Procurement with Purpose Newsletter No 128, August 19th 2025, with Finland’s heat, greenwashing at Google, banking ESG and COP26

Two days walking in Shropshire last week, ‘conquering’ the Long Mynd and Stiperstones. Twelve miles in close to 30C heat on Wednesday – then caught in heavy rain on Thursday. But the south of England missed the rain and drought is now a serious issue for the UK.

Walking across farmland and the higher moors on the plateau of the Long Mynd (which still has ‘commoners’ who are allowed to graze sheep and keep semi-wild horses as pictured above on the land), it was clear how dry the spring and summer has been. Indeed, sheep were getting some supplementary feed as the grass just hasn’t grown in recent months.

The famous Lightspout waterfall was little more than a trickle, although from a diversity point of view it was interesting to see such a range of people enjoying the walks and the chance for kids to paddle in the streams near the National Trust car park. We strode past what sounded like a group of youngsters of African origin (probably swearing in their language as the path was tricky at that point), a well-dressed Indian family scrambling up the rocky path with the women in elegant saris and hiking boots, then a family with two women in full only-eyes-visible Niqabs. Not sure I’d like to be them in the heat, to be honest, and the accompanying man was in shorts and tee-shirt which seemed both unfair and much more appropriate. But not sure I would have wanted to be the orthodox Jewish guys with dark suits, ties and Kippahs either…   

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A ‘coolcation’ in Finland? Maybe not…

This summer, it is Scandinavia that has perhaps seen the most impressive smashing of weather records. If you’ve been thinking about buying a holiday home in Finland to escape the heat of the British, French or Mediterranean summer, then think again. Finland saw temperatures above 30C for 22 days from mid-July and into early August.

A weather station in the Norwegian part of the Arctic Circle also recorded temperatures above 30C (86F) on 13 days in July, and Scandinavia and the Arctic seem to be experiencing more dramatic temperature increases than the global average. It isn’t clear what this might do in global terms given the role Arctic ice plays in wider weather systems, and residents of countries such as Norway and the UK which aren’t used to very hot weather will suffer more if uncomfortable levels of heat continue. And in Finland, reindeer herders warned that their animals were on the verge of dying in the heat.

The UK has just been consistently hot and dry. Going back to my Shropshire observations, we will see more food price inflation coming through in the Autumn, I’m sure, as crops have been poor and farmers have struggled to keep animals fed and watered. Watch out for ‘shock’ economic news later in the year.

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Greenwashing at its best!

Congratulations to Sustainability magazine and Google for a fine example of Greenwashing in a recent article published a couple of weeks ago.  I’ll be adding as a case study to my course material when I talk about that topic in my lectures.

The headline is ‘Tech & AI: How Google Cut 26 Million Tonnes of GHG Emissions’. Clearly, a good news story, featuring Google’s recently published 2025 Sustainability Report. Indeed, read the article and you might think that everything is wonderful in Google’s sustainability programme. Less water being used! Reduced emissions from data centres!

However, there are a couple of issues here. Firstly, the headline itself is misleading. Google did NOT ‘cut 26 million tonnes’.  Read the detail and Google provided products which ‘enabled individuals, cities and other partners to reduce an estimated 26 million metric tons of GHG emissions…”.

So Google reports that five of its new products have helped others reduce emissions. For instance, a ‘new route on maps that shows you the most fuel efficient path’ and highlighting pre-owned products on Google search. All well and good but I do not take that as Google itself cutting emissions.    

What it fails to mention is perhaps the single most important data point. The article says that ‘Google has reduced data centre emissions by 12% compared to the year before’. But follow the hyper link provided, to Energy Digital website, and you see an article and a headline that lays out a fundamental issue. ‘Google's 13% Emissions Rise: Can AI & Data Centres be Green?’

This is confusing to say the least, but it is clear that the Sustainability article is basically a piece of marketing content for Google rather than serious reporting. Google’s total emissions have increased, and the firm has NOT ‘cut’ 26 million tonnes of emissions.  Go to the source material, the actual Google 2024 Environmental Report. It reveals a 13% rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the previous year, largely due to Scope 3 increases, energy consumption from the AI boom and the data centres that support it.  Overall emissions for the firm now sit at 50% higher than they were in 2019.

Of course, some of the achievements made by Google are admirable in their own right, such as ‘a water stewardship project which replenished roughly 64% of its freshwater consumption, which was around 4.5 billion gallons, within a year’.

And I’m not saying that the firm is any worse than others. All the big tech firms are having the same issue with AI pushing emissions in the wrong direction. But for a reputable publication to produce an entire article without mentioning the headline aspect of the Google sustainability picture seems disappointing.

It would have been much more honest – and more interesting to the reader - if the article had talked about the negatives as well as the positives for the firm and perhaps discussed future plans. But as it stands, this looks like basic greenwashing.

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COP26 and hypocrisy in Brazil?  

We’ve talked about quite a few COP events here over the last couple of years, and the next (COP30) is in November, hosted by Brazil in Belem, the city known as the  ’Gateway to the Amazon’. There has already been controversy about the construction of a four-lane highway through the rainforest so the event can be accessed more easily. Now Brazil’s President Lula de Silva is losing credibility as a leader in sustainability both because of that development but also because of his support for new oil and gas fields.

Recently, BP has made its largest oil and gas discovery of the past 25 years off the coast of Brazil as it continues to shift its focus away from renewables and back to fossil fuels. The Santos basin oil and gas discovery, which is located in deep waters, could be its largest since its 1999 Shah Deniz gasfield in Azerbaijan discovery.

Now, despite hosting COP, Brazil is aiming to become the fourth-largest global oil producer by 2029, with a projected output of 5.4 million barrels per day.  President Lula has said that oil extraction from reserves near the Amazon River mouth (and presumably from this new BP field) is necessary to fund Brazil's energy transition and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. He argues that the revenue generated from oil production will help finance renewable energy projects and ensure affordable energy prices. 

“We want the oil because it will still be around for a long time. We need to use it to fund our energy transition, which will require a lot of money,” Lula said in February.

He was much more positive about net zero at the beginning of his term in office, but the reality of a struggling economy and voter dis-satisfaction seem to have hit him now. So does that make him a hypocrite or simply a pragmatist? 

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Banks losing enthusiasm for ESG

City Am reports that ‘Over the past year, the world’s biggest banks‘ net zero enthusiasm has quickly and quietly dried up. Top lenders have backtracked, diluted or outright abandoned their environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies.

Trump becoming President was a turning point for green finance with firms across the financial turning sour on their ESG commitments in order to curry favour with the boss. But actually some of the ESG investment approaches and ideas were plain silly. Seeing tobacco firms scoring higher than Tesla on ESG ratings was an indicator of this, and funds saying they would not invest in defence firms, for example, was rather worrying given the war in Europe and Russia’s aggression.

Scott Lane, founder and chief executive of ESG business solutions service Speeki, talked to City AM about the wider ESG picture in the banking sector.  “The biggest factor behind the scrapping of these initiatives is that they were half-baked and never given the chance to demonstrate value to shareholders and customers”.

This is another case where we really need a reset on ESG and sustainability. Let’s get rid of the nonsense and focus on what really benefits the planet, its people - and its businesses.

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Reading Festival

So since Truck Festival, I’ve been doing my Spotify and YouTube research into the Reading Festival acts we may want to check out.  (If anyone is possibly interested, this is my Spotify playlist with 2 songs from every act on the four main music stages…)  

One highlight is definitely Indoor Foxes, the moniker of Martha Barr from Glasgow. She has been performing for six years (even though she still looks about 18 to me). She is a loud and passionate performer (check out her vocals on this cover of ‘Daft Punk is Playing At My House’) but can write real tunes too, like this.  Surely a big future awaits her and looking forward to seeing her at Reading this week!