The Complicity of Corporate Sustainability

(Photo by iStock/Tomwang112)

In the early ’90s I worked on corporate sustainability with a group of young, smart, optimistic colleagues, paid virtually nothing, working out of an office closet next to the bathroom at Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainability think tank. Beneath towering stacks of energy reports and to-be-read copies of The New York Times, we drafted brochures and consulting papers arguing that corporations were the only entities large enough, nimble enough, and motivated (by profit) to solve the climate problem. We were surrounded, in-person and intellectually, by the originators of the movement: energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins, Ecology of Commerce author Paul Hawken, Ray Anderson—whose environmental epiphany transformed Interface, Inc.—and visionary engineers like Eng Lock Lee, who treated systems design like Chinese cooking, where you use everything, even the chicken feet.

We believed that the salvation of the world, the cure for climate change, and the end of pollution and waste, all of it, would be driven through business profits and strategic motivation. Doing good by the environment—cutting energy use with better light bulbs and boilers, reducing inefficiency through design and engineering, and adding renewable energy supply—was not only environmentally responsible, it was good for the bottom line. Win-win: green both ways.

That vision got people like me into the field, made for great TED talks, and inspired customers, employees, and investors. And corporate sustainability does have value: good design can, at no cost, accomplish great things. Take your cup of Starbucks: If you add cream second, you need a stir stick—a piece of wood harvested from forests, manufactured and transported, packaged and distributed. But if you add cream before you pour in the coffee (a design solution) you suddenly don’t need a stir stick at all. You’ve replaced a material thing with intelligence; you’ve eliminated waste through thought. What an unbelievably compelling way to view our problems! Imagine the glory of retrofitting light bulbs in a garage—as I did early in my career—so that total fixture wattage dropped from 400 to 30 watts, while providing better light with longer-lasting bulbs. You don’t have to be a quant to find that kind of thing inspiring. Imagine installing odor-free waterless urinals in skyscrapers because water pumping accounts for 8 percent of total building energy, saving water and saving energy.

That stuff—we called it cascading benefits—actually happened. But 25 years or more in, even as the sustainable business movement grew—flourished!—climate change, the single most important barometer for the possibility of a sustainable future—marched on. And a planet on fire, deluged in flood, and disrupted by drought and famine, warfare and heat waves—where governments and citizens are preoccupied with disaster response instead of stability and thriving—is nobody’s picture of sustainability. And yet, over the course of the corporate sustainability revolution, climate change went from a concern to a certainty, with catastrophic warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius more or less baked in. The seven hottest years on record were the last seven years.

In the face of this reality, even a victory like a large corporation cutting its carbon footprint by 30 percent— the stuff of Shazam-level super-heroism and incredibly difficult to pull off—wouldn’t even dent the climate problem. There are just too many people, too many governments, and too many other businesses that just don’t care. Even radical carbon reductions, in the US at least, aren’t enough: Our society is so carbon-infused that even homeless people have unsustainably large carbon footprints.

As a result, I’ve concluded that the business case for environmental action, which remains the fundamental corporate climate strategy, has little to do with sustainability, however admirable the intent and vision of its practitioners. Even worse, the focus on sustainable practices instead of power-wielding has unwittingly empowered the fossil fuel industry’s capture of government policy and action, providing cover to allow ExxonMobil and others to maximize profit and global emissions of greenhouse gases, unmolested.

Systemic change is the only path to climate stability. But what the corporate sustainability movement has truly succeeded at is ensuring that everyone works within a narrowly defined playing field that leaves the one thing we need to upend—the fossil-fuel-based economy—intact and unthreatened.

A Well-Intentioned Distraction

The issue isn’t only that sustainable business practices don’t scale, though this is true and pertinent. The problem is that they displace meaningful action.

A business that pursues “sustainability” as conventionally understood (and all the accounting and reporting and standard-meeting, and ISO 140001 audits and Global Reporting Initiative filings, and LEED certifications and baselining and third-party certifications that move paper and display commitment but don’t cut emissions) becomes, in the media’s eye and in customer perception, a “green” company, absolved of doing anything else. Such firms don’t have to undertake the hard work of political activism that might actually drive down global emissions like political advocacy, use of public voice, testimony in Washington, noisy, uncomfortable coalition building and peer pressure, divestment, or public calling-out of bad behavior. Hell—they don’t even need to cut their emissions to be labeled a leader. They just need to aspire to it.

But this approach may actually be worse than a distraction. In practice, these actions seem expressly designed to garner the imprimatur of greenness without demanding the hard work of power-wielding and political activism (which could irritate shareholders, be uncomfortable, and possibly trigger regulation and the anger of elected officials from which managers want other favors). Indeed, in the early stages of the climate fight, businesses avoided even acknowledging climate science, because they could easily avoid that unpleasantness with what became (and remains) a common refrain: “This stuff is so profitable, we should do it regardless of what the science says!” You can see in that construction the beginnings of moral decay. Imagine: “Racism aside, we should treat people equally because it’s good for the bottom line!”

But it did matter very much that business acknowledged the science, because policy was, at the time and even today, being made on the basis of science denial. Many awkward stances are difficult because they are also moral stances. As a theologian once explained to me: “Jesus wasn’t killed because he preached loving kindness. He was crucified because he preached justice.” In a sense, changing lightbulbs and cutting carbon footprints is loving kindness—there is nothing not to like. Tackling the systemic climate problem head-on, that’s ultimately about justice. And that will get you in trouble.

Duplicity

In so many cases, the dodge becomes open duplicity: Like Penelope, corporations learned to weave the funeral shroud of their carbon credits and waste-reduction by day and undo it at night with their corporate contributions and lobbyists. “Leaders” in the corporate sustainability movement are more or less silent on policy. Meanwhile, with the vast bulk of their action and messaging focused on how they are greening their own operations, they give money to politicians like Mitch McConnell or other climate deniers like David Purdue (as Microsoft, Bank of America, and electric car leader GM did, among others). Had Purdue won, climate action in the Senate would have been impossible, undoing all the other climate aspirations those businesses may have had. Green-talking businesses, we find, may also design and sell cloud hosting services, custom artificial intelligence software, and machine learning tools that are used to better find and distribute fossil fuels while claiming to care about climate change. (I won’t name names, but, uh, Microsoft, Amazon, and until recently, Google.) In some cases, they directly lobby against their professed environmental goals, like GM has done on automobile standards under Trump, despite its membership in the corporate sustainability group CERES. As Rhode Island’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has pointed out, you have corporations taking big action internally and sharing that story, but unleashing their lobbyists to do the opposite.

The duplicity often extends beyond climate into social responsibility and justice, causes that are part and parcel of the climate movement. As Osita Nwanevu has observed, many self-declared responsible corporations also fund anti-democratic practices by supporting groups like the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Redistricting Majority Project:

“Coca-Cola, for example, whose CEO declared it would be putting its ‘resources and energy toward helping end the cycle of systemic racism’ in June should probably stop putting its resources toward the reelection of Republican state legislators—including in states like Georgia where it is based and where the Republican Party has been particularly dogged in its efforts to disenfranchise African Americans.”

The next shoe to drop for Coke was that they allowed an egregiously restrictive voter suppression law to pass in Georgia, then vocally criticized it once it was in place. They got the cake of the law they wanted to protect the status quo, and then they ate it too by donning the cloak of righteous indignation, only after it has passed.

As another example, Proctor and Gamble has sustainability reports all the way back to 1999 and released an ad on racial justice in 2020. But during the 2016 election cycle, P&G donated almost twice as much to House and Senate Republicans as they did to Democrats. Knowing how the GOP plays on climate and race, how does that square?

Playing Into the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Hands

Over the years, these sorts of dismal discoveries led me to an even unhappier place: The actions businesses take under the banner of win-win, profitable, and good-for-the-planet corporate sustainability were exactly and precisely what the fossil fuel industry would want them to do. These moves ensure that businesses take responsibility for the climate problem only as their own individual emissions challenge, instead of seeing it as a systemic issue. It creates a focus on sustainability actions so lame and smallball that they could never and would never disrupt the fossil fuel industry’s hammerlock on governance. This approach is, in part, what climate scientist Michael Mann calls “the new climate war.”

Think about it. Fossil fuel companies like net-zero homes and offices. Carbon neutral companies. Carbon offsets. Talk of “the circular economy,” where things get reused and recycled. The idea of “science-based targets” where businesses determine their “fair share” of the globe’s carbon reduction burden (as if that made any sense at all—what is your fair share in putting out the forest fire threatening your neighborhood?) They like citizens and corporations to “do their part,” and talk about how “every little bit helps.” Most of all, they like to focus on themselves, not the system.

Fossil fuel companies like these things because they distract business and citizens from actions business might take that would actually hurt, actions the fossil fuel industry fears. Things like removing money from politics, or assaults on their social license to operate. Divestment. Public policy that eliminates subsidies and encourages renewable energy and electrification. Boycotts and protests against pipelines or business operations. Occupation of their main offices by activists. EPA regulation, right-sized carbon taxes, media that actually digs in on what “green” means (see: Major US banks loudly proclaiming bans on funding for Arctic drilling that’s not happening and risky and expensive anyway), and powerful CEOs who declare the need for aggressive climate policy in major media. They hate free and fair elections that empower the vast majority of Americans who care about aggressive climate action. 

How Did We Get Here?

When an arm of the fossil fuels business—the plastics industry—realized in the late sixties that pop bottles and yogurt containers were clogging highways and rivers, they knew they needed to get the blame off themselves and onto citizens. They did it masterfully, with the famous “Crying Indian” ad, in which an actor (of Sicilian heritage) played a native American shedding a tear over trash-chunking by inconsiderate Americans. It worked. Instead of coming after the plastics industry with pitchforks, Americans took responsibility for the problem on their own, even though they had no more demanded plastic bottles than they had insisted on mobility or cold beer delivered in a way that would destroy civilization.

Later, the fossil fuel industry embraced the same strategy, just as it had previously adopted Big Tobacco’s climate denial. As Mark Kaufman puts it, “BP hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.” A result was the ingenious carbon footprint calculator: a tool for determining just how guilty we all are, neatly shifting blame from the architects of the problem to the pawns of the systems. Remember: American citizens did not create the carbon-friendly laws and infrastructure that govern our world. Industry influence did.

Complicity

As it turns out, the great vision that business could, through its own operations, drive the solutions to climate change, played directly into the hands of the purveyors of a warming world. I would even put it more strongly: Sustainable business practices haven’t just been a distraction (bad), nor a dodge of hard, controversial work (sinister), nor even intentionally duplicitous (corrupt). The approach has been evil because it represents complicity. Complicity with the fossil fuel industry and the structure it created—its capture of government; its ownership of the economy; its buried but enduring subsidies; its support, by political proxy, for anti-democratic practices that would restrict regulation; its construction of a world in which citizens exist in a fossil economy, not of their creation but nonetheless blame themselves for it.

Corporate sustainability as currently practiced, researched, taught, and reported on remains the best way to enable the success of the fossil fuel industry in accelerating climate catastrophe. Fifty years after the Crying Indian ad, we’re still dinking around trying to figure out how our businesses can go carbon neutral, how we can work “within the system,” and through “market forces” to solve the climate problem. When some businesses make slight progress outside the policy realm, academics, the public, and the media praise them up and down. Meanwhile, the people who criticize them—well, they’re cranks, radicals, and socialists who, “just don’t understand” capitalism. George Monbiot. Amy Westervelt. Sheldon Whitehouse. Bill Moyers. Bernie Sanders. Naomi Klein. Bill McKibben. Emily Atkin.

Academia’s Role

The truth is, academics, researchers, and sustainability gurus are the ones who steered people like me in the wrong direction. Even today, at bastions of higher education, some, but not all, leading voices profess that we can reinvent business for good. Some academics push back, but they remain on the fringe. As a result, a sustainable MBA degree ensures graduates get buried in back rooms doing carbon accounting, stuck in a box made of win-win solutions and operational greening as an answer to climate change. They can’t agitate, influence company policy, get political, or even talk to the CEO. Despite their titles, they can’t affect climate change or real sustainability. Worse, pointing out the ineffectiveness of this broken strategy—because it so blatantly counters the established status quo—can peg a staffer as unstable or scarily radical. A friend and colleague in a large corporation with aggressive green aspirations struggled mightily, over years, to get the company to finally commit to “market-based carbon solutions,” the absolute lowest policy bar. (And this was just to agree that such solutions were acceptable, not to press for them.) The reality is that the labor of most corporate sustainability managers is worse than scut work: At least scut work advances toward a goal or leaves you with a clean toilet.

Sadly, most of us practitioners still haven’t worked our way out of that box. Even the businesses who understand this—take Salesforce, for example, which really is a leader in the sort of effective action I describe—still overwhelmingly emphasizes addressing its own footprint in their public materials, and almost footnotes the critical power-wielding and lobbying they do so well. The big whiff on the part of corporate America—missing the policy forest for the operational trees—may have begun with the blessing and boosterism of the fossil fuel industry, but it was bought and implemented by insiders—the gurus and sustainability leaders, the universities and businesses and think tanks.

A Future of Our Own Making

Journalism like that pursued by the truth-tellers listed above is one of the ways we can push our way out of this situation. But mainstreaming that level of integrity and inquiry is difficult in an owned world: Emily Atkin writes for MSNBC, which runs greenwashing ads about algae for which ExxonMobil is being sued. This is why academia is even more important: Even though universities themselves are heavily influenced by fossil fuel dollars, they are arguably more independent than the media and could initiate a sea change in our understanding of sustainable business by directing research and teaching curricula towards approaches that actually grapple with the climate problem, instead of pretending to. The obscure but noble Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability is teeming with apostates and insurgents who understand the points raised in this analysis, and as a result, could begin to tip research away from erudite niggling over small points of interest and focus academia’s tractor beam on real climate solutions. Those solutions, to repeat, would not revolve around resource efficiency or intricate calculations showing that doing good provides shareholder value, but around power-wielding, and revolution, the sort of study undertaken by Theda Skocpol, but through a business lens. The question isn’t the traditional query of business classes: “How can business profit from being green?” but “How can business be part of, even instigate, beneficial social and political revolution?” The irony is that we know it can be done because the fossil fuel industry has been wildly successful in doing the exact opposite. 

It’s also possible that business may wake up and finally execute on the promise of the sustainability movement. While hope is a bad strategy, there are nonetheless signs that this is happening, even though the resulting actions are too evolutionary to achieve rapid change. Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world, has been changing the conversation in corporate boardrooms, most recently with a call to businesses in his portfolio to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. True, this misses the politics of the issue, but it targets a lot of the corporate world. Meanwhile, the growing climate threat is starting to change the banking industry, first in Europe, and in pockets in the US, moving it away from financially risky and morally bankrupt fossil fuel investments. Government might wake up too, as it appears to be doing in the US, and pass regulation that values externalities and pushes corporations and wider society to do enough of the right thing that it really matters. Biden’s aggressiveness on climate is almost shocking, but he needs support—from the business community.

Last, social movements like Black Lives Matter, which are bringing to light the inadequacy of corporate action on justice—and the duplicity of progressive talk undermined by back-room politicking and anti-progressive political donations—will naturally bolster meaningful climate action, since climate is a justice issue too, after all, and since solutions like de-coupling money from politics and increasing voter access helps the climate movement as well. Business support for the Black Lives Matter movement is a piece of the difficult, moral, and seemingly risky trench work of the climate movement.

What we know we can’t survive is the status quo, because it pledges allegiance to a false deity, one that presumes that corporations, unrestrained, will save us. “That god,” Cormac McCarthy writes, “lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.”

Read more stories by Auden Schendler.