You know, thinking about homes, homes are a great example because they're. They use so much energy. They're one of the biggest sectors that you know of energy usage. Rather than trying to add all these technologies into these homes to shift where they're getting their energy from. I just make them more efficient, you know, like add better insulation, add better windows, like things that we already have. We don't need new fancy technology to do those things, make our homes more efficient and just more well designed to meet those needs and reduce our overall energy. We don't need smart house to come. [00:22:43] Speaker B: Smart house, deep cut. [00:22:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of where I think about that. And I think that the benefits that come from reducing our overall energy consumption and reducing use of certain products that maybe are really harmful to create and becoming more efficient like that will benefit everyone, especially, ideally, environmental justice communities as well. [00:23:05] Speaker B: I like that concept of pairing. We know we have some things that are proven renewable energy sources that are not problematic in the same way as some of the stuff we're talking about. But we also got to think about the other side of that equation. We need to reduce our consumption of some of these things as well. Yeah. [00:23:25] Speaker A: Which I know was hard. A lot of people feel like I have to stop using, like, you know, I can't drive everywhere, like, oh, I have to, like, do this thing, which I get, you know, it's not easy to reduce your impact when you get used to a certain comfort or a certain way of living, but, like, it also can be if we make it easy, you know. [00:23:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's high. Back to my invest. The question you asked me about investment as well is just, you know, always got to bring it back to me, you know, but it's the idea of. But there's ways that our government collectively can help support that cultural shift that we need. [00:23:59] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, one more question for you. Unlike other technologies we described, hydrogen actually has some potential uses in very limited contexts, like maritime shipping and steel production, which Manny got into a little bit that are potentially less climate intensive, produce less greenhouse gas emissions, aren't super harmful in the process. How do you feel the issue of greenwashing impacts the ability for communities to actually identify and advocate for the technologies with true potential versus some of the other problematic technologies, especially when there's nuance like that. You know, when you have a technology that has very specific use cases that are good, but a lot of them are not, like, how do you frame that to communities to actually be able to parse those out? [00:24:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think this keeps me up at night. You know, it's this idea that there's so much information out there. There's so many things being thrown at us every single day about so many different topics. How are we really trying to use what naturally kind of comes with this idea of categorizing, sorting things so that when we see certain things that we know it's good. Like it's a. I don't want to get into the whole biopsychology of how that works, but it kind of, we create these shortcuts in our brain, and unfortunately, those shortcuts can sometimes be flawed and obviously taken advantage of. So when you hear someone says something eco friendly or it's green or it's whatever the case may be, you don't feel like you need to think deeper, right? Because you've been told that this is green, so it must be good. I can move on with my life and think about other things. That's just like part of human survival in a lot of ways is being able to do that very quickly. Our brains are a computer in that way. Once we've stored a bunch of information, but our brains kind of store all of this information and then readily deploys it all so that way we can use it. So I think it's unfortunate when we have these technologies using these greenwashing tactics, because it does confuse people and it makes people then kind of, it goes into their political life, right. So we start voting for people who want these things or saying that these things are good, and we're, you know, we're making the assumption that, hey, green is green, can't be bad, right? So I'm gonna vote for this person because they're here for carbon capture, and carbon capture is supposed to be great. And that's what I'm getting from just what I'm taking in. And they don't really have the information to really kind of parse all of that nuance out into saying that, like, this is actually bad, but that is what we're here for, and that's what we're trying to do here. We act. And just also with this podcast, right, is educating people to be able to take a second to question things. I think that's the most important thing anyone can really do at this point, is just question it. You know, find your trusted organization, whether it be a local organization or a resource that tries to make these things a little bit more simple to understand and to really take a stance and really understand what's going on. Kind of behind the. Behind the curtain is our goal there is to get a peek behind that curtain that, you know, folks don't get a chance to really see. [00:27:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And also, at the end of the day, like, when in doubt, like, if you're, like, suspicious of a technology like honestly erring on the side of caution makes sense. You know, if you're, like, skeptical people, people should have to sell you on that technology. You shouldn't have to take it at face value. So being skeptical is good. Yeah, that's it for our questions. Just giving you a little bit of a light into what's coming the next few weeks. So we have one or two more specific topics that we'll be diving into under this umbrella of the wrong direction technologies that are considered false solutions or whatever term we're using now. I know Ana kind of made us question that term a little bit. One or two more topics, and then we'll start to wrap up this series talking about cumulative impacts, which is really kind of what it sounds like [email protected] hole of these technologies and how do you think about all the things that are impacting a community and then wrapping up thinking about this, just transition, the idea of moving in the right direction and what we want to see. So that's where we're headed. We've got just a couple more weeks, so if you made it this far, thanks very much for staying with us this long. And we've got a few more episodes to go. Again, you can treat this as our halftime show. Nice little reflection and commentary before we get into a few more things and start to wrap up the series. [00:28:29] Speaker B: Yeah, just people getting a chance to hear us for a change, you know, I feel special. I felt like a celebrity. You know, we were our interviews, we were our Adam guests. Well, with that, thanks for listening. Stay tuned for the next episode of wrong Direction miniseries coming out on August 26. If you liked this episode, make sure you rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show, we encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts and [email protected]. dot. [00:29:00] Speaker A: You can check out weact on Facebook at weact four EJ that's w e A C t f o r e J, Instagram x and Youtubej that's w e A c t number EJ. And check out our website, weact.org, for more information about environmental justice. [00:29:20] Speaker B: Until next time.