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”.
Both senses imply the removal of a stain, and “greenwash” was coined on analogy with “whitewash”, the figurative use of which – to mean the erasure of flaws – is first attributed to the Tory leader Viscount Bolingbroke in 1730. Observers who recall David Cameron’s promise to run the “greenest government ever”, as well as Boris Johnson’s current claim that getting to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 will be a top priority if he wins the election, might suppose that Bolingbroke’s modern heirs are also leaders in greenwashing.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
