In brief...

I’m a science teacher living in Bristol. In 2020 I took Shell to the Small Claims Court – I was asking for a refund because they claimed the petrol I’d bought was ‘carbon neutral’. I’m now doing a PhD project which uses a similar approach, but this time I’m looking at energy tariffs that claim to be green but undermine action on climate. This award-winning research is funded by Northern Bridge Consortium. Solving the cost of living and climate crises involves a rapid change to energy systems, greenwash slows this down, as consumers we can challenge this.
I need others to be involved by seeing if their energy tariff is up to scratch, and if not asking for some money back. Doing this will highlight the loopholes that allow companies to make money by greenwashing and hopefully lead to stronger action on climate.

For those wanting a bit more background...

When I took Shell UK to Court back in 2020, I was alarmed by the rise in offsetting claims to justify climate-harming activities, but their ‘Drive Carbon Neutral’ campaign really took the biscuit. I was a science teacher and did not consider myself a climate activist, merely a customer wanting my money back because I felt Shell were lying - advertising fossil fuels as carbon neutral!

This litigation forced a large multinational into lengthy correspondence with a customer as they attempted to defend the legitimacy of their offsetting practices. I wrote about my experience in a dissertation for the University of the West of England, winning the 2021 faculty Environmental Law prize. My clash with Shell had became 'research'. In academic research, research that...

1. Identifies a real world problem
2. Engages with others
3. Takes action to solve the problem...

...falls under the banner of Participatory Action Research, or PAR. I believe that PAR has the potential to quietly challenge corporate behaviour and advocate more meaningful climate governance. I am now working on a project that uses similar PAR methods, this time collaboratively with other consumers, to challenge the legal legitimacy of environmental claims made of Tradable Green Certificates (TGCs) by energy suppliers.
Regulatory authorities devised these certificates as instruments of decarbonisation, but like other markets-based fixes for the climate emergency, they have garnered significant criticism for their inherent flaws, which the 2022 energy crisis cast in even sharper relief.

Why might 'green' electricity undermine action on climate

To avoid catastrophic climate change, we simply need to stop using fossil fuels. This will happen if we can:

  • Use less energy overall
  • Use renewable energy sources to generate electricity
  • Switch to renewably sourced electricity instead of fossil fuels for transport and heating

We aren't doing well at using less energy overall, but we are gradually increasing our use of renewables, however this is happening much too slowly. This energy transition is something that many concerned consumers want to get behind and support.

Polls suggest that most people in the UK are worried about climate change and many would prefer to buy 'green' electricity, in order to support the energy transition. Suppliers, for their part, are keen to market their electricity as 'green' and might justify the green claim by...

  • Generating it themselves using renewable sources, such as solar or wind farms, that they build or own and maintain.
  • Buying it directly from a renewable generator.
  • Investing their profits in new tech that helps with the energy transition. 
  • Buying certificates (TGCs), which prove that some renewable electricity has been generated somewhere.

The problem is that these TGCs don't seem to have a positive impact other than lining the pockets of the traders who deal in them. Scottish Power have produced a great position paper that explains why here, some of the problems identified are...

  • They allow suppliers to buy dirty fossil fuel energy from generators on the wholesale market and sell it as clean renewable energy on the retail market.
  • Polluting energy sources like biomass and energy from incineration of rubbish can count as 'green' sources of TGCs.
  • They risk a type of double counting of green energy entering the grid
  • They may undermine financial support for new UK renewable infrastructure
  • Their use has been associated with multiple fraud & compliance issues. In 2021 Ofgem fined 20 suppliers for making unsubstantiated claims about renewables.
  • They risk to consumer trust - tariffs are hard to tell apart for consumers and so people believe that they are helping support decarbonisation when unwittingly they may be undermining it.

Despite years of criticism, TGCs have been used in UK electricity markets for two decades and it's as hard as ever to tell whether a 'green' supplier is helping to make the energy transition happen, or undermining it.

 

My research

My research interrogates the regulatory frameworks in which TGCs operate, challenges ‘green’ energy in court, and ethnographically analyses the litigation. In doing so it responds to the call for “deeper understanding of the extent to which litigation is an effective tool to strengthen climate governance” (Setzer and Vanhala, 2019), and resonates with Bouwer’s recognition of the significance of “numerous unacknowledged” examples of climate litigation (Bouwer, 2018). The work is situated in a critique of markets-based instruments and exemplifies ethical and logistical problems of relying on market mechanisms to tackle climate change. My bio is at: www.durham.ac.uk/staff/benjamin-hall2/