Greenwashing at Elsevier: A political ecology of corporate publishing

The largest science publishing corporations, including Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Sage, are key partners for the oil, gas, and coal industries insofar as they distribute scientific research and data that facilitate fossil fuel exploration, production, and distribution. Critical researchers seldom trace fossil fuels and, in turn, the climate crisis to the publishing corporations that they generally rely upon to distribute their own research. We argue that corporate publishers produce the invisibility of their connections to fossil fuels through changing practices of greenwashing both in the public sphere and within firms. We detail marketing and management practices in the case of the largest science publisher in the world: Elsevier. On the one hand, we examine evolving forms of green marketing. On the other hand, building on recent calls for political ecologies of labor, we highlight the proliferation of ‘greenwashing rituals’ within the firm – i.e., performative, management-sponsored dialogues and actions regarding climate change. We suggest that researchers continue to expand frameworks for critiquing the fossil fuel industry to include auxiliary industries such as corporate publishing.