Well it’s official: we have a climate change emoji. Unicode, the shady consortium that oversees the release and standardization of emojis, has veered off its apolitical tracks and released a bound-to-be-contentious icon designed by Shepard Fairey.
First of all…what? Let’s unpack.
Possibility A: Unicode is now partaking in the general enshittification (see step two) of the internet by appeasing corporate interests with engagement strategies to keep users locked in, and protecting those interests by issuing toothless tools for public dissent.
Possibility B: Shepard Fairey tossed a monkey wrench into Unicode’s gears and now we’ve got a tool to hack the digital commons.
What is Unicode smoking?
First, we have to ask why in hell Unicode—formerly the Switzerland of tech standards—decided to plant its flag in the greasy battlefield of eco-politics now. After rejecting three previous bids for a climate change emoji, in 2017 and 2022, this one slipped rather suspiciously through the iron gates.
Either the wildfire smoke around Unicode’s headquarters in Silicon Valley finally choked a sense of ecological urgency into them, or more likely, the corporate interests that comprise the consortium finally found a way to appease public contempt that was agreeable to their bottom line. That the emoji was mysteriously absent from the v.16 beta review almost suggests that Fairey’s notoriety might’ve greased some secret wheels, but the implications of that would be obviously, seriously worthy of scrutiny. Either way, an emoji with such political charge raises long overdue questions about Unicode’s imperial curatorial power.
I suspect there are a few forces at play inside and outside the consortium’s walls. For a while, Unicode has been under immense pressure from global campaigns and cultural movements to “represent” just about everything . Note the explosion of skin tones, cuisines, and family structures since 2015. That they’ve taken up greenwashing—deceptive marketing that misleads consumers about the sustainability of a company’s products or practices—might just indicate that public distrust of corporations has reached a mainstream tipping point. Mainstream or not, Unicode expects controversy judging by an embargoed media advisory I got last week with a very diplomatic intro to these “more ecologically sensitive emojis.” V.16 includes a leafless tree too.
But there’s also pressure from the inside. The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit that relies very much on volunteers, seemingly free of the shareholder pressures otherwise enshittifying the internet, but make no mistake: Unicode’s high court are a cabal of tech monopolists. Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Adobe. The emoji subcommittee is chaired by a rep from Google.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, the tech giants running energy-guzzling server farms just released an emoji designed to let you flag the bad guys torching the planet. I mean, the irony.
Fairey designed the icon as a visual metaphor for greenwashing and gaslighting. There is the sad flower, submerged in a blue-black liquid (petroleum and methane, allegedly), pelted by green rain from a gas pump. It’s wildly intricate for an emoji, but stylistically it gets at the weird reality of being gaslit by conglomerates who rain eco-deceit upon the masses. It’s a feat for a glorified emoticon.
Fairey’s statement about the design pulls no punches: “This emoji represents the trickle of lies fed to the larger populace by corporate entities feeding us toxic products that are poisoning life on Earth.” You’d be forgiven for feeling impressed with Unicode for accepting such a flaming middle finger to capitalism.
But, come on. A symbol for gaslighting, graciously given by the corporations it’s meant to target? The act itself is gaslighting: “Why would we make this if it was meant for us?” It’s a greenwashed symbol for greenwash. There’s something poetically hellish about that.
But this is what these companies do best: co-opt the language of dissent to camouflage themselves in empty solidarity. Maybe you remember the time Kendall Jenner solved racism with a Pepsi? In this case, they’re selling it back to us before it’s even started.
Welcome to the Revolution, Now with More Aesthetic
So thanks for the bladeless guillotine, Unicode.
But this is where it gets interesting. It’s not just Unicode’s thing, and I dare to hope that maybe, just maybe, they got played.
Shepard Fairey has always understood one thing better than anyone: the power of visual branding in a world of micro attention spans, and how to package rebel iconography with wide commercial appeal and its subversive integrity intact. The symbol is classic Fairey — bold propaganda aesthetic dripping with irony—and it translates surprisingly well into the tiny world of emojis, if hard to appreciate at 18x18 pixels.
But Fairey’s roots in guerilla street art come strangely into play here. His “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker campaign in the 90s caught fire and jammed public spaces all around the U.S., unsanctioned. In this case, the emoji is actually a Trojan horse for an extremely obscure issue. That Fairey weaseled it into a globalized character set and into shared digital space feels a lot like finding one of those Andre stickers on a random streetlight, like it’s not supposed to be here. And that gives me a strange sense of hope.
Bizarrely, the bid for the greenwashing emoji was developed by a former marine engineer for Royal Caribbean, Petra Hornby, who was looking for a way to call out the cruise industry for advertising liquid natural gas as a clean fuel (it’s not). A few years ago, Hornby was overseeing construction of RCI’s new LNG-powered Icon fleet (whose technicolor lasagna of a lead ship is enough to make your teeth hurt), raising concerns behind the scenes about the company’s shift towards LNG and the misleading ad campaigns around it.
LNG is condensed methane. And methane, for the uninitiated, is basically climate change on fast forward. Advocates say it burns cleaner than standard marine fossil fuel, and it does, but every molecule of methane that leaks into the atmosphere traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. And those ships? They leak. A lot. Actually every stage of LNG production from extraction to combustion spews some methane right into the atmosphere. But LNG companies are banking on the fact that the average consumer doesn’t know or care that much about the finer points of emissions science, and meanwhile, they’re flooding ad space with expensive “green” pro-LNG propaganda.
“I drank the Kool-Aid for a while, but too much and it makes you sick,” she told me. “At some point there’s nothing left to do but mutiny.”
To Hornby, that meant finding a way to put the LNG industry on blast. She tapped the only artist she thought could make something cool enough to catch on. They both knew Unicode would never take something so specific to LNG, so Fairey expanded it and developed a symbol to flag greenwashers of all stripes.
The problem of using an emoji to combat corporate irresponsibility– The Emoji Industrial Complex
So, how’s this gonna go? Regardless of who greenlit the tools, the premise sounds juicy: exposing greenwashing with the flick of a thumb. But reducing the sprawling web of corporate duplicity to a keyboard icon is like clapping back at a hurricane with a squirt gun. Then again, in the hands of millions, it’s not nothing either.
We’ve been here before when we saw the eruption of raised fist emojis during Black Lives Matter, and then the subsequent lack of substantive change when the outrage receded. This is the trap of enacting defiance or solidarity with an emoji: a sense of catharsis that protects the status quo.
Greenwashing is a meticulously crafted façade that demands a multi-layered response: consumer education, regulatory oversight, and, crucially, transparency. We all know an emoji won’t break the system’s back. We need accountability. We need system-level changes. We need corporate regulations that limit carbon output and governments that prioritize actual clean energy. We need to dismantle the global supply chain dependencies that keep unsustainable industries afloat. Things are moving in the right direction; a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute tells us fossil fuels will be outrun by cheap, efficient renewables in no time. But we’ve got to stay focused.
So we can’t get waylaid by performative action on social media. I fear the droplet could be a catalyst not to systemic change, but to complacency that feels like action. Slap a sad flower on that Toyota EV ad and it’s a day’s resistance done. You can’t stylize your way out of planetary collapse. It will only do what it is meant to do if it works in tandem with sleeves-rolled-up action on the ground. Regardless of who permitted them, we can wield these tools how we like.
With this tiny emoji, Fairey gives users a superpower à la carte, enabling anyone to become an eco-vigilante with a keen sense of irony. That is, if we use this thing right. And by “right.” I mean not in the way it is meant to be used by the powers who gave it the greenlight.
What that means is up to you, and you won’t find the answer on the internet.
