Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 13 December 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

The Role of the Media and Communications in Actioning Climate Change: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Jonathan White:

I will come in on a specific example. Senator Boylan raised the carbon neutral claim, which is a common type of commercial practice in fossil fuel aviation and petrol or gas supply. There have been examples of self-regulatory body rulings finding those claims to be misleading. That has not happened in Ireland but has happened elsewhere. It has happened repeatedly in some instances. The claim might be for neutrality before it was found to be a matter of compensation. Each one was found to communicate the same basic misleading consumer understanding. There is also litigation afoot regarding those commercial practices. However, the issue is that they continue across the board and across the different European jurisdictions. It an example of why I feel sympathy for the role of self-regulatory bodies such as the ASAI in trying to deal with these quite complex issues. Complaints often run to hundreds of pages in order to explain all of the scientific invalidity of those sorts of claims and the context around them. We can see that systemically it is not proving to be the solution.

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