Taking Back the Consumer’s Voice

by Madeline Khoo

For my collage, I wanted to create a piece that echoes the climate hushing and greenwashing concepts that were discussed in Lily Hsueh’s new book, Corporations at Climate Crossroads. When I attended this book talk for my sustainability experience, Hseuh describes this “climate crossroads” corporations are facing, as climate hushing is increasingly likely, given how heavily corporations’ success is driven by public perception in every way. While more corporations are choosing to be more environmentally aware and conscious to appeal to a generation that is concerned with these topics, there is another angle where wanting to be involved with green initiatives can both positively and negatively impact a brand’s image, or the other side, where a brand chooses to make unsustainable decisions and wants to hide that from its consumers. This collage focuses on an image of a person shushing the viewer, overlapped with an image of Wall Street to allude to corporations, greenwashing protests to showcase the public perception on these issues, and three CEOs who participate in climate hushing: Andrew Wheeler, Rupert Murdoch, and Charles Koch. Andrew Wheeler is a former coal lobbyist and current administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency who has restricted the agency’s ability to use scientific data when creating regulations, rolled back clean-water protections, and more. Rupert Murdoch is the founder of Fox News, known for his climate-change skepticism that is echoed in the bias of the news platform. Charles Koch is the founder of Koch Industries, a business that released 25 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2017, and co-founder of the Cato Institute, which launched conferences for skeptics of climate change. Whether a CEO climate hushes for political or economic reasons, the result still ends in this lack of transparency to consumers on a business’s sustainability initiative. This piece seeks to highlight these issues and to urge the viewer to fight back against the unsustainable practices that these corporations employ for the sake of profit.