I haven’t been following COP27, not because I don’t care about the effects of climate change, but because I think the whole thing is a waste of time and a rather expensive joke. Why? Because it panders to the belief that the big corporations actually care about their environmental impact, allowing them to appear virtuous whilst they continue to abuse the world’s resources with impunity. It basically amounts to greenwashing on a global scale.
The simple fact that Coca Cola, one of the biggest polluters in the world, is sponsoring COP27 tells you everything you need to know about the aim and authenticity of the event. These people don’t care about tackling climate change. The only thing they care about is increasing their profit margins, and they don’t care if they have to exploit the environment or the taxpayer to do it.
I don’t believe for a moment that the UK is going to hit net zero by 2050. And the truth is that neither do the people who are making such claims. This obligation has supposedly been entrenched by law, but as we’ve seen recently laws can change in 30 seconds. So, the likelihood of reaching net zero by 2050 without backtracking or U-turns is practically non-existent.
The Business Ambition 1.5°C campaign is yet another example of an empty promise dressed up as a green initiative — it looks great on paper but just doesn’t hold up under greater scrutiny. It’s simply not achievable.
However, that’s not to say that there aren’t companies who are actively transitioning to more sustainable business practices, including Vaculug who are committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2030. But for most corporations, it’s nothing more than lip service — an opportunity to show off their environmental credentials without having to make any serious changes to their business operations. In other words, it’s all just horse excrement!
And the worst thing is that they know it. And yet rather than focusing their energies into what actually is achievable, they keep spouting this nonsense and treating the public like fools. The consequences of this environmental posturing has profound implications, because the West’s ostracisation of fossil fuels pushes control into countries such as Saudi Arabia, where we have no say over regulations, methods of extraction, or how and where they’re used. And who ends up paying?
It isn’t the large multinationals, who just seem to get richer and richer! It’s the everyday working person. Because the fact is that we whilst we can produce products more efficiently, we can’t simply produce them out of thin air. But no-one’s investing in fossil fuels or oil anymore because it doesn’t follow the green narrative, and businesses are already beginning to suffer the effects. And trust me, the big corporations won’t suffer for long because they’ll simply pass any losses on to the consumer.
So, when are people going to wake up, start calling out the lies and hypocrisy and hold these charlatans to account? Because it isn’t their profit margins that the big corps are gambling with — their bottom lines won’t suffer no matter what happens. They’re gambling with your future and that of your children’s. How much longer are we going to keep letting them get away with it for?