By David Suzuki

I was recently in San Jose, California, to speak at the Third Annual West Coast Green Conference. It was a forum to display programs and products that are leading the green revolution. I was impressed by the number of booths (several Canadian) in the cavernous building.

Everything was “green” this and “eco” that, and there were a lot of exciting new products, for sure. But there was also a lot of “greenwashing”; that is, businesses bragging about some product or something they’ve done that seems green without a real commitment to what being green means.

Way back when the environment was in vogue in the late ’80s, Procter & Gamble put on a show of being green by bringing out a reusable plastic shell to put plastic bags of detergent in, yet their big revenues came from Pampers, disposable paper diapers. That to me was greenwashing.

When scientists first raised concerns about climate change in the late ’80s, fossil-fuel companies mounted a campaign of disinformation, setting up websites proclaiming it was “junk science” and sponsoring skeptics who also denied the science. One of the major contributors to that campaign was Exxon Mobil, which now has ads on CNN promoting research the company is doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without ever saying that human use of fossil fuels is affecting climate. That is greenwashing of the most blatant kind. I believe that future generations will look on the kind of deliberate confusion put out by companies like Exxon Mobil as an intergenerational crime.

At the conference in San Jose, Nobel Peace Prize winner and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore said companies that promulgate the notion that human-induced climate change is not real are committing “fraud”. I couldn’t agree more.