Overheard on a coffee line

Ever accidentally eavesdrop on a conversation and you can't help but to chime in?

Maybe the journalist in me errs on the side of being nosy, but when I overheard two people at a climate panel recently trying to decipher the meaning of the different scopes of emissions, I had to join the conversation.

Fortunately, they were receptive, but to my surprise, these weren't exactly climate newbies. These were executives at a pretty popular B Corp.
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At first, you might think this signals that greenwashing has gotten out of control. If these execs don't know what Scope 3 means, can we really trust the company's sustainability commitments?

But on deeper reflection, I think this is really a story about the divide between scientific and plain language. The technical jargon may be a shortcut to signify seriousness, but it doesn't mean a company is actually acting more responsibly or is effective on a broad scale with its communication.

Instead, we need to move past catch-all language and talk about sustainability in different ways to different audiences. Segmentation is key, and often that means dropping the scientific talk and connecting with what different groups intuitively understand.

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