The misinformation tax: Greenwashing and greenhushing in energy communications

One of the most unpredictable aspects of public relations is that you can control the message but not the reaction. Nowhere is this distinction more pronounced, or more critical, than in the energy industry, where firms must balance economic and operational realities while still advancing environmental progress. 

In an industry where the energy transition shapes both the public and private discourse, companies understand that making sustainability claims without concrete evidence can do significant damage to their credibility. But the risk of doing the opposite—not talking about your progress at all out of fear of scrutiny—is often overlooked.

Greenwashing, making misleading or unsubstantiated environmental claims, and greenhushing, avoiding the conversation altogether, actually play a similar role in sustainability progress. Both leave audiences to draw their own conclusions. And those can often be far from accurate.

Luckily, there’s a middle ground between greenwashing and greenhushing: saying precisely and accurately what you’ve achieved and what progress you still need to make, with data to back it up. Here’s your guide to doing just that.

A brief history of greenwashing 

Greenwashing began to gain steam when sustainability became a major driver of purchase intent in the 1990s. Fast-forward to 2015, when the Paris Agreement further pushed environmental benchmarking into the conversation. By 2020, net-zero promises went mainstream as a corporate benchmark, with the number of companies declaring net-zero targets doubling between 2019 and 2020. 

Investor pressure, shareholder activism, and tightening energy regulations turned net-zero commitments from aspirational brand positioning into a boardroom mandate. Sustainability credentials became a de facto requirement for accessing capital markets, winning major contracts, and attracting talent in the energy sector.

While making a net-zero pledge is an admirable step, many companies did so without an actionable plan to back it up. Pledges multiplied faster than the infrastructure could keep pace with. Many publicly stated goals lacked roadmaps for reaching them. 

As the gap between corporate ambition and corporate reality widened, audiences started to notice and the term “greenwashing” became part of the public lexicon. The phenomenon is now fairly well-known: Make a claim without something defensible behind it, and buyers, investors, and regulators rightly move to skepticism. But some companies are avoiding saying anything at all to avoid potential backlash. Which, in terms of corporate communications and PR, is its own kind of problem. 

Two sides of the same coin

The answer to better sustainability positioning isn't less or more communication. It's accurate, strategic communication grounded in what you can actually defend. Before we dig into how that’s accomplished, let’s explore the drawbacks of both greenwashing and greenhushing. 

Greenwashing: The loud, confident firstborn

The word "greenwashing” carries a connotation of deliberate action to conceal or mislead. And while examples of intentional deception do exist—and you’ve surely read all those case studies—the more common story in energy and industrial sectors is subtler. 

Picture this: A branding team creates a campaign featuring wind turbines and bold net-zero language. While decarbonization is a 10-year strategic priority, the campaign isn't an accurate snapshot of the company's current standing. Months pass before the operations team reads the content, feeling a quiet unease. The investor deck tells a slightly different story. The engineering team never reviewed the language, let alone approved the numbers. No one had bad intentions. But the gap between the claim and the company's current reality is now public record.

Without data transparency and accountability, it’s a slippery slope. 

A 2024 study found that organizational silos and centralized, hierarchical structures are often leading causes of greenwashing. Data integrity can also be at play. A recent legal analysis notes "greenwashing lawsuits increasingly start inside bad data systems long before they reach the courtroom." 

Even in today’s ESG-savvy landscape, many companies still lack a clear measurement framework for accurately tracking sustainability progress. By breaking down ESG progress into clear, measurable goals and sharing this framework with all relevant parties, companies can ensure that marketing, PR, and leadership work from the same source of truth when communicating about sustainability. 

Greenwashing: The price tag

The costs of greenwashing are documented, compounding, and increasingly difficult to reverse. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Business Ethics focused on cases in which a firm overcommitted or didn’t deliver on sustainability promises rather than act irresponsibly. The team found a statistically significant negative link between perceived greenwashing and customer satisfaction. 

For B2B companies such as those in the energy industry, even more factors are at play, including the crucial investor layer. In one survey of 350 investment decisionmakers, 85% believed that the greenwashing problem is getting worse. Another study found that 94% of active investors believe that any given corporate ESG report contains unsubstantiated claims. 

The baseline for ESG credibility is already compromised in the market’s eyes. When greenwashing news breaks, holdings can reduce, stock prices can decline, and every subsequent sustainability disclosure from a given company gets viewed through a lens of skepticism that’s hard to shake. 

Loss of technical credibility with the buyers who matter most also impacts the bottom line. Engineers and procurement professionals who encounter unsubstantiated sustainability claims can come to distrust a company as a whole. In a sector where partnerships are long, the stakes are high, and technical credibility is the currency of every new contract, that’s a critical problem. 

Greenhushing: The quiet, angsty middle child

After considering the ramifications of greenwashing, avoiding sustainability communication entirely can start to feel reasonable to many brands. 

Greenhushing, the deliberate decision to under-communicate or go entirely silent on sustainability efforts, is one direct and immediate result of greenwashing backlash. If making sustainability claims poses such a significant threat, why say anything? It might feel like a neutral option, but this approach can cause issues of its own. 

Connected Impact's Transparency Index 2024 reviewed more than 600,000 external communications from 200 of the largest companies in the US and UK and found 58% were actively under-promoting their ESG progress. 

For energy companies genuinely working on emissions reduction, operational efficiency, or responsible asset management, silence can cause a perception that “sustainability is not our priority.”

Greenhushing: The price tag

Harvard Law School now explicitly advises boards to "balance greenwashing risks with greenhushing risks," signaling just how quickly the legal and regulatory communities recognize saying nothing as its own form of avoiding the truth. 

The commercial consequences are just as concrete. A high percentage of businesses self-reported being excluded from contract opportunities because they couldn’t (or wouldn't) share their sustainability credentials.

In terms of investor relations, silence also has negative ramifications. Morgan Stanley’s 2025 Sustainable Signals Survey reports that 80% of global institutional investors view sustainability as core to managing investment risk. 

Although these studies may not be specific to the energy industry, the takeaway remains: Staying quiet isn’t an effective way of reducing scrutiny. Rather, it removes your voice from the table during the evaluation stage for potential clients or investors. It also removes your voice from a conversation that is arguably more central to the energy industry than any other, especially amid the current evolution of energy systems and all the complexity and innovation that comes with it. 

The antidote: Saying what’s true with careful words and data

Words, even lack thereof, are rarely neutral. Language carries connotations, creates impressions, and shapes how an audience understands what they're being told. Phrases like "carbon neutral," "cleaner energy," without context, or the absence of any message at all, invite audiences to read between the lines. 

Using honest, transparent language about the pace, difficulty, and specificity of what progress actually looks like goes much further than ambiguous claims that may or may not hold up. Stakeholders in the energy industry understand the complexity and competing priorities involved with net-zero and other ESG progress, but only your company knows its specific operational realities. By communicating with authenticity, you reflect your company’s nuanced approach to a complex energy landscape and its commitment to transparent, practical progress. 

How to hit the ESG communications sweet spot

The alternative to both greenwashing and greenhushing is precision and the confidence that comes from having built the infrastructure to support what you say. Energy companies doing genuinely complex, difficult, consequential work have more real stories to tell than almost any sector. Here's how to tell it credibly.

1. Start with data infrastructure, not the press release. 

Before any sustainability-related communication goes out the door, there needs to be a defensible, documented evidence trail behind it. The same goes for a media pitch, a social post and a blurb on your company’s homepage. Regulators and opposing counsel now treat website copy the same as product packaging. Digital statements are public records, and "we didn't think anyone would check" is not a legal strategy. This infrastructure is also what makes greenhushing unnecessary: When you have verified data, you have something defensible to say.

2. Break down the silos between operations and communications.

The communications team cannot publish what the technical team hasn't verified. Why? Because the engineering team is actually marketing’s greatest shield against risk. Establishing cross-functional review processes for ESG claims before publication helps ensure alignment and accuracy. 

Break down silos, find new ways of working, and establish systems across relevant functions to ensure that external communications are reviewed not only by your marketing experts, but by your technical SMEs. Otherwise, silos can lead to greenwashing, intentional or otherwise, and eventually, greenhushing. The latter removes your company from an essential energy industry discourse.

3. Embrace the "disclosure trumps performance" principle.

Teams often assume that honesty about progress gaps will make a company’s sustainability initiatives seem weak. In reality, communicating numbers not yet met and prolonged timelines fosters a sense of trust and openness. Emphasize why you have not yet met the target, acknowledge that more work needs to be done, and outline a plan to bridge the gap. All three elements showcase your nuanced understanding of an incredibly complex energy landscape. 

4. Develop a repeatable, evidence-based reporting framework. 

ESG reports are not marketing documents. A disciplined, data-driven accounting of where the company stands, with consistent metrics tracked year over year and honest commentary on both progress and gaps, is one of the most powerful credibility tools available. It also helps eliminate the temptation to greenhush. When you have a data-backed report that demonstrates progress, you want to show it to people. 

5. Show the work, not just the vision. 

The most credible energy communications lead with specifics: what was done at a particular facility, what emissions reduction was measured and by what methodology, who third-party verified the finding, and what comes next. Case studies, site-specific data, and documented outcomes are the currency of credibility and the antidote to radio silence. 

6. Invest in earned media as a structural defense against skepticism. 

When a reputable trade publication, financial analyst, or national media outlet validates your sustainability-related story, it carries a credibility that no press release can match. Simply put, external validation is invaluable. Third-party endorsements can carry significant weight in every element of your company’s growth strategy, from branding and marketing to sales and customer service.  

7. Seek third-party verification before you need it, not after. 

Independent environmental audits, third-party certifications, and external review of ESG reporting are how claims become credible and provide documented proof that saying something is worth it. In an environment where regulators are actively enforcing and investors are actively scrutinizing, self-declaration isn’t enough. 

The most compelling stories are rooted in proof 

With more than 30 years of experience helping energy and industrial companies communicate their sustainability efforts, we’ve seen every version of what happens when action and communication misalign. This much we know is true: Overclaiming, underclaiming, or opting out of the conversation entirely all leaves real value on the table. 

Our Growth Engine integrates branding, marketing, sales, service and technical teams into one connected system, which helps ensure every claim is grounded in operational reality and genuine achievement. 

Once we've established a connected, evidence-based narrative, we introduce your story to the journalists, analysts, and editors who shape how your industry thinks. Our PR and media relations team includes former network-level journalists who understand both the technical substance of energy and the standards of proof required for credible media coverage.

Let us help you build a communications strategy that makes your brand a trusted energy leader, with evidence-based messaging that stands up for your ESG progress. 

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