Long hailed as a major piece of the climate solution, sustainable business practices have not only fallen short: They even enable the continued dominance of fossil fuel.
By Auden Schendler
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.
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