Myths, Greenwashing and Carbon Calculators

Maybe you’re not EasyJet, Shell, Land Rover, Volkswagen, or BP or even GM, or maybe you are also asking, as Joel Makower is: How bad is Greenwashing?, but there’s no doubt that company after company is having their green claims called into question in some very public (and occasionally embarrassing) ways.

One of the most popular ways to get around this is really quiet simple - measurement. If you can determine, as WebEx customers can, the exact amount of greenhouse gasses you are not emitting as a result of not traveling (by plane, car, whatever), it would be hard for the press, the activist community or others to indict your claims.

But there’s a catch (isn’t there always?). Let me illustrate this and debunk that myth with two examples that are close to home:

Example 1: I live in San Francisco. I travel to a meeting in New York. My contribution to the airplane’s carbon emissions for that trip (round-trip) is 1.4 metric tons of carbon. So it is logical and reasonable to conclude that had I used my own company’s technology to meet on the web, I would have avoided 1.4 tons of carbon emissions.

Simple, right? Well, unfortunately, no.

Example 2: I host a meeting. There are 12 participants. 1 from San Francisco, 2 from Dallas, 3 from Chicago, 3 from New York and 2 from San Diego. We decide to avoid travelling and the associated carbon emissions with a WebEx meeting.

How do I calculate the actual avoided emissions, knowing only the number and location of the participants? The answer is I can’t. I have no idea where we would have held this meeting (maybe one of the locations with more people? Maybe a central location?). If we had to travel, might a few of the people not found it worthwhile? Would they have joined by phone? Or not joined at all? I can go on, but you get the point.

It is simply not possible to look at an individual web meeting and assume that everyone in the meeting would have travelled to the host’s location, and calculate carbon emissions avoided.

Another complication: As much as we as a vendor of web meeting services might hate to admit it, not every web meeting replaces travel. Sometimes they replace phone calls - no avoided carbon emissions there! And, as I know all too well, sometimes they are among people who sit in offices near each other in the same building (or even on the same floor) - not even a phone call avoided (though the avoided walking is not all that good for our collective health!).

So I ask you: Is it really true that when I use WebEx to meet with my colleagues in other cities instead of calling them on the phone, that I am avoiding carbon emissions from travel? (if you said yes, we need to talk further).

But some (maybe all) of the highly-touted carbon calculators out there make this assumption. They either assume that everyone in a meeting is travelling, or that everyone is travelling to the meeting host’s location.

DANGER! If you use the numbers from these carbon calculators to tout your avoided carbon emissions, you are in danger of being accused of greenwashing! (seriously, if I can pick apart those calculators in one blog post, imagine what the media and activist communities might do to your claims).

Stop overstating your carbon emissions reduction.

So what do you have to do to get it right? Know that only a percentage of your meetings avoid travel, and even for those, only a percentage of the people in those meetings are avoiding travel. Know what your travel carbon footprint looks like - how do your people travel, by what modes (plane? car?) and where? Then you can get an accurate view of your avoided emissions.

And then you can go to the press and make a valid, verified claim. You can report it in your annual citizenship or greenhouse gas impact report. And when the press and activists come calling, you can answer confidently and fully defend your claims.

(Ad: If you want to know more about how WebEx can help you do this, please contact me, and I’ll be glad to help)

Posted by Jeff Weinberger at 12:28PM PST

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Jeff Weinberger
WebEx Green Initiative
WebEx Corporate Social Responsibility
Cisco WebEx