Reality offsets: Climate meets capitalism at the Olympic Games

Abstract

In the era of undeniable climate crisis, investors too have become wary of corporate greenwashing. Far from heralding progress, this development appears to legitimise a collective greenwashing project better described as corporate environmentalism. Through this meta-greenwashing, corporations as a bloc are exploiting their communicative platforms to renarrate climate crisis into climate opportunity, positioning the corporation as an indispensable agent of overcoming the crisis. From one perspective, the entry of big capital into climate discourse promises to overcome the contradiction between endless growth and a finite planet. Yet, from another, it merely sustains the contradiction, fuelled by unjustified hope. This article critiques corporate environmentalism through the example of the Olympic Games. As the world’s largest media event that fuses half the population by technology while producing vast carbon emissions, the Games has in recent decades countered environmental critique through policies and discourses exemplary of corporate environmentalism. Analysing Olympic sustainability discourse shows how it sustains the double reality of climate crisis and capitalism by conjuring a seductive vision of a future of sustainability – a vision that floats free of present-day unsustainability in the same way net-zero targets rely on leaps of faith and undeveloped technologies. The examples analysed show how a new grammar of ‘future perfect sustainability’ offsets environmental concerns by rendering the present in light of a hoped-for future sustainability, just as it pushes sustainability ever farther away.