The head of the United Nations announced the appointment Thursday of an expert panel led by Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former environment minister, that will scrutinize whether companies’ efforts to curb climate change are credible or mere “greenwashing.”
McKenna, who was minister of environment and climate change from 2015 to 2019, will chair the panel.
Recent years have seen an explosion of pledges by businesses — including oil companies — to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” amid consumer expectations that corporations bear part of the burden of cutting pollution. But environmental campaigners say many such plans are at best unclear, at worst designed to make companies look good when actually they are fuelling global warming.
