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When Coca-Cola Fails at its Sustainability Goals, That’s Everyone’s Problem
Beneath the veneer of public, seemingly good-faith attempts to clean up its operations and help solve the climate and plastic crisis, lurks a deep and systemic commitment to a take-no-prisoners approach to the bottom line.
Aug 29, 2023
The Coca-Cola Company has managed to do well this year when it comes to climate change—last winter it sponsored the annual climate change meeting COP27, and despite the indignation, the company still managed to get through it unscathed. This summer, sales are up as heatwaves rip across the globe and leave nearly half the world’s population parched and grasping for the nearest respite, often a cold bottle of sugary release.
The company has spent years perfecting the art of selling a heck of a lot of product that most of us would agree is not health food nor planet saving, while simultaneously convincing consumers that the company is indeed saving the planet and helping communities thrive. Confused? That may be the point.
In the past decade Coca-Cola has had a history of publicly declaring targets for reducing its contribution to plastic pollution—from selling its beverages in recyclable packaging, to using more recycled material in its bottles, to using more reusable packaging.
It has had the dubious distinction of being the largest plastic polluter for five years in a row, with its name on more pieces of plastic litter collected around the world than any other company.
But it’s all hot air, or fizzy water, or whatever. Its failure to meet self-imposed, largely unambitious goals, is well-documented. The company has been criticized for backsliding on its various “sustainable” commitments: to reduce the single-use plastic consumption (it in fact increased its consumption from 125 billion bottles in 2021 to 134 billion in 2022); use more recycled plastic in its bottles (a 1990 pledge to make its bottles from 25% recycled plastic has not been met over 30 years later); and to transition to reusable packaging (a gimmicky, piecemeal rollout in a handful of neighborhoods, with little to no scalable impact yet to be seen). In the meantime, it has had the dubious distinction of being the largest plastic polluter for five years in a row, with its name on more pieces of plastic litter collected around the world than any other company.
But these are actually the least of its failures: Beneath the veneer of public, seemingly good-faith attempts to clean up its operations and help solve the climate and plastic crisis, lurks a deep and systemic commitment to a take-no-prisoners approach to the bottom line. Coca-Cola Capitalism comes first.
Take, for example, a 2020 report on the food industry’s systemic greenwashing tactics that dedicates a full 50 pages to the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage industries’ concerted efforts to undermine plastic waste reduction policies in 15 countries. Documents from The Coca-Cola Company reveal its true commitments—to “fight back” against package regulations in Europe, to slow down the rollout of deposit return schemes in Europe and Kenya, and to oppose a plan to streamline recycling in the U.S. state of Georgia.
While at least reluctantly acknowledging its role in the plastic pollution problem, the company has done little to address the toxic impacts of its supply chain and product.
This sort of behavior isn’t just limited to the realms of plastic pollution and climate change. The control over national and state policy extends to how the company approaches toxic chemicals in plastics.
While at least reluctantly acknowledging its role in the plastic pollution problem, the company has done little to address the toxic impacts of its supply chain and product. Our reporting shows that the plastic bottle supply chain is a critical driver of the environmental racism behind whole communities being poisoned by dangerous air and water pollution and treated as sacrifice zones. Meanwhile, Coke’s consumption of PET plastic does not seem to be decreasing.
Perhaps the most problematic of The Coca-Cola Company’s sustainability failures is that as Coke goes, so goes the PET resin and PET bottled beverage industries. We found that Coke alone uses a fifth of all the PET bottles made in the world. And our in-depth reporting and follow-up conversations with beverage companies around the particularly dangerous antimony catalyst used to make the bottles confirm that the same bottlers that supply The Coca-Cola Company, brands like Amcor and CKS, are often the same bottlers used by other, often smaller brands that must rely on for their products. We held conversations with beverage companies of varying sizes as part of our Detox the Bottle Pledge, and an emerging theme revealed that the majority of PET bottles on the market are the product of a close relationship between the several biggest brands like Coke, big bottle manufacturers like Amcor and CKS, and giant resin producers like IVL and DAK. These relationships foster a shared interest in sustaining the plastics industry, even if it means compromising on consumer safety and ignoring established science on toxic impacts of their current practices. Smaller brands with an interest in selling safer products often have little sway within the industry and face difficulties when pushing for safer, more just packaging under the specter of strong business relationships among industry behemoths.
As long as The Coca-Cola Company maintains an iron grip on the PET bottle industry, makes little to no progress on its own goals, ignores the full impacts of its reliance on plastics on fenceline communities and consumers, and actively undermines legislation to reduce the harmful impacts of plastics, the entire interconnected universe of bottled beverage industry, bottlers, and resin makers will continue to harm people and the planet. If the company wants to be the global citizen it purports to be, it should start by telling its bottle manufacturers to make bottles with a safer alternative catalyst and it should rapidly scale up reuse and refill systems in countries like the U.S. where they’re woefully nonexistent. It’s time for the biggest plastic consuming companies to find safer packaging that doesn’t poison entire communities and their consumers.
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John Kerry Says 'Under No Circumstances' Will US Pay Poor Nations for Climate Damages
"This is unfair and goes against what was agreed upon at COP27 in Egypt. Climate activists especially from the Global South must stand up to the U.S. and other Western powers that want to short-change developing countries."
Jul 14, 2023
John Kerry, U.S. President Joe Biden's climate envoy, made clear at a congressional hearing Thursday that Washington has no intention of compensating impoverished countries for destruction wrought by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency despite playing an outsized role in creating it and continuing to accelerate it.
During the United Nations COP27 summit held last year in Egypt, delegates agreed to establish a "loss and damage" fund through which rich nations can provide poor ones with financial resources to help cover the escalating costs of extreme weather disasters, which are growing in frequency and intensity due to unmitigated greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution. Although developing and low-lying countries bear the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis, they suffer disproportionately from its deadly consequences and remain most vulnerable to future impacts.
Asked by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, whether the U.S. would allocate money to eligible nations harmed by increasingly common and severe droughts, storms, floods, and other climate change-exacerbated catastrophes, Kerry emphatically rejected the idea.
"No, under no circumstances," said Kerry.
The U.S. diplomat is preparing to travel to Beijing in the coming days to discuss the climate crisis with Chinese officials, including plans for the upcoming COP28 conference hosted by the United Arab Emirates.
Last year's agreement to establish a loss and damage fund was hailed as a positive step forward even though it coincided with yet another failure by policymakers to commit to a swift and just phaseout of coal, oil, and gas—the primary sources of further devastation. Fossil fuels are estimated to cause more than $5 trillion in unpaid damages around the globe each year.
Details of the fund—including which governments will be expected to pay and which will be eligible to receive as well as how much financing will be provided and how it will be distributed—are still being worked out.
Denmark, the first U.N. member to pledge loss and damage funding, promised to allocate just $13 million to Africa's Sahel region and other areas. At the time, critics warned that a significant portion of the paltry sum is structured in a way that could enrich private insurers at the expense of those most in need.
Global justice advocates who pushed to create the fund have stressed that the U.S.—by far the world's largest historical emitter of heat-trapping gases—and other wealthy polluters have a moral obligation to provide grants, not interest-bearing loans or other predatory instruments, to help alleviate the burdens they are imposing on billions of vulnerable people who have done little to unleash climate hell.
A loss and damage fund was deemed necessary because a certain amount of destruction has been locked in due to extant emissions and atmospheric concentrations of GHGs. But it is not the U.N.'s first foray into climate-focused redistribution.
Developed countries agreed at COP15 in 2009 to disburse $100 billion in green finance per year to the developing world by 2020 and every year after through 2025, at which point a new goal would be set. However, only $83.3 billion was mobilized in the first year, and governments are not expected to hit their annual target, which has been criticized as woefully inadequate, until this year.
An analysis published last year showed that the U.S. is the biggest reason for the shortfall. If Washington were to give at a level commensurate with its cumulative contribution to global GHG pollution, it would allot $39.9 billion of the $100 billion pledge each year. That's $32.3 billion more than the estimated $7.6 billion it actually shelled out in 2020.
With his comments on Thursday, Kerry signaled that the U.S. has no plans to reverse course and start providing its fair share when it comes to the emerging loss and damage fund.
Not only have the U.S. and other rich countries refused to adequately fund climate action in the Global South, but they are also actively moving to expand fossil fuel extraction and combustion—ignoring the international scientific consensus and eliciting condemnation from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who has described existing policies as a "death sentence" for humanity.
In addition to rapidly slashing planet-heating emissions, progressives have emphasized that canceling impoverished countries' external debts would free up trillions of dollars that can help close the widening chasm between what science and justice demand and what policymakers are currently doing.
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COP27's Greenwashing Scam
This year's UN climate conference offered some reason to celebrate. But the growing clout of the 'carbon capture' industry is hindering urgent efforts to clamp down on fossil fuels.
Dec 05, 2022
As the annual UN climate conference, COP27, came to a close in late November, the talks produced a lot of lofty rhetoric but little concrete progress on the gravest threat facing humanity today.
There was one very important positive development: After years of demands by poor countries in the Global South suffering the worst impacts of climate disasters, the COP27 agreement finally established a "loss and damage" fund for the wealthy countries most responsible for climate change to compensate poor countries for climate disasters.
Much remains undecided, including the size of the fund, its governance structure and how much countries should contribute. And even if wealthy countries pledge contributions, there's no guarantee they'll keep their promises -- they've already broken the promise made in 2009 of providing $100 billion a year in climate finance for the Global South.
Regardless, it's a win worth celebrating. Wealthy countries were uniformly opposed to establishing the fund, while the Global South displayed unprecedented unity, and ultimately prevailed.
Unfortunately, when it came to meaningfully addressing the key driver of climate change -- fossil fuels -- leaders at COP27 failed to act. And the growing clout of a "greenwashing" scam deserves much of the blame.
Failing on fossil fuels
The final COP27 agreement calls on countries to move away only from "unabated coal power," reiterating the weak language coming out of COP26 last year that failed to address oil and gas. It also dodges the issue of government subsidies for fossil fuels by calling only to phase out "inefficient" subsidies. (Which begs the question: What's an "efficient" subsidy for poisons, anyway?)
A number of countries called for phasing out fossil fuels. They included two Pacific Island nations, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, as well as Colombia, who were subsequently joined by the rest of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and Independent Association of Independent Latin America and Caribbean (AILAC) groups.
Surprisingly, they also included India, the world's second largest coal producer; Norway, a major oil producer; and, most surprisingly, the United States, the world's largest oil and gas producer. However, pressure from Saudi Arabia, the world's second largest oil producer, helped kill these efforts.
Some of these interventions may not have been well-intentioned. There's speculation that the Indian delegation knew Saudi Arabia would kill the proposal anyway, so they made a symbolic proposal to look good without actually changing anything. This is substantiated by the right-wing Indian government's domestic energy policy of expanding coal production.
But the U.S. position also deserves scrutiny. The devil is in the details.
A carbon sucking "unicorn"
To understand why, look at the line about phasing out only "unabated" coal power. What, then, is "abated" coal power?
In the terms of the agreement, this refers to fitting coal plants with technology to pull carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and bury it underground, known in industry terminology as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
CCS is a disastrously bad idea, as several studies have documented. It's a largely unproven technology with an empirical record of failure, and relying on it to deal with averting climate catastrophe is reckless. Many climate activists liken reliance on CCS to a belief in unicorns.
CCS doesn't address other serious environmental concerns with fossil fuels, such as the impacts of surface coal mining and particulate pollution from power plants, which disproportionately affect poor and vulnerable people in the United States and elsewhere. And it generates new environmental justice hazards of its own, such as carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures.
It's also inordinately expensive, something even CCS proponents acknowledge. In Wyoming, for example, utilities have opposed a law requiring them to retrofit coal-fired power plants with CCS, citing cost concerns.
CCS has a superficial appeal -- if it worked, it would allow us to keep burning coal (as well as oil and gas) and avoid warming the planet. Unfortunately, that's exactly what makes it an industry fig leaf.
This brings us to the U.S. position.
When the U.S. joined the call to phase out oil and gas in addition to coal, the delegation evidently wanted to insert the descriptor "unabated." So they weren't really calling for an oil and gas phaseout. They were calling for the universal adoption of CCS technology with fossil fuels.
If the U.S. language were adopted, U.S. fossil fuel exports would be allowed to continue. Under the territorially based emissions accounting used by the United Nations, "abating" emissions from burning oil and gas exported by the United States would be the responsibility of the importing countries.
U.S. oil and gas exports are substantial, and the Biden administration is adding fuel to the fire by permitting a massive buildout of oil and gas export terminals on the Gulf Coast. Soon after COP27 ended, a U.S. Department of Transportation agency approved yet another oil export license for a proposed terminal in Texas.
The Biden administration appears intent on expanding U.S. oil and gas exports, and the U.S. proposal at COP27 was consistent with this objective.
Challenging CCS
Over the last few years, despite growing evidence against CCS, broad popular opposition, and findings by the U.S. Treasury Department's own watchdog that tax breaks for CCS have been abused by industry, Congress and the Biden administration have doubled down on expanding CCS.
Congress passed two bills, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which massively expanded subsidies for CCS. But that hasn't stopped the Biden administration from bragging about the IIJA and IRA as major climate achievements, even though the IIJA contained no funding for renewables at all.
Given the high-level political backing for CCS in domestic energy policy, it's plausible that the U.S. proposal to expand CCS internationally is also intended to position the United States as the global leader in CCS technology, holding technical knowledge and intellectual property for a "climate solution" it wants the world to be hooked on, in addition to U.S. oil and gas exports.
Challenging this CCS-centric approach to climate policy will be key to dismantling the U.S. fossil fuel industry and its bipartisan political support system -- and winning environmental justice both at home and abroad. It will also be key to undermining dangerous U.S. negotiating positions in international climate talks, making true international cooperation on climate justice more possible.
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