Greenwashed: How ‘Net Zero’ Became the Biggest PR Scam on Earth

“Net zero by 2030!” “Carbon neutral operations!” “Powered by 100% renewable energy!” — if you’ve heard these headlines from big tech and thought, “Wow, they really care about the planet,” then congratulations: you’ve been successfully greenwashed.
These grand declarations sound like bold, world-changing commitments, but in reality, they’re often little more than corporate theatre — a high-budget performance designed to make you feel like real progress is being made. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find these promises are less about reducing actual emissions and more about clever accounting, PR spin, and a points-based system that lets companies look virtuous without changing much of anything.
It’s a game of optics over outcomes, where the scoreboard is rigged to make the players look like they’re winning. The tragedy is that while the public is applauding these announcements, the clock on genuine climate action keeps ticking.
Here’s the truth — most of these pledges aren’t about actually cutting emissions. They’re about buying enough eco-points to pretend they did.
It’s like claiming you’ve quit smoking because you gave your last pack of cigarettes to your neighbour — while you’re lighting a cigar.

1 — Renewable Energy Credits: The Monopoly Money of Climate Action

Microsoft, Google, Amazon… the usual green saints. They plaster headlines with claims that they’re “powered by 100% renewables,” but if you dig past the glossy press release, you’ll find a very different reality: the vast majority of their servers, data centres, factories, and offices still run on good old oil, gas, and coal.
So how do they make the numbers work? Enter Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) — a kind of eco-currency where you don’t actually have to produce clean energy yourself. Instead, you buy credits from someone else who has produced it, then mark your own operations as “green” on paper. You keep burning fossil fuels, but now you’ve bought yourself a moral halo.
It’s the corporate equivalent of paying your neighbour to eat a salad so you can tell your doctor you’ve improved your diet. These credits don’t magically replace dirty energy with clean — they just move the bragging rights around.
The brilliance (and the problem) is that the system rewards financial manoeuvring, not genuine transformation. You can be a climate hero without ever switching off a single coal-fired plant, so long as you’ve got the cash to buy the points. And for companies with trillion-dollar market caps, that’s not an obstacle — it’s pocket change.

2 — Solar Token Effort

Here’s the dirty little secret: you don’t need to overhaul your entire energy supply to get your “green” badge. All it takes is sprinkling in a token amount of renewable energy — maybe a few shiny solar panels on the roof or a handful of wind turbines for the photo op — and then cashing in the credits.
The magic number? Often just 5–10% renewables in your energy mix is enough to let you claim the coveted “carbon neutral” title, because the rest gets balanced out with purchased credits.
It’s like eating Big Macs every day, then getting a gold medal for nutrition because you sniffed a celery stick. The optics are fantastic, the headlines are glowing, and nobody asks why 90% of your operations are still powered by fossil fuels.
This isn’t about real change — it’s about ticking just enough boxes to pass the test, while leaving the rest of the exam blank. And the rules are written to make sure that’s perfectly acceptable.

3 — Net Zero Is Net Nonsense

“Net zero” is one of those phrases that sounds like the ultimate climate goal but, in reality, is about as meaningful as a politician’s promise before an election. It doesn’t mean zero emissions — it means we emitted the same amount as before, but bought enough points to cancel it out on paper.
The atmosphere doesn’t care about the accounting. CO₂ doesn’t pause on its way up to check your carbon offset receipts. If you pump it out, it’s there — trapping heat, melting ice caps, and pushing sea levels higher whether or not your company’s PR team has declared you “carbon neutral.”
The genius (and tragedy) of the net zero concept is that it allows companies to appear revolutionary while remaining entirely conventional. You can keep operating the same coal-heavy supply chain, keep running diesel fleets, keep pouring plastic into the world’s oceans — and as long as you buy enough credits or invest in a token tree-planting scheme, you’re a climate champion.
Worse still, much of the offsetting market is built on promises that might never materialise. Those trees planted to “absorb” your emissions? Many won’t survive long enough to make a dent. That renewable project you funded overseas? Sometimes it was already built, meaning your “investment” just rewrote the paperwork, not the future.
If climate action were a school exam, net zero is the student who copies someone else’s homework, changes a few words, and still gets an A. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it keeps the shareholders smiling — but it’s not solving the problem.
If fixing climate change were as simple as buying credits, we’d have been done 20 years ago. The fact we’re still having this conversation should tell you everything you need to know.

4 — PR > Planet

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the PR payoff of looking “green” is far greater — and far cheaper — than the cost of actually becoming green. Rebuilding infrastructure, replacing fossil-fuel-heavy supply chains, and committing to clean energy at scale costs billions and takes years. Buying credits and producing a slick sustainability report? That’s a rounding error on the quarterly budget.
This is why the global transition to clean energy crawls at a snail’s pace — because the scoreboard rewards the illusion of progress, not the progress itself. In fact, the more companies spend on green PR, the less pressure they face to make structural changes. Investors see the words “net zero” and stop asking questions. The public sees wind turbines in an ad campaign and assumes the problem is solved. Meanwhile, emissions keep rising, ecosystems keep collapsing, and the companies patting themselves on the back are still burning through oil like there’s no tomorrow.
The sad irony? For many corporations, climate change is less a crisis to be solved and more a marketing opportunity to be exploited.

5 — Much Like This Website…

WTFNow is proud to announce we are officially a net zero website. How did we achieve this? Our CEO once ate kale by accident, and we’re riding that achievement straight to environmental sainthood. In fact, under the same creative accounting rules used by major corporations, we could probably claim we’re “carbon positive” because our office recycling bin has more than one can in it.
We didn’t change our power source, we didn’t plant a forest, and we didn’t overhaul our operations — but we did once walk past a solar panel on the way to lunch, so we figure that’s worth at least a press release. If Microsoft can slap a “green” label on servers running mostly on coal, we can slap one on a website running on caffeine and sarcasm.
So yes — net zero. Award incoming.

Bottom Line:

Corporate “net zero” pledges are like handing yourself a medal for running a marathon you Ubered halfway through — except the medal is made of recycled PR slogans, and the racecourse is still covered in oil spills. Until the system rewards real, measurable change instead of creative accounting and virtue-signalling, these pledges are just climate cosplay. The planet doesn’t cash your green marketing cheques, and future generations won’t be impressed by your offset receipts.
If we want genuine progress, we have to stop grading corporations on how good they look going green, and start holding them to account for what they actually do.

Stay tuned for more WTF moments, look out for the next one where we’ll explain how throwing a paper straw into your plastic smoothie cup is going to save the polar bears.