Global Courant 2023-04-30 17:00:45
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is pushing for a change to Federal Trade Commission regulations that would require all U.S. companies to adhere to California standards that govern when a company can advertise itself as “green.”
In a letter last week, Bonta and 15 other blue state AGs called on FTC Chair Lina Khan to amend the agency’s guides to the use of environmental marketing claims, or “green guides.” Bonta said making it harder for companies to call themselves “green” is a step needed to “strengthen consumer protection laws against advertising that exaggerates environmental benefits” or “greenwashing.”
Bonta argued that the FTC should follow the California model as a “leader in reducing waste, enacting environmental laws to the highest standards, and protecting and preserving our precious natural resources.”
“The FTC’s green guides need to be updated and strengthened to ensure that individuals and businesses can base their consumer decisions on accurate information,” Bonta said in a statement.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom (R) speaks as Senator Anthony Portantino (L) (D-Burbank) and California Attorney General Rob Bonta (C) look on at a news conference Feb. 1, 2023, in Sacramento, California. ((Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images))
“We are urging the federal government to go even further in developing strict standards to protect people from misleading information and to establish a strict basis for environmental marketing claims,” he said.
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Bonta says he wants to “expand the scope of the Green Guides to consider how the standards for each environmental marketing claim can be clarified and strengthened to ensure they are better supported by real environmental benefits.”
But Bonta’s move was criticized by a Republican counterpart who says the request is off limits to attorneys general.
“Attorneys General need to make sure that unelected federal bureaucrats can’t just enact any rule they want to advance their radical climate agenda, not encourage them,” Missouri Republican AG Andrew Bailey told Fox News Digital in a statement. .
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is up for re-election Tuesday night. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The AGs wrote that “the stated purpose of the Green Guides is to ‘help marketers avoid misleading environmental claims under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act’.”
“The Guides have come to play an important role in setting the limits of such claims,” they said.
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Indeed, as our states strive to address critical environmental issues – climate change, the pollution of our air and water, emerging contaminants and solid waste disposal, among so many others – the value of basic standards for evaluating whether environmental marketing or promotional claims are deceptive and thus potentially illegal under consumer protection laws cannot be overemphasized,” they wrote. “Our efforts are completely undermined by such unscrupulous environmental marketing.”
For example, the states are asking that the FTC require that if companies want to make a renewable energy claim, it must be “underpinned by actual environmental benefits, requiring marketers making renewable energy claims to actually purchase and use renewable energy.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group via AP)
Among other things, the AGs also want the FTC to change the definition of “compostable” to include both scientific standards and the known practical limitations of composting at scale.
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“FTC needs to make explicit that ‘recyclable’ means what the FTC intended and what consumers understand it to mean: that when the consumer properly disposes of a ‘recyclable’ item, it will actually be recycled as a matter of course,” Bonta said.
Bailey said such changes would not only place an additional burden on businesses, but would also unconstitutionally bypass Congress.
The FTC did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Brianna Herlihy is a political writer for Fox News Digital.
