You may have seen their advertising: earnest commitments from a consortium of six major oil sands developers to the effect that they are hard at work making Canada's environment cleaner and more sustainable. In particular, the Pathways Alliance assure us that they are well on the way to a net-zero future, through advanced carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects among others.
In fact, CCS is largely a failed technology and shows little or no prospect of success in the foreseeable future, while in the meantime proving a dangerous distraction from the more immediate problem of reducing our carbon footprint.
So, it's not a huge surprise to see that the Pathways Alliance has suddenly removed all content from its website and social media feeds in anticipation of the federal bill C-59 which, among other things, contains a truth-in-advertising amendment to the Competition Act that would require corporations to provide evidence to support their environmental claims.
Otherwise known as the "anti-greenwashing provision", this is considered a major win by the environmental movement, even though it is in essence quite modest and not specifically aimed at the fossil fuel industry.
Greenwashing is rampant these days, and studies show that up to 50% of companies' and governments' environmental claims have no supporting evidence and weak or non-existent verification. Worse, 57% of Canadian consumers no longer trust firms' green claims, making the work of honest firms that much harder.
The Pathways Alliance's public statement says that the amendment "will create significant uncertainty for Canadian companies that want to communicate publicly about the work they are doing to improve their environmental performance". What they actually mean is, "crap, we've been rumbled!"
Rather than creating "significant uncertainty", the amendment does quite the opposite. It really just requires companies to tell the truth, and to be able to back up their claims with evidence. Seems reasonable, right?
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