The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Ever had the experience of reading a newspaper or magazine article dealing with a topic or an event you have intimate personal knowledge about? If so, I bet you've had the same reaction as me: Surprise and dismay over the number and seriousness of the mistakes and misunderstandings that even good journalists working for reputable publications commit. It's a sobering experience, one that leaves you wondering how many errors riddle all the other articles we read every day dealing with topics we don't happen to know about personally.

An interesting case in point is this story in the current Business Week about a green business skeptic named Auden Schendler. He gains credibility because of the fact that he is a self-proclaimed "convert" to this position, having been a long-time advocate of green business efforts. Schendler is getting a lot of press--including of course the BW article itself--for declaring that environmental initiatives by companies can rarely pay for themselves, let alone boost profits. In particular, Schendler takes a jaundiced view of renewable energy credits (RECs), and the BW article devotes a lot of space to "debunking" the use of such credits.

We don't have a lot of personal knowledge about the cases cited by Schendler (and by Ben Elgin, the author of the BW article), although we'd join some of those who commented online in expressing a bit of skepticism about an article that relies heavily on the experience of a single ski resort in broadly asserting that the eco-business movement is based largely on "little green lies."
More interesting is the reaction to the article from one of the businesses cited in the article, Johnson and Johnson, as expressed on their corporate blog. Here's what blogger Marc Monseau, who works in J and J's corporate communications department, had to say:

Johnson and Johnson wasn't a big part of this article, but having sat through the lengthy interviews that our folks did with Ben [Elgin] (at his urging), I was staggered by how he characterized the company's efforts and how little context he included about all that it has done over the past 30 years to conserve energy and--more recently--to reduce emissions.

Monseau describes some of the corporation's environmental initiatives dating back to the 1970s, then notes:

I was particularly peeved when Ben failed to mention any of this when he pointed out that:

Johnson and Johnson has proclaimed a 17% reduction in carbon emissions since 1990, based largely on RECs. Without the credits, the pharmaceutical giant has seen a 24% increase.

That's true . . . apart from the fact that Johnson and Johnson is not merely a "pharmaceutical" company . . . but it also fails to tell the whole story.

During that same time frame the company increased sales by 372%, bought new businesses and expanded operations throughout the world.

As a corporate PR specialist, Monseau is obviously disappointed that the whole positive story about his firm didn't turn up in the BW article. (By that standard, PR specialists find practically every magazine article disappointing.) But I think the context Monseau offers for the one statistic about J and J that BW chose to mention is really crucial.

At first blush, a 24 percent increase in carbon emissions since 1990 does sound significant. And contrasted with the company's claimed 17 percent reduction, it almost makes J and J sound dishonest or hypocritical. But in fact a mere 24 percent increase in emissions over a time period when the company grew more than threefold is extremely impressive and amounts to a notable reduction in emissions when measured on a per-revenue-dollar basis.

Ben Elgin's elision of that context strikes me as downright misleading. And while this one fact certainly doesn't demolish the article's entire argument, it leads one to question whether the author has a bias, conscious or unconscious, that led him to cut logical corners elsewhere in the piece.

(The bias needn't be an anti-environmental bias, although that would be the obvious assumption. It might just be the "bias" that most writers share for information that is striking, eye-opening, and controversial . . . even if the startling implications might not be quite so newsworthy on fuller examination.)

In this day and age, most people have learned to approach the media with a healthy degree of skepticism. Yet sometimes we let down our guard a bit with stories that take a "contrarian" or "counter-intuitive" perspective, as the Business Week story does, positioning itself as a challenge to the conventional wisdom about green biz.

Fair enough: Conventional wisdom should always be challenged. But even "contrarian" articles deserve skeptical scrutiny. In the months to come, we can expect to see more and more "backlash" articles that attempt to poke holes in the case for sustainable business. They should be tested against the facts just as rigorously as articles on the other side.

Labels: Auden Schendler, Ben Elgin, Climate and Carbon, Greenwashing, Johnson and Johnson, Marc Monseau