Why does nobody believe you when you say you've changed?

Ørsted used to be called DONG Energy. In 2006, 85% of its power generation came from coal. By 2023, renewables accounted for 93%. Carbon emissions down 96%. They sold the entire oil and gas business. Closed the last coal plant. Built the world’s largest offshore wind portfolio.

By any measurable standard, this is the most complete corporate energy transformation ever executed.

The stock collapsed 83% from its peak. The CEO was replaced. S&P downgraded the company to one notch above junk.

If genuine transformation doesn’t protect you, what exactly is the incentive to transform?

The Cases

Ørsted. The transformation is verified. They physically divested fossil fuel assets and built wind farms. This is not a rebrand — it’s a reconstruction of the entire business. But when they abandoned two U.S. offshore wind projects in 2023 due to supply chain costs and interest rates, the market didn’t treat this as a normal business setback. It treated it as confirmation that the whole project was suspect. The stock lost 20% in a single day.

A fossil fuel company that wrote down a comparable asset would not have faced the same reaction. But Ørsted had made promises about what it was becoming. When any piece stumbled, the entire narrative was questioned.

Unilever under Paul Polman. Polman launched the Sustainable Living Plan, eliminated quarterly earnings guidance, and delivered 290% shareholder return over his tenure. The sustainability-branded products grew 69% faster than the rest of the business.

Then he left. His successor struggled with growth. And one of Unilever’s largest shareholders, Terry Smith of Fundsmith, wrote in his annual letter that Unilever was “obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business.” He mocked the effort to define “the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise.”

The share price had underperformed for five years. The criticism landed not because Polman’s results were bad — they weren’t — but because he had framed sustainability as the reason for the strategy. When any stumble followed, it was attributed to the sustainability framing rather than to normal business volatility.

Interface. Ray Anderson committed the world’s largest carpet tile manufacturer to eliminating all negative environmental impact by 2020. They achieved a 96% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Launched the world’s first carbon-negative carpet tile. Met the target.

Interface still faces criticism — for a low post-consumer recycling rate, for reliance on carbon offsets, for an industry where 90% of carpets still end up in landfills. The company’s own VP of sustainability called their recycling rate “pathetic” while simultaneously noting they were “best in class.”

Being best in class doesn’t inoculate you. It just means the class is being graded on a curve nobody agreed to.

Meanwhile, Silence Goes Unpunished

ExxonMobil and Chevron never set company-wide net-zero targets. They pursued what researchers call “regressive strategies” — no curtailment of fossil fuel production, no meaningful clean energy investment, no Scope 3 commitments.

They were never punished for this.

BP and Shell made bold net-zero pledges and then backtracked — BP scrapping its production reduction pledge, Shell lowering its emissions targets. BP’s shares fell 18% in 2024. By early 2025, Shell was exploring a takeover bid for BP.

A 2022 study in PLOS ONE examined all four companies and found a mismatch between claims and actions across the board. But the European companies that made the loudest claims absorbed the most reputational damage.

The market effectively told companies: silence about climate commitments carries lower risk than ambition followed by any shortfall.

The Measurable Response

This dynamic now has a name: greenhushing. Companies deliberately hiding their sustainability efforts to avoid scrutiny.

A South Pole study found 70% of sustainability-committed companies worldwide are deliberately concealing their climate goals. 88% of environmental services firms are reducing climate messaging. 86% of consumer goods companies are pulling back communications.

A Harvard Business Review study of 75 global firms found that only 13% had actually retreated from sustainability work. The other 85% were maintaining or accelerating efforts — but doing so quietly.

The work continues. The talking stopped.

Why This Is Structural

Academic research confirms the mechanism. Kim and Lyon at the University of Michigan found that perceived incongruence between a company’s message and its performance is punished more harshly than bad performance alone.

Read that again: a company that claims to be good and falls short is punished more severely than a company that never claimed anything and performs just as badly.

This isn’t a quirk of perception. It’s a structural feature of how credibility works. Making a public commitment creates a measurable target. Missing the target — even partially, even for legitimate reasons — costs more than never having set one.

Credibility isn’t granted by announcement. It’s accumulated through verifiable evidence over time. And the few companies that actually transformed are paying the credibility tax of every company that faked it.

The word “greenwashing” contains no gradient. It’s applied identically to Ørsted — which eliminated 96% of its emissions — and to a fast fashion brand that labeled a collection “conscious.”

Until the market can distinguish between genuine transformation and performance, the rational incentive is to stay quiet. Not because the work doesn’t matter. Because the talking costs more than the silence.