A story of climate, culture and courage, ft. EU Green Claims Directive

The EU policy kerfuffle unintentionally revealed a major problem-we can draft all the climate laws we want, but if the culture isn't ready for honesty, they're Schrödinger's legislation

Image : AI generated

It began, as these things often do, not with a decision, but with a murmur.

The story began when a European Commission spokesperson, Maciej Berestecki, standing behind the insignia of the European Commission, declared that in its “current context” the Commission “intends to withdraw the Green Claims proposal.”

With that small act of verbal disassembly, a piece of legislation years in the making, designed to hold companies accountable for their environmental marketing- collapsed into confusion. Negotiations between Parliament and Council were cancelled. The media declared the directive dead. Environmental groups cried foul. And the EU, long considered a global vanguard in climate policy, looked momentarily spineless.

Within a week, the Commission reversed itself. It had not, it now insisted, “formally” withdrawn the directive. “At no point has there been a backtrack,” an official clarified, delicately unravelling the narrative of retreat. The law was, in effect, Schrödinger’s Directive - simultaneously dead and alive, undone and still under negotiation.

In any other policy cycle, such bureaucratic stammering might have been a minor embarrassment. But the Green Claims Directive was never just a consumer protection law. It was an existential test of the European Union’s political will, its regulatory integrity, and its cultural readiness to anchor sustainability not just in aspiration, but in accountability.

NO- the directive had not been withdrawn. And YES- the broader commitment remained.

The President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was said to be personally supportive but the damage had already been done.

Not to the law necessarily but certainly to the cultural fabric on which laws like this one must depend.

What makes this episode remarkable is not the legislative back-and-forth. Policy lives and dies every day, and often for less. To me, what is remarkable here is how much this particular piece of policy demanded of our belief system and how quickly it exposed the fractures in that belief.

Lack of cultural readiness

THIS is exactly why I find it imperative to write this piece today.
The EU Green Claims Directive, had it passed cleanly, would have been the first of its kind, a legislative attempt to restore honesty to the language of sustainability. A law not to regulate emissions, but to regulate meaning.

Consumers are enticed by labels that promise "climate neutrality" or "recycled content," yet studies show more than half of such claims are vague, misleading, or entirely unsubstantiated.

The directive required that any such claim be scientifically verifiable, independently certified, and legally accountable.

The Green Claims Directive, first proposed in March 2023 and passed at first reading by Parliament in 2024, was meant to change this. It aimed to make environmental claims verifiable, comparable, and grounded in science, backed by independent accredited verification. Not only would this create a level playing field for honest businesses, it would also protect consumers from deceit, a lex specialis to the broader EmpCo Directive, which bars climate neutrality claims based solely on offsets.

It was a proposal of quiet power.

By all accounts, the law was modest, measured, and sorely needed. But it faced a familiar foe ie. the fear of “burdening” business, specifically microenterprises, companies with fewer than ten employees. Parliament had already agreed to exempt them. But the specter of bureaucracy, once invoked, proved enough to nearly kill the proposal.

This is the part that matters and the part I want to have more conversations about. Not that the directive might still pass (albeit weakened) but that it almost didn’t because of a lack of cultural readiness to defend the simple act of demanding that people tell the truth.

“Greenhushing” and the fear of speaking honestly

Unsurprisingly, faced with such uncertainty, some companies are choosing silence over speech. This phenomenon known as “green hushing”, where businesses deliberately avoid talking about their environmental efforts for fear of backlash or non-compliance, is on the rise. But this, too, is a kind of capitulation. A retreat into ambiguity. And, ironically, a greater danger than greenwashing itself.

If you really dig deeper into the subject you’ll find that, sustainability disclosures, when honest, can increase both company value and consumer trust. Silence may shield firms from scrutiny, but it also forfeits credibility and opportunity. Therefore, the challenge in this case is not whether to speak, but how to speak with integrity in a world that punishes dishonesty but still resists verification.

The culture that eats policy alive

We tend to think of climate denial as a crude thing, the domain of oil executives and populist cynics. But in truth, denial is more insidious. It is present in every room where truth is treated as negotiable, where discomfort is avoided, where the long view is dismissed for the sake of the quarter, or the vote.

And if there is any lesson to be drawn from Europe’s recent ambivalence, it is this - that even the most well-crafted policy will falter without the culture to support it.

It’s not that we don’t understand the science.

It’s that we have not yet cultivated the emotional and moral literacy to act upon it.

The thing that came to fore in all of this is that, caught between ambition and appeasement, the Commission blinked. Its spokesperson’s brief statement (ill-phrased or deliberately cautious) set off a chain reaction that nearly dismantled years of legal drafting and stakeholder engagement.

The mindset gap

This insight is hardly new.

Around 2014-15, during my time at UC Berkeley, I came across George Marshall’s work, who is a climate communications expert and the author of Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.

George Marshall, a British environmental campaigner, communications specialist, award-winning documentary-maker and writer, will help you understand why we hesitate, why we defer, why we fumble. And how we might, if we choose to, change.

It remains, to this day, one of the most essential and unsettling books on the subject and today seems to be the perfect setting to suggest this book to whoever is interested in understanding the cultural nuances in this context. The book’s premise is simple and devastating - that climate change, far from being misunderstood, is simply unconfronted. Not for lack of facts but because it does not fit the emotional architecture of the modern mind.

Drawing from social psychology, evolutionary theory, and interviews across political, religious, and professional divides, Marshall makes a clear case - we ignore climate change not because we can’t see it, but because we can’t bear what it asks of us.

I remember being blown by this stark reality of our existence as even I struggled to make sense of the impact of our collective actions.

It asks for collective responsibility in an age of hyper-individualism.

It asks for moral clarity in a world allergic to guilt.

It asks for sacrifice, shared destiny, and long-term thinking, all things our culture treats with suspicion.

And so, we turn away.

The reflection of the Directive

The Green Claims Directive, then, is not just another law. It is a mirror. It reflects the gap between our espoused values and our lived ones. Between what we believe we care about, and what we are willing to defend.

It is telling that a directive designed only to verify voluntary marketing claims -not to cap emissions, not to penalize polluters, but merely to clarify language- was nearly abandoned for fear of upsetting business. It is also telling that this fear persisted despite clear public demand for transparency and despite overwhelming scientific consensus.

Marshall writes that the failure to act on climate change is not a failure of intellect, but of imagination. And indeed, it is only in the final chapters of his book that he offers solutions - not technological or legislative ones, but psychological, communal, and cultural.

He suggests, provocatively, that we might take cues from religion : that we need rituals, shared stories, sacred values, and opportunities for redemption. That we must frame climate not solely as an environmental issue, but as an issue of justice, economics, public health, and human survival.

That we must build a culture in which action is inevitable.

If this law fails, what comes next?

If the Green Claims Directive collapses or is ultimately watered down into ineffectiveness, the question won’t be whether sustainability regulation is dead. It will be whether sustainability truth can find life elsewhere.

And in many ways, it already has.

Litigation is rising. French courts have cracked down on greenwashing. Dutch courts have ordered multinationals to reduce emissions. In Germany, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that companies cannot claim climate neutrality without disclosing whether their claims are based on real reductions or mere offsets.

Financial markets, too, are stepping in. ESG metrics, green bonds, and supply chain disclosures are becoming soft enforcers of what law has failed to codify. And across Europe, cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris are implementing circularity and regeneration principles at the urban level, far ahead of national parliaments.

This is what we might call the post-policy architecture of sustainability, a world in which governance is decentralised, plural, and adaptive. It is less efficient, for sure, but in the absence of governments, that are willing to take action vehemently in favour of the cause - this architecture will need to be strengthened and made more resilient.

The culture of conviction

As I have often emphasised that nothing excuses the biggest stakeholder’s or the regulators or legislative authorities failure to lead the charge. At a time of ecological crisis, language matters. Structure matters. Law matters. We cannot regenerate the planet without regenerating the systems that govern it.

But we must also recognise that laws do not enforce themselves. They require belief, coherence, and collective will. And as I mentioned before, where these are absent, other forces of the architecture -civil society, finance, local governance, citizen activism must step in to fill the gap.

The Green Claims Directive may still pass. But its moment of uncertainty has already taught us what we needed to know : that truth, once political, is now cultural.
That sustainability is a matter of compliance, but more importantly it is a matter of character. And that the most dangerous form of greenwashing may not be corporate, it may actually be institutional, rhetorical, and systemic.

What Now?

Of course, this controversy, in time, shall become a footnote.

But let us not waste the lesson. Pay close attention to the way in which the debates, discussions and negotiations are now going to take place to pass this law.

It’s time to realise that we cannot legislate our way out of climate collapse. We must believe our way out. And for that we must shift our mindset and not just that of politicians and CEOs, as this applies to every citizen who shops, votes or even tells stories.

Whether you are a commissioner in Brussels, a policymaker in Washington, a founder in London, or a parent in Dhaka, you will support climate action only when your values are aligned with your sense of purpose. When you see sustainability not as a sacrifice, but as a moral imperative. Not as a trade-off, but as the only plausible way forward.

That kind of shift doesn’t begin in a courtroom or a parliament. It begins in the culture. In the stories we tell. In what we choose to believe and defend.

Read this book before you - vote or build or lead

I urge you to pick this book.

This particular incident triggers a deeper reckoning - what causes even the best-designed climate laws to falter? The answer, increasingly, lies in mindset.

The author explores the premise that the real barriers to climate action and posits the idea that the real barriers aren’t political or technological. They are psychological. They are cognitive biases, social conformity, identity-driven worldviews, and a universal human tendency to look away from the slow, abstract, collective threats that define climate change.

In dozens of interviews, ranging from evangelical skeptics in Texas to Nobel-winning scientists, he uncovers the patterns that explain not only denial, but disengagement. We don’t fail to act because we don’t understand. We fail to act because we understand just enough to be overwhelmed, ashamed, or numbed.

In fact, as he points out, data alone rarely changes minds. What changes minds and cultures are stories, symbols, and social reinforcement. What people trust are not necessarily facts, but messengers who mirror their values. What mobilizes action is not shame, but shared belief. (Think : the health warning ads about smoking and alcohol, which rely on inducing shame, but their actual impact is often limited).

If we want the Green Claims Directive (or any climate law) to succeed, we need more than legal architecture. We need a cultural shift so profound that legislation becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

And that shift begins with mindset.

Whether you are -

• A European Commissioner voting on the next phase of the Green Deal,

• A leader of a political party weighing short-term popularity against long-term integrity,

• An entrepreneur shaping your brand narrative,

• A policy drafter negotiating the technical minutiae of regulatory language,

• Or simply a citizen deciding what to believe

You will only support, defend, and demand ambitious climate action if you have a mindset that accepts the scale of the challenge, embraces collective responsibility, and recognises climate change not as an environmental issue but as a human one.

Don’t Even Think About It is a necessary read for anyone engaged in this space. It offers no false comfort, but tremendous clarity. And its core message is simple yet transformative -

“We are not hardwired to ignore climate change. But we are surrounded by a culture that encourages us to.”

From conviction to culture

In the book’s closing chapters, Marshall argues that climate change must be recast as a sacred, non-negotiable value not unlike justice, freedom, or the protection of children. He urges the climate movement to learn from religion: to foster ritual, community, forgiveness, and belonging. To give people not just responsibilities, but a story they can see themselves in.

It is not enough to legislate sustainability. We must believe in it. We must speak of it in our homes, our boardrooms, our campaigns, and our courts. We must make it normal, compelling, and shared.

And yes! we must make it forgivable, too. Because people cannot act from guilt alone. They must be shown a way forward, one that permits them to be flawed but still part of the solution.

The temporary collapse and resurrection of the Green Claims Directive is a cautionary tale but also a gift. It reminds us that the gap between what we know and what we do is not always about information. It is often about imagination.

And so the real work begins not with drafting policy, but with reframing the story we tell ourselves :

That we are not helpless.
That we are not enemies.
That we are not alone.

And that climate action, far from being a sacrifice, is an expression of the very best of what it means to be human.

If you want to understand why climate progress is so hard and how we might make it easier - START HERE.

Because before you support a directive like the EU Green Claims Directive, you must first be willing to believe that it matters.

And to believe that, you need the mindset.

As in the end, this was never about marketing claims.

It was about the truth.

And our ability, as a culture, to bear it.