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Aspiration’s comprehensively deceptive greenwashing
It’s “do well” OR “do good.”
It’s impossible to miss Aspiration’s star-studded marketing blitz, in which a succession of A-listers promise you that you can save the planet by switching credit-cards (“Do good. Do well.”). They’re emblematic of the promise of green capitalism, the idea that climate emergency is about a slight misconfiguration of the profit motive and the finance sector.
If that’s true, it’s great news for our species, our civilization and our planet. It would mean that we could head off the climate emergency with just a few tweaks to finance regulation, which is a much easier lift than transforming the whole economy. Even if you hate capitalism, it’d be great if saving the world could be decoupled from ending the finance sector, because doing the former would give you more time to accomplish the latter.
But if it’s possible to “do well and do good,” you wouldn’t know it from Aspiration. From top to bottom, the company is a swamp of deception, omissions, and greenwashing. For a comprehensive breakdown of the Aspiration scam, look to Carson Kessler’s excellent Propublica investigation:
