Greenwashing is declining

Our CEO Arnaud Brohe spoke with laurent lambrecht, a journalist at La Libre (Brussels based newspaper). Full article here (French): https://lnkd.in/eANHhr47  Some extracts from an interview where they discussed among others greenwashing, the EU CSRD and the role of AI in climate action:

Despite a serious accident, which reduced his mobility, Arnaud Brohé is leading Agendi a company that now has about forty employees.(…)
Recently, several global companies have reduced their climate targets. This is notably the case of the oil company BP and the consumer products giant Unilever. However, these two companies were considered to be climate leaders in their industry. Does this mean that companies are less concerned about the climate than before? Not necessarily, says Arnaud Brohé, who follows this matter very closely. “Until very recently, companies’ decarbonization plans were carried out on a voluntary basis,” he explains. These plans, and sustainability reports, were often marketing tools. Companies published objectives, sometimes very ambitious, that they could not really achieve.”
However, according to this expert, the EU CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) has changed everything. This directive mandates around 50,000 European and non-European companies to publish a report detailing their environmental, social and human rights impact. The objective is to publish comparable and audited information. This should allow the public, journalists and NGOs to compare companies. (…) According to Arnaud Brohé, this directive has already pushed companies to be more realistic in their decarbonization plans.

Among the companies that have seen their CO2 emissions increase, there are of course the giants of artificial intelligence (AI). As a reminder, AI consumes a lot of electricity to train. But the tech giants generally respond that solutions, generated by AI, could reduce CO2 emissions. What does Arnaud Brohé think? “I’m skeptical,” he replies. Of course, AI can help in many fields such as medicine, research, batteries… But let’s not forget the rebound effect, which implies that an improvement in efficiency does not necessarily lead to a decrease in consumption. (…)

Regarding the fight against global warming, this expert is not particularly optimistic. “We will probably succeed in reducing our CO2 emissions and perhaps being neutral by 2100,” he says. But, in the meantime, we are going to go through a lot of human suffering.