Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe is fed up with companies exaggerating their environmental credentials.
“There’s far too much greenwashing in the system,” he said in a recent interview. For Scaringe, it’s all too easy for a company to obfuscate the source of its power consumption, especially when it doesn’t actually create any new capacity for renewable energy. And consumers aren’t discerning enough to tell the difference.
“This is just so conceptually complex,” he said, making a clear distinction between companies that buy renewable energy to cover their own emissions while also creating new capacity and those who want to “pay a teeny little incremental amount more to get the ability to pat ourselves on the back and say we’re using renewable…