The earth is in crisis. And this crisis is escalating. The planet is growing warmer and warmer, bringing increasingly violent storms, prolonged droughts, rising seas, scorching forest fires, and the extinction of species. And this is far from our only worry. Coral reefs are dying. Fish stocks are collapsing. Industrial pollutants are poisoning the Arctic. And toxic chemicals are leaching into aquifers.
Signs of an escalating global environmental crisis are everywhere. Swirling eddies of plastic are growing ever-larger in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, with the largest, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” bigger than the state of Texas. Already, more than half of the tropical forests, which contain roughly half of all land species, are gone. Sixty percent of primate species, our biological cousins, are now heading toward extinction by the middle of this century. Yet, still, every year we continue to destroy as much as ten million hectares of tropical forest – an amount equal to one soccer field every two to three seconds.1
Is big business to blame? Just the opposite, the chief executive officers of the world’s leading transnational corporations (TNCs) are telling us: big business is saving, not destroying, our planet. As Paul Polman, CEO of the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever, remarked: “We are entering a very interesting period of history where the responsible business world is running ahead of the politicians.”2
The ambition of big business to protect our planet would seem boundless. To stop climate change, Nike says it is pursuing “sustainable innovation – a powerful strategy that drives us to dream bigger and get better.” Monsanto says it is a “leader in innovative and sustainable agriculture,” with a “simple mission”: to “provide tools for farmers to help nourish the growing global population and help preserve the Earth for people, plants, wildlife and communities.” Until recently even Volkswagen was saying it was aspiring by 2018 “to be the world’s most successful and fascinating automobile manufacturer – and the leading light when it comes to sustainability.”3
TNCs such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi are now competing to proclaim their enthusiasm. “Sustainability is the pivot for where we want to go – how we want to structure our processes, our thinking, our investments,” declared Coca-Cola’s CEO in 2010. “Companies like PepsiCo have a tremendous opportunity – as well as a responsibility – to not only make a profit, but to do so in a way that makes a difference in the world,” said Pepsi’s CEO in 2016.4
Only big business, the CEOs are telling anyone who will listen, has the power – and the determination – to make the hard decisions necessary for sustainable development, or what they are increasingly describing as “sustainability.” Pursuing sustainability is good business in a world of growing scarcity, goes the refrain. “Environmental sustainability,” asserts Walmart, “has become an essential ingredient to doing business responsibly and successfully.”5
The past decade has seen sweeping promises by the world’s biggest corporations. Zero deforestation. Carbon neutrality. Zero water footprints. One hundred percent renewable energy. Zero waste to landfill. Fully responsible sourcing. One hundred percent conflict-free ingredients. Can Walmart and Volkswagen and Nike truly help save us from full-blown planetary instability by the end of this century? What about ExxonMobil and Toyota and Apple? Or Google and General Electric and Costco? Or McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and Mattel? Or Starbucks and Monsanto and Nestlé?
Most governments and many NGOs are clearly hoping so, nodding along as these companies declare themselves to be “sustainability leaders,” and loudly applauding industry-friendly solutions, such as certification, offsetting, and voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR). Leading scholars are also seeing promising signs of change in the business world. “Rather than looking to government for solutions,” argues Professor Andrew Hoffman of the University of Michigan, “many businesses are taking responsibility for climate change seriously and changing the system on their own.”6
Can these companies, as the world pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, really help keep global warming from exceeding 1.5°C? Or help end overfishing, deforestation, and biodiversity loss? Or help stop the depletion of fresh water? Or help curb plastic and chemical pollution?
The world’s biggest corporations deserve credit for changing some practices in response to the escalating global environmental crisis. Yet, as I argue in this book, trusting them to lead sustainability efforts is like trusting arsonists to be our firefighters. Here and there, they are extinguishing a fire or two, at times even relishing the task. But, compelled by their structure and purpose to pursue profits and growth at any cost, at every opportunity they are also setting new fires, all the while gesturing excitedly at areas doused in CSR to distract from the flames rising all around them. One should not be fooled: when all is said and done, what companies like Walmart, Coca-Cola, and BP are doing in the name of sustainability is aiming to advance the prosperity of business, not the integrity of ecosystems or the quality of future life.
For me, sustainability is the quality of advancing social justice without irreparably degrading ecosystems or harming future life. I do not see this as a condition the world will one day attain, but rather an ideal that political systems need to strive for constantly, like those of liberty, freedom, and justice. Defined in this way, the pursuit of global sustainability aims to balance the ecological and socioeconomic needs of all life. And defined in this way attributes of a sustainable system must include resilience, structural integrity, and dynamic balance.
Yet this is not how big business understands sustainability. Defining sustainability as the pursuit of greater technological efficiency, less waste, and more recycling can reduce some of the damage from rapidly rising production and consumption. But it won’t stop the forces of planetary destruction. Doing so will necessitate intergenerational equity, a respect for nature, a fair distribution of earth shares, and reasonable consumption: all of which, as I’ll show in this book, big business is now steering us away from.
I must be careful, however, not to overstate my case. Domestic laws and policies certainly constrain the options and actions of business, and TNCs do not have free rein around the world. There are many instances where big business does not get its way; on occasion, TNCs lose political struggles outright.7 Moreover, as we will see in later chapters, corporate sustainability is obviously doing some good, with CSR creating some opportunities to nudge along environmental reforms. In fact, this explains much of the power of CSR to enhance brand value and legitimize corporate self-governance. And clearly more and more business executives and middle managers have come to believe in the power of pursuing CSR as a way to balance a firm’s financial obligations with its environmental and social duties.
At first glance the results of CSR and sustainability policies can even seem impressive. Walmart is recycling more cardboard and selling more jewelry certified as “ethical.” Apple is doing more to monitor the standards of the firms supplying the components for its IPhones, IPads, and Mac computers. BP is making some progress in reducing methane emissions during the production of natural gas. Google is transitioning to renewable energy, heading toward zero waste to landfill from its data centers, and tracking deforestation and overfishing. And Coca-Cola is offering more financing for water and wetlands conservation.
There is even some evidence of TNCs raising environmental standards in developing countries: what Ronie Garcia-Johnson memorably described as “exporting environmentalism” when explaining the consequences of big American chemical companies moving into Mexico and Brazil.8 And there is some evidence of transnational mining, timber, and agrifood companies offering more benefits to communities in developing countries, such as funding schools and medical clinics.
Almost certainly, without such efforts the global environmental crisis would be escalating at an even faster rate. Nor is there any question that most CSR and sustainability managers – and even a few CEOs – are genuinely committed to sustainability, as they understand it. Yet, the question animating this book is not, “Is big business CSR and sustainability doing bits of good here and there?” There has already been an avalanche of books claiming to find gains across a wide range of firms, countries, and sectors.9
My question is more ambitious in scope and one that, intriguingly, is rarely asked: “Is big business going to destroy the earth by the end of this century?” My starting answer is “no,” at least not completely, as corporate self-interest, governmental policy, democratic processes, community resistance, the environmental movement, and the resilience of the earth itself will prevent total destruction. But my follow-up is important: unless states and civil societies do far more to rein in the rising power of big business over world politics and consumer cultures, big business is going to destroy vast areas of the earth’s forests, oceans, lands, species, air, and atmosphere. Our planet will still exist; however, it will be a far more perilous place for all life.
At this point you might be ready to shrug and push back, “Well, corporate sustainability is a start; and it is certainly better than doing nothing at all.” And, for sure, you would be correct. But, again, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that CSR and sustainability policies have no value for improving the environmental and social performance of big business. Nor am I suggesting that companies like Walmart or Unilever are not on occasion supporting higher environmental standards or better transnational environmental governance: they clearly are. Rather, I’m arguing that the voluntary, self-interested sustainability policies and strategies of big business will never aggregate into the systemic and transformative change necessary to stop the global environmental crisis from continuing to escalate, as these policies and strategies do not have the innate capacity to restrain the compulsion of big business to extract profits, exploit nature, and expand operations – and lay waste to the earth along the way.
Of course, the world’s biggest TNCs are not solely responsible for the escalating global environmental crisis, as we will see when surveying this crisis in Chapter 5. There are many interacting and reinforcing forces at play. These include the legacies of imperialism and colonialism as well as the parochial politics arising out of a world order of sovereign states. They include the caustic nature of international trade, development financing, and capitalism itself. They include the ill will and corrupt ways of political leaders and cronies around the world. And they include the indifference, ignorance, and greed of more than 7.5 billion people – up from three billion in 1960. Yet the world’s biggest TNCs, as I’ll argue in this book, have a particularly great responsibility for causing the global environmental crisis to escalate, with their CSR and sustainability claims doing as much to obfuscate as to help.
At every turn, as this book will show, the same TNCs espousing CSR and sustainability continue to strive to minimize regulations, fees, and taxes (or seek subsidies). As law professor Joel Bakan tells us, a “corporation” is legally constructed to pursue profits and self-interest with the morality of a charming psychopath, never truly worrying about the consequences for others.10 This helps explain why, as the Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern lamented in 2016 when expressing his frustration with Amazon and Starbucks, “Every Viennese cafe, every sausage stand pays more tax in Austria than a multinational corporation.”11
Most often corporations pursue self-interest through lobbying and lawyers. They finance political campaigns, probe for policy loopholes, and use the courts to bend rules in their favor. And they sow scientific uncertainty and public confusion by funding industry-friendly “research” and by disseminating misinformation.
Constantly seeking more power over markets, rule-makers, and competitors, the world’s biggest companies are growing bigger and bigger, sometimes by acquiring and merging for mutual gain, sometimes by attacking and counterattacking in hostile takeovers. These companies are also frequently willing to break the law to gain a competitive edge, perhaps by bribing officials or perhaps by devising a scheme to evade auditors, certifiers, and regulators. The secret strategy by Volkswagen to install software in at least eleven million diesel cars to “defeat” emissions testing is just one of many examples over the past decade (Chapter 4 provides details).
Such behavior, however, only partly explains why big business, left to self-govern, will destroy so much of our natural world by the end of this century. Significantly, big business remains a driver of, not a solution for, three of the most potent forces underlying the escalating global environmental crisis: rising rates of excessive consumption; rising rates of wasteful consumption; and rising rates of unequal consumption. These forces are powering “overconsumption,” understood as consumption that exceeds the capacity of the earth to regenerate natural systems and retain biological dynamism (Chapter 5 offers a full definition). Rising rates of overconsumption, as Chapter 5 details, is increasingly displacing the environmental and social costs of everyday living onto the world’s poorest regions and most fragile ecosystems, as well as into the future: what one can think of as “ecological shadows of consumption.”12
Certainly, big business provides many valuable economic and social services. And, without doubt, discount retailers such as Walmart and Costco are offering more affordable food, clothing, and appliances for those less well off. We need more consumption; I would never want to suggest otherwise, given so many people still live in extreme poverty, and given the world population is racing toward ten billion by the middle of this century. Yet, if we’re ever going to get a handle on the escalating global environmental crisis, we need to confront the fact that at every turn big business is fostering excessive, unequal, and wasteful consumption.
This is driving global consumption far above the capacity of nature to regenerate or absorb the garbage and chemicals. The advertising campaigns of big business are reorienting entire cultures – from Europe to China to India to Brazil – to maximize the consumption of global brands. Markets are being flooded with nondurable goods and plastic products, from throwaway furniture to disposable diapers. Fast-food chains and processed food companies are shifting consumer preferences toward high-fat, high-salt, and high-sugar diets, contributing to rising worldwide rates of obesity among both the rich and poor. Big agricultural firms are taking over smallholder lands to mass-produce crops and meat. Electronic and appliance companies are designing products for quick obsolescence and non-reparability. And automakers are extoling the virtues of trading in for the newest model.
The profits from the manufacturing of everhigher rates of overconsumption are enhancing the financial power of corporations and the political influence of billionaires. To further extend this power, over the past ten years big business has been steadily gaining control over the framing and implementation of sustainability policies, a trend reinforced by the broader tendency of governments since the 1980s to deregulate, privatize, and free up the world economy for TNCs.
One consequence of the enhanced power of big business over sustainability discourses and policies has been to shift global environmental governance toward solutions friendly to big business: ones that are voluntary, market-based, growth-oriented, industrial-scale, trade-focused, and profit-reinforcing. Such governance is opening up some opportunities to increase recycling and energy efficiency, reduce packaging and waste, and raise the standards of corporate suppliers. It is providing some funding for conservation. And it is offering some opportunities for environmental NGOs and community groups to work alongside big business. But, as we will see time and again in this book, the priority on corporate interests is causing environmental gains to rebound into even greater ecological pressures as these companies reinvest savings to expand production, increase sales, enhance profits, and bring untested substitutes to market.
The concept of “big business,” you might reasonably push back, washes out important differences in the initiatives and consequences of particular companies. Definitely, public companies with global brands are responding more proactively to sustainability demands than private companies without much public profile. Technology firms like Google and Apple are certainly doing more to embrace renewable energy than oil companies like Chevron or Phillips 66. And for sure the ecological consequences of the agrochemical company Monsanto are very different from the mining company Glencore. Even the effects of Subway and Starbucks are somewhat different in North America than in Asia.
Contrasting the consequences of big-box retailers like Home Depot and Office Depot with fast-food chains like KFC and McDonald’s would undoubtedly yield insights into the different ways CSR is playing out. So would comparing similar companies across political jurisdictions – say contrasting the environmental consequences of the automakers Volkswagen, Toyota, and General Motors across the jurisdictions of Europe, North America, and Asia. And so would delving deeply into the motives, actions, and consequences of firms such as the outdoor clothing company Patagonia, which describes itself as “an activist company” “using business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”13 Still, as I hope to demonstrate by the end of this book, setting aside the many differences across TNCs and analyzing big business as a singular force offers unique insights into why the environmental crisis is escalating, why overconsumption is rising, and why corporate self-governance is never going to solve this crisis.
Even if you accept the conceptual value of the term big business, you might still be wondering: “Is big business really any worse than small- or medium-sized business?” Would it perhaps make sense to retitle this book, “Will Capitalism Destroy Our Planet?” After all, as Karl Marx (1818–83) had already illuminated back in the nineteenth century, capitalism spreads like a cancer through cultures and nature. Small business, it is true, can be just as corrosive as big business, as we can see with logging, cattle ranching, soy production, and palm oil plantations in the tropics.
There are, however, good reasons for focusing on big business rather than on capitalism or all business. For one, many others have already exposed the destructive nature of capitalism on the global environment, such as Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything, Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg in Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations, and Jason Moore in Capitalism in the Web of Life. More importantly, however, shining a torchlight on big business allows us to see the dominant destroyers in a capitalist system so hegemonic as to seem nameless and blameless. By doing so in a short, essay-style book, I hope to offer an especially vivid picture of the consequences of big business over the past decade, aiming to expose to much-needed scrutiny the increasingly common assertion by big business that it is not destroying our planet, but is instead transforming capitalism toward sustainability – a false claim that more and more state and nonprofit leaders are obviously coming to trust.
As we will see over the course of this book, the power of big business both to protect and destroy the planet is rising. Big business is not only gaining more and more control over global supply chains, national economies, and consumer cultures, as Chapter 2 will show, it is also gaining more and more influence over the discourses, agendas, and governance mechanisms of sustainability, as Chapter 3 will review.
More and more CEOs of big business, as Chapter 3 discusses, are arguing that the rising power of TNCs is offering increasing opportunities for CSR to promote global sustainability. According to these CEOs, nowadays there are especially good opportunities to create incentives and supply technologies to help raise the standards of their hundreds of thousands of suppliers. There is some truth to this claim. And it is understandable why so many people want to believe in corporate sustainability, given the capacity, when big business wants, to enforce its will around the world. As Chapter 4 will reveal, however, there is a dark underbelly to the business of CSR, where it is simultaneously concealing illegalities, obfuscating accountability, and legitimizing the increasing concentration of power and wealth within corporations.
Moreover, as Chapter 5 outlines, even the corporations with the best CSR practices are powerful forces causing unsustainable production and overconsumption to escalate. And, as the chapter further documents, climate change, deforestation, chemical contamination, land degradation, ocean depletion, and plastic pollution are all getting worse as the ecological shadows of overconsumption intensify. This is deeply concerning, as states and NGOs are increasingly turning to these same corporations to govern us out of the global environmental crisis, shifting governance away from regulatory mechanisms and societal oversight and toward voluntary, corporate self-regulation aiming to profit from this crisis.
Global environmentalism, as both a movement and philosophy, has been a powerful counterforce to consumer capitalism over the past half-century. And, as I discuss in Chapter 6, environmentalism continues to be highly influential. Still, as I argue in this concluding chapter, those governments, NGOs, and consumers conceding authority and offering legitimacy to CSR should be far more wary of business partnerships, philanthropy, and financing, and far more alert to the post-truth politics underlying what big business is calling sustainability.
Voluntary codes of conduct and feel-good declarations of responsibility are never going to turn big business into a force of social justice and planetary sustainability. Any chance of stopping big business from destroying much of the earth will require governments and societies to reorient global environmental politics to reduce – and then restrain – the power of big business. Doing so is increasingly urgent, as the exact opposite is now happening, with the financial, political, and cultural power of big business rising at an ever-quickening clip.