A linguistic study of aviation greenwash |
Dear Helen, We have a new paper exposing the aviation industry's greenwash! In some ways, the research article tells us what we already knew, but it does also give us practical tools to challenge the industry. This you can see in the table below, taken straight from the paper. On it, you can see three things: - On the left, the narratives that the aviation industry uses.
- In the middle, the rhetorical strategy that this is part of.
- On the right, a counterfactual that we can use.
Let's zoom in on narrative four, 'false solutions', which I've artistically circled for your reading pleasure. |
Figure from Gössling et al. (2026) |
As we know, the aviation industry (like many highly polluting industries), delays acting on its catastrophic levels of pollution by promising future solutions: Through persistent narratives of innovation and leadership, airlines reproduce a cultural logic in which technological progress is both the problem and the solution. This self-reinforcing cycle aligns with what Lamb et al. (2020) describe as “discourses of climate delay,” in which commitment to long-term goals becomes a substitute for immediate structural change (also see Shue, 2023). The counterfactual we need to lead with, then, is that these technologies do not exist at scale, and the cost of SAF is prohibitive. Also, we can point to the long history of broken promises by the industry (see below, a graph we’ve shared in this newsletter before). |
The history of the aviation industry's targets for the % of all fuel which will be so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuel (source: Stay Grounded's Common Destination report) |
There is, I think, another implication for our work implied by this 'future solutions' narrative. As the climate movement, we talk a great deal about "the future". We do this mostly in terms of outcomes (e.g. escalating climate disasters), and sometimes we even focus on climate goals (e.g. 'net zero by 2030' demands). The risk, here, is that we feed into the delay strategy of the industries we're opposing by basing discussions on hypothetical futures, rather than what is happening now. The aviation industry needs us to be focused on the future. Because any look at past failures (see above) or current actions (see our weekly social media feed) exposes that they are incapable of taking the climate crisis seriously. So long as they are allowed to talk about tomorrow, they will continue to get away with murder. Thank you to the scientists that expose the anti-scientific greenwash of the industry, and the activists who work to bring this into the mainstream. |
Until next time, Sean (from the Stay Grounded team) |
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