AXA Joins Greenwashing Ranks

If you are a regular reader of IrishEVs, you’ll know that our initial focus has always been to fight the common myths about electric vehicles to help Irish citizens make better informed decisions about driving a battery electric vehicle, and how this could cut their carbon footprint.

However, the rapid rise in greenwashing – the act of companies claiming to be sustainable while doing nothing to cut emissions – has led us to focus increasingly on this subject over the past year.

Month after month we are seeing more and more corporations indulging in greenwashing activities in Ireland, which are designed to confuse consumers and allow them to continue profiting from high emissions that worsen the Climate Crisis.

Today, again, we focus on another Irish brand joining the greenwashing ranks: AXA Insurance.

Offsetting Responsibility

Despite the fact that the EU has stopped allowing offsets to be counted towards emissions reductions targets from the start of 2021, AXA Insurance recently accounted that it will be offsetting carbon produced by the cars it insures.

The insurance company claims it will “offset 100% of the carbon emissions produced by all new and existing car customers for one year”. Their website states that it will plant 600,000 native trees across 200 hectares at a cost of €2 million.

• Can you confirm the specific tree species being planted as part of your partnership with The Nature Trust?

• What is the typical age of the trees being planted as part of your partnership with The Nature Trust?

• Considering the EU will stop allowing offsets to be counted towards emissions reductions targets from 2021, how can AXA justify this as anything more than a greenwashing campaign?

Insuring EVs

Insurance companies have come a long way in recent years in supporting electric car adoption.

While the industry was slow to support EVs initially, with insurance rates having typically been higher than those for petrol or diesel cars – with many insurers increasing the premiums for EVs or declining to insure them – we have seen a significant shift to the point where EV insurance is now often the cheapest option.

That said, there are still a number of insurance companies in Ireland who do not offer cover for electric cars, and this needs to change, and needs attention from regulators and the government to ensure that widespread and affordable adoption is increased to help the country meet its essential Climate Crisis emissions targets.

A prime example that we should be following is that of the government in the Netherlands.

They have called out Shell for its ads which claim that their fuel is ‘carbon neutral’ as they will offset the emissions of their customers, banning the adverts on the basis that there is no scientific proof to their claims.

The adverts suggest that customers paying an extra cent per liter of fuel will mean their money can cancel out the emissions produced from the burning of fossil fuels. Needless to say this is entirely untrue and simply a way to guilt-trip consumers into spending more.

This is almost identical to the campaign run by Applegreen here in Ireland, which is similarly unscientific and based on promoting misinformation to increase profits.

“Our research shows that this forest was not actually being logged in the years before Shell started protecting it”

Lisa van Langen, a student at Vrije University’s Climate Change and Sustainability Law Clinic in Amsterdam, commented: “One form of carbon compensation that the company offers is a pledge to protect forests in Peru from logging. Our research shows that this forest was not actually being logged in the years before Shell started protecting it.”

“Also, forests are absorbing increasingly less carbon, and the forest could burn down. Shell wants to compensate climate damage that is 100% definite with a measure that they cannot know for sure will work, or for how long it will work.”

While forests are absorbing less carbon, the recent IPCC Report confirmed that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now higher than any time in at least 2 million years.

We simply do not have the time or ability to mitigate the emissions we create – the only viable way forward is to dramatically cut emissions and to cut them immediately.

Those greenwashing corporations like Shell, Applegreen and AXA are profiting from sustaining or worsening emissions, and we simply must not allow them the opportunity to enhance their reputations from disinformation campaigns that are anything but ‘green’.

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