Opinion-Editorial: The Earthshot Prize is Off Target

This year, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge,  launched a new project: the Earthshot Prize. The Earthshot prize at its core is simple: if you come up with an innovative solution to five core environmental issues you can win one million pounds. These core issues, or “Earthshots,” are: protect & restore nature, clean our air, revive our oceans, build a waste-free world, and fix our climate. 

The Earthshot Prize is nothing more than a thinly-veiled greenwashing of the global elite. 

Prince William explained that he wanted the name the Earthshot Prize after Kennedy’s Moonshot campaign that put man on the moon. The idea of a “shot” is supposed to spark energy and creativity around solving a shared problem. This sentiment is also why former President Barack Obama called his campaign to adopt more solar power in America “Sunshot.” Prince William calls his environmental award “the most ambitious and prestigious of its kind” despite not yet awarding a single cent.

There is not much information about the Earthshot Prize except for an 11 minute 30 seconds video where Prince William is interviewed by David Attenborough and interviews members of the Earthshot Prize Council. The well-produced video plays like a blockbuster movie with star-studded cast members including Yao Ming, Shakira, Cate Blanchett, Jack Ma, and Indra Nooyi. Each Prize Council member answers Price William’s questions about why protecting the Earth is an important endeavor for everyone to engage in with great eloquence, pride, and some jokes are thrown in. 

Despite all of the attention that the Earthshot Prize has received, it is a deceptive tactic that allows the Prize Council to engage in ineffective environmentalism. 

Jack Ma, ex-chairman of Alibaba group, helped to manufacture a holiday in China that promotes rabid consumerism called “11.11.” In 2020 alone, this fake holiday generated $38 billion dollars in sales in a single day. To create a holiday that focuses on consumerism is not a really environmentally friendly thing to do.

However, Jack Ma is not the most hypocritical Prize Council member. That prize goes to Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsico, one of the world’s largest producer of packaged food and beverages. The list of human rights abuses and environmental degradation against Pepsico is long. Pepsico, along with Nestle and Coca-Cola, are the three largest plastic polluters in the world. In the search for cheaper palm oil, Pepsico has also been responsible for the deforestation of thousands of acres of biodiverse rainforests in Indonesia. Under Indra Nooyi’s leadership, Pepsico certainly was not protecting and restoring nature or building a waste-free world.

Furthermore, this prize will distribute only 50 million pounds over a decade. For comparison, Jack Ma’s net worth alone is currently 70 billion dollars. The effects of Jack Ma not promoting rabid consumerism or Indra Nooyi stopping Pepsico’s plastic production could far outweigh any environmental benefits generated through this prize. 

The Earthshot Prize’s long list of nominating organizations also reveal where the prize’s true goals lie. The vast majority of nominating universities are from rich countries that have historically contributed to anthropogenic climate change and the well-established nonprofits on the list are all white-dominated and led organizations. These are the same organizations and communities that put the Earth on this trajectory to begin with.

The Prize Council and the nominating organizations history of hypocrisy when it comes to environmental issues is a feature of the Earthshot Prize. It does not actually seek to make real environmental change—it seeks to allow rich people feel powerful and shield them from critique. 

Real environmental change will come from community-driven projects that hold large companies and power systems accountable for their environmental harms—the true “most prestigious” environmental prize is the Goldman Environmental Prize which does just that. The Goldman Environmental Prize, dubbed the “Environmental Nobel” has been awarding grassroots changemakers across the globe including Berta Cáceres and LeeAnne Walters. This November, the Goldman Environmental Prize honored its three decades-long achievements in awarding environmental protection.

Environmental sustainability work does need rich people to help but not through the Earthshot Prize. The Prize Council could have chosen to invest their money in existing environmental work or forgo personal wealth gains by choosing not to further polluting activities. However, they chose to enrich themselves and pursue philanthrocapitalism instead. Like the Bezos Earth Fund and Shell’s Eco-Marathon, the Earthshot Prize does nothing but attach the names and faces of the rich to “ethical” and “humanitarian” campaigns without generating any real change that actually protects the environment.