Greenwash or greenwashing describes when positive environmental claims are used misleadingly in public relations or advertising to divert attention from environmental impacts. It is often used in the context of identifying information hazards associated with particular environmental interventions or arguments. A low-impact intervention or an intervention that affects only one component of a larger system of impacts might be worth pursuing in the abstract, but have a net harmful effect by providing actors with excuses not to take more substantive action (or rhetorical distractions from their lack of more substantive action).