Cloud: Ok, can you guys fill me in on what's going on?
Barrett: Let me ask you, blondie; do you even know what this factory does?
Cloud: Uh... provides zero-emission eco-green energy?
Barrett: [sarcastically] Oh yeah? Really?! Then what exactly is that green smoke coming out of the chimney stack?
Cloud: Well that's obviously the zero emmissi— um... aw shit.
— Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged, "Episode 1"
This is when a specific type of Villain with Good Publicity co-opts environmentalism to sanitize their image, all while covering up actions that are harmful to the environment. Essentially an Ecocidal Antagonist that cares about their public reputation and attempts to put up a front to appear otherwise.
"Greenwashing
" refers to an organization or corporation using deceptive marketing to appear environmentally friendly, despite their true practices being environmentally harmful. While your typical Toxic, Inc. does little or nothing to hide their pollution and revels in how much harm they cause the environment, a company using greenwashing does everything possible to make themselves look eco-friendly. That car they designed that runs on clean fuel? It actually runs on a poisonous substance that's making people sick. Those ads they put out to encourage recycling and proper waste disposal? They're no better at it themselves. That eco-friendly product they're pushing? It's actually a far deadlier one with a different label to disguise its lethality.
This type of villain is usually a Corrupt Corporate Executive, especially of Peace & Love Incorporated variety, but it can also apply to people who simply pretend to be environmentally cautious while being the opposite (i.e. a celebrity who preaches environmentalism but whose actions are far from eco-friendly).
For the sake of the story, greenwashed villains will often commit other crimes to mask their actions such as Human Trafficking.
Sub-Trope of We Care, and related to Villainous Gentrification. Contrast with Eco-Terrorist who is trying to save the environment, just with dangerous methods, and the Ecocidal Antagonist, who is very open about his desire to strip nature down to its gnawed and blackened bones.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Marvel 2099: Ostensibly, Eco's job is to keep the city clean. In practice, they allow the dumping and smuggling of hazardous materials, and can legally execute anyone accusing them of corruption by writing them off as "polluters".
- Poison Ivy (2022): The villain of issues #7 and #8 is Beatrice Crawley, the CEO of FutureGas. To the public, Crawley is a proud feminist and head of an eco-friendly fracking company. However, one of her employees accuses of her not being very kind to her female employees when they ask for maternity leave and her company is revealed to be infecting people and plants with chemicals that turn them into monsters. Crawley is also a former assistant professor to Dr. Jason Woodrue, Ivy's former mentor, and is deliberately pushing her company's technology to continue his twisted vision.
Fan Works
- Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged: Shinra claims that their mako power plant generates clean energy and has zero emissions despite this very obviously not being true. Naturally, Cloud naively believes this lie and is puzzled that AVALANCHE has a problem with the "zero emissions" reactor right until Barrett points out the enormous amount of green smoke coming from it.
Films — Animation
- The Lorax (2012): At one point, The Once-ler advertises his Thneeds as "Lorax Approved!", In a parody of real life efforts to greenwash by getting pro environmental messaging on unethical products.
- Bigfoot Family: The oil company CEO goes on TV with a slick modern tech-bro image talking about how they're all high-tech now and have developed a proprietary process for clean drilling. As soon as the cameras are off, he drops the facade and shows himself to be a greedy oil baron from a long line of greedy oil barons who doesn't care one whit about the environment and will do anything to get at that sweet black gold.
- Cars 2: Sir Miles Axlerod, head of Axlerod Industries, claims to be electric-run and pushes the alternate fuel Allinol as an environmentally friendly product. In reality, Axlerod is the Kingpin behind the Lemons' operations, and wants to discredit alternative fuels so that they can go on selling oil from the oil fields they own.
Films — Live-Action
- Glass Onion: Connecticut Governor Claire Debella is running for Senator on a progressive, ecofriendly platform. Her campaign is endorsed by Miles Bron, a CEO who is pushing a new fuel source called Klear. Even after learning that Klear is incredibly dangerous and unstable, with the potential to destroy houses and that Miles has killed two people in part to keep this secret, Clair is still reluctant to turn against him until Miles's house and the Mona Lisa are destroyed due to an explosion created by Klear and it becomes impossible to hide its very serious flaws.
- Legally Blonde 2: Congresswoman Victoria Rudd is introduced as Elle's Benevolent Boss and her strongest ally in passing Bruiser's Bill, a piece of legislation that will outlaw animal testing. It's revealed that Rudd's image as an animal lover is a lie and she has been secretly working against Bruiser's Bill in support of her sponsors who are in favor of animal testing.
- On Deadly Ground: Michael Jennings is introduced shooting a commercial to promote his company Aegis Oil as an eco-friendly business. Once the camera is off, Jennings yells about how the animals stink and orders them to be removed. Jennings's actual business practices are also proven to be far from eco-friendly, as Aegis Oil uses substandard parts in order to operate their newest oil refinery and has a foreman killed when he tries to alert the Environmental Protection Agency of what is going on.
- Quantum of Solace: To the public at large, Dominic Greene is the CEO of Greene Planet, a corporation that buys up land for ecological preservation. In truth, Greene is a member of the criminal syndicate Quantum and his corporation's buying of land is merely to further Quantum's agenda; the film reveals that he is engaged in a plot to create a monopoly over Bolivia's water supply by causing an artificial drought.
- Slaxx: Canadian Cotton Clothiers is a boutique clothing company aimed at young hipsters who market their clothes with a "socially responsible" image of eco-friendliness and fair trade. In truth, CCC uses GMO cotton and child labor to make their clothes. The villain is the ghost of a 13-year-old Indian farm laborer who died in a workplace accident and seeks her revenge on the greedy Western corporation and consumers she died serving.
Literature
- Juniper Sawfeather: Affron Oil pretends to care about the environment, running an ad campaign that brags about saving the environment one gas station at a time. But despite the billions of dollars they make every year, they refuse to spend one penny on anything that would actually protect the environment, like retrofitting their oil tankers to comply with new regulations about the thickness of the hulls. As a result, their leaky ships pollute beaches along the entire west coast. They're responsible for the oil spill that kills two mermaids at the beginning of the first book, and in fact turn out to be upholding the masquerade because if people find out there's sentient life in the ocean, they won't be able to get away with polluting it.
- Dirk Pitt Adventures: In Sahara, an amoral tycoon has built a state-of-the-art facility for disposing environmental waste in the Sahara Desert, far from any significant human habitation. But the "waste disposal facility" is really only for show — while some waste is being destroyed as advertised, the most dangerous waste is stored underground in very unsafe ways, leading to massive contamination of nearby groundwater supplies and oceanic pollution that quite threatens the entire biosphere.
Live-Action TV
- 30 Rock: Jack Donaghy introduces a new corporate-friendly mascot, Greenzo, to promote GE's new line of environmentally friendly products. Jack is thoroughly upfront that he only sees environmentalism as a fad to be exploited for profit, and is panicked when the actor playing Greenzo starts publicly supporting actual environmentalist policies that would harm his bottom line.
- Castle: "One Man's Treasure" has Lance Carlberg, the chairman of New York Recycle, who claims to have found a method to recycle batteries safely. In truth, his company simply switches the labels containing the battery sludge and dumps them in the sea. Sam Parker had discovered this while committing corporate espionage and was killed by Carlberg to silence him. The police are able to nail Carlberg when they find the gun he used to kill Sam in the dumpster outside of his apartment building. Castle jokes that Carlberg would have gotten away with it if he recycled.
- Leverage: Redemption:
- "The Great Train Job": Blake Whitcomb is a green energy innovator who has been in the news for his intentions to create a plane that runs entirely on electric energy. However, the Leverage team discovers that Whitcomb has been carelessly and illegally disposing of the batteries for his electric cars, resulting in a couple of farmers becoming sick and their crops dying. Whitcomb is also willing to hire Neo-Nazis to intimidate the victims of his crimes into staying silent.
- "The Muddy Waters Job": GulfPetrol is an oil company that had recently gotten into trouble due to oil spills. Their new CEO Ethan Bradford was brought in to take care of any leaks and received great praise for pushing the company in a green energy direction. However, it is ultimately revealed that this is all just media spin; Gulf Petrol's new oil platform Hyperion has been leaking after being damaged by a mudslide and Gulf Petrol will do anything to cover it up, even going as far as destroying their own oil rig to hide evidence of the leaks, killing their own employees in the process.
- "The Fractured Job": Eliot's hometown has been hit by earthquakes and illness from tainted water ever GreenSlate Energy set up a fracking operation in the town. The team's investigation shows that GreenSlate has been doing everything they can to hide evidence that their operation is causing harm. This includes attacking Eliot's father to silence him, paying off the environmental company hired to report on GreenSlate's environmental impact, and getting the Attorney General who has invested money in them to help cover up their malpractices.
- The Sarah Jane Adventures: "Invasion of the Bane" features Bubble Shock!, a fictional soft drink delicious to all but 2% of humans and advertised as organic, which Sarah Jane Smith is investigating when she meets Maria and Luke. The organic ingredient in question turns out to be secretions from the alien Bane mother meant to control humanity.
Video Games
- Fallout 4: The player can find pre-war notes on the terminal of the Red Rocket Truck Stop between the proprietors who are stashing nuclear waste from the vehicles (society having moved from increasingly rare fossil fuels to atomic-powered everything) in some natural caves beneath the building to hide them from inspectors. They did a little too good of a job, as the player can also find their "Trashbusters Award" for "greatest year-to-year waste reduction by a single store".
- Pikuniku: Mr. Sunshine markets himself as a businessman who sends flying robots who pick up trash and even gives money to the residents of the town. He actually wants to destroy the island with his volcano to build a perfect city in his image.
- Pokémon Black and White: Team Plasma manages to combine this with Eco-Terrorist. They're initially introduced as an Animal Wrongs Group willing to fight civilians with the motive of liberating Pokémon from human control, but all of them (save for the movement's leader, N) are shown to be just as abusive as what they're claiming to be against. Ghetsis, the true leader of Team Plasma, is later revealed to be using Pokémon liberation as a front to give himself access to all of their power while leaving the general public helpless. Subverted in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, where the genuine believers in the cause split off into a more benign version while Ghetsis' remaining followers don't even bother with the pretense.
- The Simpsons Game: This is parodied in the "Lisa the Tree Hugger" level. Mr. Burns' logging operation is called "Auntie Nature Eco-Friendly Clearcutting" and its logo is a female version of Mr. Burns shown with flowers in her hair and hugging a bunny... all while still sporting a sinister smirk. The whole thing is of course a paper-thin veneer over ruthless razing of the local forests.
- Spider-Man: Miles Morales: Simon Krieger is the CEO of Roxxon Corporation's R&D Department whose aim is to have New York City's Harlem District powered by Nuform, an alternative fuel source he insists is completely safe. It isn't: anyone exposed to Nuform for an extended period of time becomes fatally sick, as Rick Mason, the former head of the Nuform project, found out the hard way. Despite this, Simon decides to go forward with using Nuform because he feels he's sunk too much money into the project to scrap it and kills Rick to hide the truth. This leads to Rick's little sister, Phin, becoming the Tinkerer and joining the Underground with the goal of exposing Simon's corruption.
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Earthblood: Endron, the corrupt oil company serving as the game's primary antagonistic force, runs a publicity campaign to advertise a new biofuel in order to present itself as eco-friendly. In truth, Endron is a thoroughly evil company actively trying to corrupt and destroy nature as part of its service to the Wyrm, and the eco-friendly image is just a publicity stunt. This is acknowledged in a conversation between two NPCs, where one notes that the new fuel is just the same old stuff with new packaging.
Web Videos
- Climate Town: "What Your Bank Really Does With Your Money": Discusses a number of large banks' greenwashing PR releases while the banks themselves are funding the very fossil fuel expansion projects and other climate harming projects that the scientists they're quoting and referencing have warned against.
Western Animation
- Captain Planet and the Planeteers: Among the Eco-Villains, this is Sly Sludge's M.O. more than most. While the likes of Hoggish Greedly or Looten Plunder might play this as part of a scheme, Sly Sludge is meant to represent short-sightedness and improper disposal. Hence, many of his get-rich-quick schemes revolved around finding a new "environmentally friendly" method of disposing of things like toxic waste, only for it to turn out to be a scam. He eventually underwent a Heel–Face Turn when the Planeteers convinced him there was genuine money to be made in recycling.
- Futurama:
- In "Leela's Homeworld", Bender opens an industrial waste disposal business. It dumps the toxic waste into New New York's sewer system, annoying the mutants who live down there.
- Also in "Bender's Game", Mom has the world's only dark matter mine in Alaska and tries to come off as sympathetic.
Mom: Do people care enough to drill for dark matter even in an Alaskan wildlife refuge? People do.
- King of the Hill:
- In "Earthy Girls Are Easy," After being caught illegally dumping old propane tanks, Buck tries to improve Strickland Propane's reputation with a "going green" campaign. But rather than spend time and effort changing how he lives, Strickland decides to take advantage of carbon offsets and pay Dale to plant a forest to make him seem forward-thinking, much to Hank's disappointment. And since Dale is too lazy even to plant a forest, they "pay" a survivalist for the carbon offsets (read: allow a concern to be held on his property that exists to do nothing more than show Strickland's "dedication" to the environment).
- In "Raise the Steaks," Megalo-Mart sells supposedly "organic" steaks, but a clerk admits to Hank that it's just factory farm steaks with a different label. Hank finds genuinely good organic food at a co-op store, but Megalo Mart buys it and uses its green image to sell its crappy steaks as natural.
- Miraculous Ladybug: Sleezy self-serving Mayor Bourgeois has supported such "green" campaigns as launching all the trash in Paris into space (because all that rocket exhaust has got to be better than recycling) and bulldozing a public park to create a bottled oxygen factory (but they're going to use the wood from the trees they cut down, so that makes it sustainable).
- The Simpsons: In "The Old Man and the Lisa", Lisa seemingly manages to get Mr. Burns to turn over a new leaf by getting him to open the "Little Lisa Recycling Plant" and tout the environmental benefits of recycling. All is well until he shows her the "best" part — the use of recycling to create a massive fishing net made out of plastic to capture an ocean's worth of sea animals and sell off their meat. It is then that Lisa realizes that he hasn't changed at all as a person.
Lisa: Ah! You haven't changed at all! You're still evil, and when you're trying to be good, you're even more evil!
- Tiny Toon Adventures: In "Waste Deep in Wackyland" (the third short of "Pollution Solution"), Montana Max presents the opening of his new pollution-free factory to the news reporters, claiming to have changed his ways from being the biggest polluter in ACME Acres. After the reporters leave, Monty reveals to the audience that he hasn't really cleaned up his act, and his new factory is just as environmentally unfriendly as his previous ones. He just chooses to dump the runoff in the one place no one would think to find it: Wackyland, home of Gogo Dodo and his friends. After dealing with the waste, Gogo finds out Monty was responsible and puts him on trial. Monty is found guilty of polluting Wackyland and his punishment is execution, but Gogo agrees to let him go if he agrees to clean up Wackyland.
