New Climate

The world’s biggest companies are over-hyping their promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to the New Climate Institute.

It issued a study of 25 top companies and found their plans would cut emissions an average of 40 percent, not the 100 percent mark of “net zero” and “carbon neutral” claims.

The Institute’s “Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2022” gauged the transparency of the listed company’s climate pledges and gave them an “integrity” rating.

Shipping company Maersk was the only firm to earn a “reasonable integrity” mark.

Apple, Sony and Vodafone chalked up “moderate integrity” grades.

New Climate Institute

Amazon, Google, Ikea, Volkswagen, Walmart and Hitachi were on the “low integrity” roster, while “very low integrity” scorers included BMW Group, Unilever, CVS Health, Nestle, Novartis and Accenture.

Thomas Day, lead author of the study, said his team “set out to uncover as many replicable good practices as possible, but we were frankly surprised and disappointed at the overall integrity of the companies’ claims.”

The companies have a year to clean up their acts before the 2023 Monitor is released.

China copped the Olympic gold for chutzpah by having an Uyghur athlete from Xinjiang carry the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the Winter Games.

It was a poke in the eye of world human rights groups.

The largely unknown athlete finished 43th in her cross country event and was then whisked by Chinese authorities from the world’s stage.

The decision to choose Dinigeer Yilamujiang for the Beijing National Stadium torch lighting ceremony, “rather than a more accomplished or widely known athlete and pair her with a member of the Han majority, was interpreted as Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s act of defiance against the global pressure campaign and decried as ‘offensive’ by overseas Uyghur human rights groups,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Human Rights Watch says Chinese leadership is responsible for widespread and systematic policies of mass detention, torture and cultural persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xianjiang.

Disinformation has emerged from the dark corners of the internet and is now coming for brands, according to a hefty 50-page report from Marathon Strategies.

“The Age of Disinformation: The Weaponizing of Disinformation Against Corporate America” report counts 5.7M mentions of S&P 500 companies from a disinformation string from November. 2020 to November 2021.

More than six-in-ten (61 percent) of the sentiment surrounding the identified conversations were overwhelmingly negative.

The top targets of disinformation were communications services, consumer discretionary, information technology and healthcare.

The report notes that disinformation “can spread alarmingly fast, igniting from an ember to a conflagration.”

It noted that from July 1-8, 2020, there were five mentions of Wayfair in connection with terms and hashtags associated with human trafficking conspiracy. That ballooned to more than 81K conversations by July 10.

Phil Singer, CEO/founder of Marathon, notes that while media coverage of online disinformation generally focuses on the political consequences of campaigns, spreaders of disinformation are stepping up attacks on corporations.

He views the report “as a wake-up call for all businesses about the need to be vigilant when it comes to monitoring their brands and to prepare mitigation strategies before they become victims of disinformation.”