Greenwashing is the act of overstating the environmental gains and benefits of one’s actions. And one of my real gripes with the various greening projects is the (deliberately) misleading language that is being used to describe what is being done and what is being achieved.

So this morning I read (yet another) article somewhere in the press stating that Norway has nearly completed its EV transition. Wow, these amazing Norwegians, they are now (nearly) all driving around in EVs!

Well, actually …, no (in case you missed that, I was being sarcastic). Not by a long shot. Something like three quarters of vehicles driven in Norway are ICE. What they mean by ‘completed EV transition’ is that most of the cars sold this year were EVs. That’s very nice, and well done yous, but that’s a long way to go to completing an EV transition in any expected, honest, and meaningful sense of the expression. (Mentioning Norway, perhaps we should talk about North Sea oil and deep sea mining instead, that’s a much bigger deal, environmentally speaking, than 40% of Oslo driving Teslas, or whatever EVs are fashionable over there.)

The most egregious case of this linguistic deception is the frequent substitution of the word ‘energy’ for the word ‘electricity’. You will find that most of the time when the politicians and their journalistic sycophants speak of ‘ambitious plans’ to decarbonise ‘energy’ in relatively near future, they invariably mean ‘decarbonise electricity’. The difference is huge, electricity represents only something like 20% of our energy use. Also, decarbonising electricity is easy, it’s the low hanging fruit, we could have done this decades ago without recourse to ‘cutting edge innovation’ of wind mills, dams and batteries (the French did).

There is little doubt that this kind of misleading language is used deliberately, it’s part of fostering the Great Delusion that life can go on as has always done, something the populist politics of our day cannot do without.