Canadians are pretty good at doing green laundry. Let's work with that...
There are constructive ways of building greenwashing regulations that account for critical changes in the relationships between people and their energy systems
Been thinking lately about my new book: Fifty Shades of Green: What Colour is Your Mental Wash?
It’s based a simple psychology premise: colours are tremendously emotive. And greenwashing as a notion is powerfully polarizing. The “greens” at each end of the perspective spectrum are wildly different, with a multitude of shades in between – particularly when the oil and gas sector is in the frame.
But we rarely drill deeper into greenwashing “greenness” to probe how varying shades affect people in different times and contexts in their relationship to climate change and the environment.
Put another way: “green” is not an absolute – one person’s lime green is another person’s emerald green. There is no universally accepted “green absolute”, despite what regulators and activists might believe.
My thinking lately has been shaped by recent changes to Canada’s Competition Act designed to tighten greenwashing regulations, notionally to ensure competitiveness prevails in the marketplace. The changes weren’t specific to “oil and gas” – my industry of employment – per se, but the sector is a good proxy for assessing, in the interests of sound public policy, how people process “greenwashing” as a socio-political market construct.
I believe they think in shades. Shades suitable for particular contexts.
Those shadings of green – some subtle, some stark – will in large measure be critical drivers in a decarbonizing energy sector evolution over the next years and decades. That will come as the consuming public gets increasingly drawn into critical decision dynamics at the policy nexus of energy and environmental security and stability.
Energy entitlement and an “absence of awareness” will disappear.
I’m fitting that “psychology of shades” thinking into my own three-element framework for anticipating and monitoring energy systems change – and being able, where possible, to contribute constructively to the difficult “choice making” that will become even more apparent in everyday life than it already is.
The framework is under development and so still fairly rough, but here are its conceptual foundations.
§ Permissions to Produce
o Social license to operate is dead as a notion. “Permissions to Produce” offers a different analytical approach to two-way engagement, based on an energy-consuming public far more literate on energy fundamentals and a sector simultaneously far more attuned to consultation efficacy. In a greenwashing context, that ought to mean being better able to distinguish between spurious and credible claims and energy industry players more appreciative of society’s boundary conditions for claiming progress. In turn, that means public permissions granted tacitly and explicitly based on context will become critical to sector evolution and change.
§ Conditions of Combustion
o Industry (for the most part) is resolutely focused on emissions reduction through various means. But you wouldn’t know that from the headlines that dominate daily discourse. “Conditions of Combustion” offers an analytical set of tools for assessing how those efforts are translating to public acceptance – along with concomitant changes in consumer consumption behaviours. Central to the toolkit is a set of measurement methodologies that make equal sense to society and energy producers and so “scorecards” recording progress over time will show significant improvement in quantifiable reductions. Put another way, when emissions reductions claims are made, consumers ought to be able to process those claims themselves because they’re familiar with the precepts of accepted methodologies.
§ Conundrums of Consumption
o This framework offers ways of analyzing how ordinary Canadians think about their relationship as consumers to the energy systems in which they’re embedded – and what is/is not acceptable in terms of “green” claims. “Conundrums of Consumption” is a way of tracking and thinking through changing transgenerational attitudes to energy use and how individuals and communities are adapting to change as they navigate critical choices at the nexus of energy security and stability of supply and environmental impact. At its core is unpacking how people will balance lifestyle versus environmental imperatives.
These three sub-frameworks do not operate independently. They’re intended to inform and play off each other and to work in the “messy middle” of Canadian society where most people live, work and play – and where there is the most potential for progressive critical mass creation.
The framework is part of the two-part submission I intend to make to the Competition Bureau call for public input, via which I hope to answer as many as possible of the questions to which regulators are seeking input. And I’m taking the Bureau up on its offer to post all submissions publicly on its website in the interests of getting input and feedback.
Through the input process, I hope to convey to regulators a better understanding of where the sector is on its environmental-impact journey and suggest why a more nuanced, less heavy-handed, approach, to greenwashing is in order – all the while enhancing the public’s right to a deception-free competitive marketplace.
The second part of my submission will be to answer directly the actual questions the Bureau has posed: Public consultation on Competition Act’s new greenwashing provisions (canada.ca)
Through those answers, I will provide a broad range of specific examples and case arguments on key progress fronts in terms of environment impact.
Canada has a great opportunity through this process to create a balanced regulatory system that not only ensures true greenwashing is called to task, but simultaneously a system via which progress (across all industries) is transparently measured and held to account – but one in which companies can explore new horizons without fear of persecution.
That means, of course, understanding that being “green” legitimately is contextual and contingent on circumstance.
Canadians are already doing mental green laundry loads every day. They’re pretty smart – and our regulatory frameworks should recognize and accommodate that intelligence.
In other words: they know how to sort laundry into the right colours.
Bill, thanks for the framework. It’s useful and pragmatic and it can help us have more powerful conversations about the energy future and choices we make.