Greenwash & Public Relations

U.S. corporations gave away $18.15 billion in charitable donations in 2012 - a combination of cash, grants, and in-kind goods - up 12.2 percent in nominal terms over the previous year. A closer look reveals profit motives, notably for pharmaceutical companies and retail chain Wal-Mart. Read More

A climate change activist locked himself to a projector screen at an oil and gas conference in Texas today interrupting a TransCanada executive who was making a presentation on a pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Instead 300 astonished attendees heard an impassioned presentation about TransCanada's poor safety record. Read More

Range Resources, a Texas company, bullied the federal government into dropping a scientific report on environmental contamination caused by fracking, a new investigation has just revealed. This comes on the heels of two major pro-fracking academic reports that had to be withdrawn in 2012. Read More

Hedge fund billionaire George Soros is making a killing buying and selling farmland in South America after converting them to biofuel production. While this has caused the land prices to increase dramatically, the ecological impact is questionable. Read More

BP, the British oil company, is attempting to blame "blue collar workers" for the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, alleges the U.S. government. Federal lawyers say the company is trying to divert attention from management failures of "gross negligence." Read More

A new study, issued by scientists at the Freeman Spogli institute at Stanford university in California, that suggests that organic food has no medical or health values is deeply flawed, say outraged activists. Read More

A subsidiary of Herakles Capital, a New York based investment firm, has decided to cancel its application to join the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) after environmental groups alleged that its 73,086 hectare project in southwestern Cameroon would threaten the sustainability of the local community. Read More

Rio Tinto has been named as early front-runner for the Greenwash Gold award for the worst Olympic sponsor, with BP in second place and Dow Chemical third. The three corporations have paid millions to stick their names all over Olympic promotional material and activities. Read More

The United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil concluded this past weekend with no new government pledges. On the other hand, multinationals scored a public relations victory by claiming that they will implement $50 billion of sustainable changes to help save the environment. Read More

Aubrey McClendon, the founder and CEO of Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy, who championed natural gas to the extent of paying environmental groups to oppose coal, is facing angry shareholders for his profligate ways. Chesapeake is one of the leading users of fracking - an environmentally questionable method of extracting natural gas. Read More