The other day we were driving in a major Canadian city and a large wide heavy industrial truck trundled past with the slogan “On the Road to Net Zero” stuck on its side. Whoever put it there probably realizes that the proposed destination does not permit trucks of this kind, yet they dutifully cheer on their own demise. Which oddly reminded us of the latest order of clothing to arrive from Amazon, also by truck, in a package claiming to be “reducing carbon emissions”. Both offer up conventional pieties in an unconvincing, lackadaisical manner, as in the decadent phase of a state-imposed civic religion. It is like living in a society where it remains customary to offer oblations to the Olympian gods, while not giving two seconds’ thought to what Hermes would want you to do, or whether Zeus might punish you for denying hospitality to strangers. The weird ritual quality to it all suggests the worst combination of conformity, cunning and indifference.

Whether you call it “greenwashing” or mere hypocrisy, it is a rarity in the debate in that it irritates the zealots and the skeptics equally. The former grumble that all these corporations genuflecting before the sign of Net Zero are just faking it while destroying the planet, and the latter that by carrying on with the pretense they are shoring up bad public policy. And both are annoyed, rightly, that this stuff is everywhere but doesn’t seem to mean anything. You can confront intransigence. But not mush.

The people who, for instance, make the garments in question are not lying when they say “Being earth-friendly is important to us.” We have no doubt that the majority of that firm’s employees, from top to bottom, really do care about the environment and like to go to bed at night thinking they haven’t spent the day helping wreck it. The problem is that having agreed to the conventional formulation, like someone mumbling their way through the Lord’s Prayer while thinking about cooking some bacon for breakfast as soon as the dreary thing ends, they do not spend much time actually conforming their behaviour to their words, probably because they haven’t bothered discovering much about what it would require.

In the case of the trucking firm, the problem is that what they do is energy-intensive. And since wind and solar cannot power our economy, for reasons this firm certainly cannot control, the fact that they might at some point buy enough offsets or engage in other Jesuitical jiggery-pokery does not mean that they will not emit carbon. It just means they’ve purchased the modern equivalent of an “indulgence”. Again, we do not accuse them of having worked through the whole thing and decided to fake it. On the contrary, we accuse them of having vaguely absorbed a few conventional pieties without careful consideration, made them into a slogan, and gone about their business.

You can find literally thousands of examples. Indeed, it is hard to find a product nowadays that does not merely claim to be environmentally friendly, but make a hoo-hah about climate in particular. Go ahead. Read the package, or the website promo, before you buy it. Whatever it is. And yet we are not on the road to Net Zero collectively because we are not on it individually. That people really think offsets somehow work doesn’t make it better. Especially if they go out of their way to avoid listening to any contrary claims lest it disturb their sleep.

P.S. We ourselves, since we do not believe in a man-made climate crisis, are not being lazy hypocrites in rejecting the advice on the underwear package to “Wash cold and save energy”. We strongly suspect that most people who buy such things don’t hunt through the packaging for ideological sore points. (Just as most normal human beings don’t get riled up at those ridiculous notices telling you that everything you buy is known to the State of California to cause cancer, partly because they don’t read them.) But among those of us eccentrics who do, we strongly suspect that they wash them in whatever way they think will work, and those who choose to wash in cold water aim to save money not the planet.