Shell wins greenwashing award

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Royal Dutch Shell’s ongoing public relations campaign to rehabilitate its environmental image won the oil company the not-exactly-flattering Greenwash Award from CORPORATE WATCH. The award comes as a climate change conference in Shell’s home country of the Netherlands continues to churn out bad news about the industry’s impact on global warming.

The business watchdog group deconstructs one of Shell’s recent ads — similar to the ones the company is running on the MoJo Wire — dealing with environmental issues, and provides a reality check on the kinder, greener image Shell is trying to project. Turns out, as most environmentalists have suspected, that the PR campaign is mostly a shiny veneer covering some ugly ongoing realities about Shell. Consider this humbling factoid: The CO2 emissions from the oil Shell produces are greater than those coming from all of Central America.

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