‘Greenwash’ is a serious problem, hard to diagnose and harder to disprove. Can the See Through Greenwash Sniff Test help resolve this intractable dilemma for investors and businesses?
This article examines a new way for genuine green investors to tell sound prospects from green cos-playing opportunists, and for authentic sustainable businesses to distinguish themselves from greenwashing grifters.
The Greenwash Gap
The problem is as old as the notion of profit-driven business doing social good, made more urgent by our accelerating climate crisis.
A trillion-dollar industry – carbon trading, impact investing, sustainable finance, ESG, CSR – has grown to address issues of business sustainability.
Their value, financially and morally, pivots on defining – and avoiding – ‘greenwash’.
The need for such an industry demonstrates a collective failure to reach a consensus on how businesses can take meaningful climate action.
It appears like a classic case of the ‘tyranny of choice‘. The more ‘climate solutions’ on offer for businesses, the less likely any one of them is to fit the bill.
Every solution appears to require its own definition of what constitutes genuine or fake climate action: net zero, carbon-neutral, offsetting, SDGs, ESG, CRS. The result is an apparently unavoidable ‘greenwash gap’, a grey zone where the sceptics sniff, and the carbon-industry sells.
Is this gap intrinsic to the problem of reconciling business with sustainability? Is it possible to narrow, or even eliminate the gap?
The See Through Greenwash Sniff Test is designed to fillet the flim-flam, focus on the fundamental, and close that gap.
The See Through Greenwash Sniff Test
Evaluate it yourself.
See Through Together’s 5-part video investigation explains the Sniff Test, applies it, and comes up with a winner.
It’s presented by See Through Together’s UK-based editor Robert Stern (’SternWriter’). Robert has spent a lifetime examining the gap between business words and actions, from multiple angles; international textile trader, CNN Beijing Bureau Producer, CNBC Shanghai Bureau Chief, documentary filmmaker and multilingual presenter, to name a few.
Like all See Through content, the Greenwash Sniff Test is original, hand-crafted by real people, and hallucination-free.
These videos could not possibly have been generated by AI. Large Language Model ‘stochastic parrots’ are not trained on data that permits the generation of See Through content. We’ve checked.
Does the See Through Greenwash Sniff Test work?
Watch to find out. Here are the five episodes, with a summary and sceptical challenge for each.
Part 1: The Challenge (1’56”)
Proposes ‘greenwash’ could be a Goals/Metric mismatch and identifies a suitable test-site.
- Is See Through’s framing of the greenwash question logical and reasonable?
- Is ‘global planetary solutions event’ ChangeNOW the right place to conduct the Sniff Test?
Part 2: The Test (2’59”)
Reveals the Sniff Test’s two diagnostic questions to calibrate the ‘Greenwash Gap’.
- Are our two Sniff Test questions fair?
- Do you agree with our predicted answers?
Part 3: The Results (10’53”)
A random selection of real-world planetary solution businesses take the Sniff Test.
- Did the actual answers surprise you?
- Did the answers to our surprise bonus question change your mind?
Part 4: The Outlier (5’36”)
Applies the Sniff Test, plus other probing supplementary questions, to an unusual Change Now attendee.
- Was this entity really such an outlier?
- Did you see its coup de théâtre coming?
Part 5: The Answer? (10’25’)
Reveals the Outlier’s claims for offering a unique solution to the Greenwash dilemma.
- Do its claims to uniqueness stand up to scrutiny?
- Do they answer the original question?
Actions, not words
If you’re convinced by the Sniff Test:
If not, please leave your critiques and suggestions for improvement in the Comments.