Surveying the escalating environmental crisis, and thinking about our personal role as the consumers of the products of big business, can feel depressing, even gut-wrenching, as it was for me when learning of the waves of plastic now crashing onto the shores of Henderson Island. Still, returning to this book’s anchoring question, I do not think big business is going to destroy our planet: not completely, anyway. Let us review why I have come to this conclusion.
First of all, despite the extraordinary power of big business over the world economy, global rules, and political narratives, and even though this power is rising in all its forms, big business is still only one of many interacting forces degrading the earth. The myopia of governments, the actions of small business, and the desires of billions of people are major factors. Modern cycles of degradation also arise out of centuries of ecological imperialism and economic exploitation. For sure, big business is a powerful force of destruction. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to conclude that the evils of world politics – nuclear warfare, biological terrorism, militarism – are far more likely to obliterate us.
There are, however, other good (and more optimistic) reasons to think big business won’t destroy our planet. Significantly, as ecological and economic turbulence intensifies, business self-preservation will help prevent total destruction. Already, large numbers of TNCs are exploiting the increasing scarcity of natural resources and the growing instability of the global environment to gain competitive advantages and expand markets, including eco-markets. This is definitely improving management on some measures. As we saw in Chapter 3, for example, as the competition for natural resources intensifies, the efficiency of production is rising; and as the competition for eco-consumers builds, the energy efficiency of many household products, such as dishwashers, refrigerators, and washing machines, is increasing.
Big business is improving environmental performance in other ways, too. TNCs are redesigning products to save on transportation costs. They are making plastic bottle caps smaller and lighter. They are selling three-ply toilet paper and concentrated laundry detergent. And they are miniaturizing electronics.
Most redesigns aim to capture new markets or reduce per unit costs of shipping goods across the world’s oceans, skies, and highways. But sometimes, as sustainability managers are always eager to point out, these “new and improved” products are also reducing per unit waste and pollution emissions. At the same time TNCs are recycling more metal, glass, paper, and plastic to generate a reliable resource stream for further production. And they are installing rooftop solar panels to diversify energy sources as global warming generates uncertainty in coal, oil, and natural gas markets.
The intensifying competition for resources is further encouraging big business to do more to control global supply chains. Over the past decade, as Chapter 3 reviewed, TNCs have set up codes of conduct, environmental reporting requirements, auditing systems, certification standards, and recycling and waste management programs for their supply chains. Partly, TNCs are trying to protect brand value and better manage reputational risks. But gaining more control over supply chains is also offering many competitive advantages.
It is helping TNCs to track and buy the highest quality and least expensive inputs, from coltan to cocoa to coffee. It is helping them cut production costs, increase profit margins, and slash prices to increase sales and open up markets. And it is allowing them to claim sustainability leadership by reducing waste, improving efficiencies, and lowering the per unit greenhouse gas emissions of relatively low-performing suppliers.
Granted, as the previous chapter showed, these are fairly modest gains in comparison with the scale and force of the escalating global environmental crisis. Moreover, as we have seen, the compulsive pursuit by big business of ever-more power, profits, and growth is overriding many of these gains. Yet I also put some hope in the power of the global environmental movement – including a gradual strengthening of environmental regulations and international norms since the 1960s – to prevent big business from completely destroying our planet.
Environmental management has clearly been improving since the 1960s, at least in some places, for some people, in some time periods. Very few states, for instance, still legally allow the hunting of whales, the trading of endangered species, or the dumping of toxic sludge into local rivers. The international community of states has also managed to solve a few planetary-scale environmental crises. One of the best examples is the coming together of states after 1987 to work with DuPont and other chemical companies to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were destroying the ozone layer after drifting skyward from our refrigerators, air conditioners, and home insulation. As a result of these efforts, the ozone layer, necessary for life on earth, is now set to regenerate over the next fifty years.
There are many other examples of environmental improvements. Thousands of certification and offsetting programs are now offering more environmentally friendly options for consumers, and most cultures have shifted somewhat toward more environmentally conscious consumption, from organic coffee to eco-tourism. Worldwide, more than 200,000 parklands, nature reserves, and ocean sanctuaries have been put in place, and today more than one-seventh of the earth’s landmass is officially “protected” by governments.1 Before 2006, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was the only marine protected area larger than 200,000 square kilometers; yet over the decade since 2006 governments announced another eighteen massive marine parks, covering more than thirteen million square kilometers of ocean.2
On land, meanwhile, state and community rangers in Africa are fining and jailing poachers in the fight to save elephants, rhinos, and hippos. Parts of Africa have also been reforested. The Green Belt Movement alone, a community organization set up by Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai in Kenya in 1977, has planted more than fifty million trees across Africa.
The influence of environmentalism is clear across many other areas, too. In terms of per unit of economic output, over the past few decades technological advances in resource extraction, manufacturing, and transportation have been steadily improving energy efficiency, reducing pollution, and eliminating unnecessary waste. Buildings are meeting higher water, waste, energy, and emission standards. Highways are more durable and road construction does more to account for habitat disruption. The incineration of garbage and the recycling of e-waste are following stricter environmental guidelines, especially in developed countries. And pollution has decreased markedly in well-off cities, such as in London, where smog during one particularly bad week in late 1952 contributed to the premature deaths of as many as twelve thousand residents.3
The production of solar and wind energy has also been surging over the past decade, with China at the forefront. Worldwide, solar, wind, and renewable power grew yet again in 2016, up fourteen percent. Led by China, installed global solar capacity went up fifty percent that year, although it is important to note that solar energy still only accounts for a small portion of world electricity production.
Significantly, though, as renewable power increases we’re now starting to see a decline in coal consumption. In China, coal consumption fell in 2014, in 2015, and again in 2016. Worldwide consumption of coal also fell in 2015 and again in 2016 as businesses and governments switched to natural gas and renewable energy. The UK led the way following mine closures and the introduction of a carbon tax, with coal consumption in 2016 dropping by more than fifty percent, hitting levels not seen since the 1800s.4
In some ways the corporate embrace of sustainability as a marketing and management tool is also creating opportunities for environmental activists to influence corporate production, retailing, and marketing. We saw this, for instance, in the campaign to shame global brands into no longer sourcing palm oil linked to tropical deforestation. Starting in 2008 when Greenpeace convinced Unilever’s Dove soap to switch to buying palm oil certified as sustainable, activists then went after scores of other brands, from Nestlé’s Kit Kat chocolate bar to Procter & Gamble’s Head & Shoulders shampoo to PepsiCo’s Doritos tortilla chips. By 2016 just about every global brand had made a public commitment to “zero deforestation” and was promising to only source palm oil from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (sales of RSPO-certified palm oil rose fivefold from 2010 to 2016).
The influence of environmental NGOs and grassroots movements only goes so far, however; and for many activists the politics of opposing business remains cutthroat, especially in developing countries. Those benefiting the most from destroying our planet continue to control the main levers of power – from armies to bureaucracies to corporations to the media – and environmentalists are routinely jailed and murdered.
At least 185 environmental activists lost their lives in 2015, forty-two of whom were opposing industrial mining. Others died fighting against illegal logging, agricultural plantations, hydroelectric dams, and poaching, with Brazil, the Philippines, Colombia, Peru, and Nicaragua leading the death tally. “As demand for products like minerals, timber and palm oil continues, governments, companies and criminal gangs are seizing land in defiance of the people who live on it,” explains Billy Kyte, who documented the murders of activists in 2015 for the NGO Global Witness. “Communities that take a stand are increasingly finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.” Even more environmental and land activists were murdered in 2016: at least two hundred.5
Our planetary crisis would surely be worse without the global spread of environmentalism and the courage of grassroots activists like those in Brazil, the Philippines, and Colombia. Yet the net results are not adding up to anything close to planetary sustainability as the power of big business continues to grow, as inequality continues to rise, and as the ecological shadows of overconsumption continue to intensify. If anything, as this book underlines, since the mid-2000s corporate, state, and to a lesser extent NGO environmentalism have been doing less and less to challenge the societal, political, and corporate forces and narratives driving unequal, wasteful, and excessive consumption, with environmentalists increasingly looking instead to eco-consumerism as a way to protect the global environment.
Today, just about every mainstream sustainability policy reflects the demands of economic growth, the interests of transnational corporations, and the concerns of wealthy individuals – reflecting a growing dominance of what I think of as the “environmentalism of the rich.”6 The vast majority of international and national environmental initiatives are failing to reduce unsustainable consumption or slow rates of degradation on a global scale. Moreover, the costs and benefits of environmental solutions are highly uneven, with rich and powerful individuals and places almost always faring better than marginalized peoples and vulnerable ecosystems.
Remarkably often, when governments and firms are claiming to be solving a problem they are in fact deflecting the problem into another jurisdiction or into the future, casting ecological and social shadows that make the global situation worse, not better. This was the case in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, when the United States phased out leaded gasoline at home, while American TNCs increased leaded gasoline exports to Africa. This was the case as well after China banned logging in its natural forests in 1998, only to become in short order the world’s biggest importer of tropical and boreal wood, much of it illegally logged and smuggled into the country.
The world’s richest people are now consuming five, ten, even fifty times more than their fair earth share. Meanwhile, consumption of increasingly scarce natural resources continue to grow, while lands and oceans continue to fill with consumer waste. Yet global environmental governance largely ignores the growing inequality of consumption and the extremes of wealth creation.
States see more consumption, of any kind, as economic growth, prosperity, and a sign of effective governance. Corporations see more consumption as sales, profits, and a sign of a strong market. Even most NGOs do not portray consumption as a problem, although there are some exceptions, such as Adbusters, a counterculture magazine and activist network calling for less consumption and greater social justice.
Significantly, as we have seen in this book, since the mid-2000s the world’s biggest TNCs have been steadily gaining power over global environmental governance as they increasingly claim to be sustainability leaders. States have reacted by backing market-based governance and delegating authority to corporations to self-regulate. Large numbers of NGOs have responded by cooperating and partnering with these TNCs.
But, as the previous chapter showed, corporate sustainability does little to reduce inequitable, conspicuous, or wasteful consumption, as at the end of the day corporations are seeking more sales, profits, and growth, not the social sustainability of communities or the ecological integrity of the earth. Eco-consumption, although able to ease the footprints of a few conscientious consumers, has little power to shift global patterns of consumption. At the same time corporate sustainability is primarily aiming to find savings to invest in more factories and stores, and to sell more products, regardless of need, durability, or net ecological costs.
Sustainability for big business is about wasting less to produce more, so, even though each unit of production may end up causing less environmental harm, overall harm frequently ends up rising. We see this pattern, for instance, with ongoing corporate strategies to manufacture and market nondurable, disposable, and quickly obsolescent products, not just at home, but all around the world. And we see this as corporations continue to engineer the overconsumption of unhealthy food and fast food.
The corporate understanding of sustainability does not see the tripling in sales of plastic water bottles as a problem, but as a logical outcome of strategically investing the savings from manufacturing, packaging, and transporting water bottles more efficiently. For this reason, although the environmental gains from corporate sustainability governance can look impressive when measuring, say, changes in the tonnage of recycled metal, glass, or plastic, the gains look far less impressive when evaluating the global environmental consequences of, say, the volume of plastic flowing into the ocean, or the amount of chemicals spilling into rivers and lakes.
These failures of corporate sustainability have done little to impede the growing power of TNCs within global environmental governance or the trend toward more moderate environmental discourses and demands from civil society. Since the mid-2000s large numbers of local, national, and international NGOs have joined forces with business, raising funds by cobranding products, and advocating for eco-technologies, eco-products, and eco-certification as solutions for global environmental problems. This more moderate stance is helping raise funds for conservation and community development. Yet praising big business as “sustainability partners” is also muting criticism of the ongoing role of these companies in manufacturing overconsumption.
At the same time states and corporations are capturing and manipulating the discourse of sustainability, and misinformation and exaggerations are rampant on all sides. There is also a dark side to TNCs now claiming to be responsible and sustainable. We saw this in Chapter 4 when looking at Volkswagen’s scheme to install secret software to evade emission regulations. We saw it with ExxonMobil’s clandestine strategy to back climate skepticism. And we saw it again with the tactics of Starbucks, Apple, and Google to avoid taxes.
In this context environmentalists who advocate for state policies of sustainable development, corporate responsibility, eco-markets, certification, and eco-consumption risk becoming little more than mouthpieces for corporate strategies to deflect criticism of the status quo, stall reforms, and legitimize a highly unequal, exploitative, and destructive global political economy of consumption. Such initiatives bring other risks too, aggravating unequal, wasteful, and excessive consumption, as well as deflecting attention from broader corporate and state efforts to drive overconsumption.
Corporate sustainability and global environmentalism, then, would seem to be doing enough to stop big business from destroying our planet completely, but not enough to prevent immense damage by the end of this century. States and societies clearly need to do far more to curb the power of big business to drive unsustainable production and consumption.
Given our current trajectory, I don’t see a way to avoid damaging a great deal more of the earth over the course of this century. But the extent of the coming damage is not set in stone. Can we avoid another one- to two-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures by 2100? Probably not, but we can certainly still avoid another three- to four-degree Celsius increase. Will the earth lose lots more forests, wetlands, and species? Again, this seems inescapable.
Can we avoid, however, a sixth mass extinction? Or significantly decrease plastic, air, and chemical pollution? Or do a much better job protecting the last of the rainforests, coral reefs, and biodiversity hotspots? Here, I think we can.
But any chance of this happening will require governments, nonprofits, and consumers to put far less faith in corporate self-reporting and self-regulation to solve global environmental problems. And it will necessitate far louder questioning of the motives and impacts of big business as well as much tougher state regulation of TNCs, including confronting the increasing power of big business to manufacture overconsumption.
Corporate sustainability, as we have seen time and again in this book, is helping on some measures. There’s certainly value in encouraging big business to continue to increase recycling, improve building standards, and reduce packaging waste. In a few cases big business may even advocate for better environmental practices, as is now occurring in the USA for clean power as more than seventy percent of the top one hundred companies pursue renewable energy targets.7 And to at least a limited extent NGOs willing to partner with big business – such as WWF, Conservation International, and the Environmental Defense Fund – are helping to conserve some environmental values.
But by its very nature corporate self-governance cannot deescalate the global environmental crisis. CSR philanthropy and corporate sustainability are first and foremost power levers and business tools. For any chance of moving toward global sustainability, governments and NGOs need to keep this in mind, working to take back, rather than surrender, power over global environmental governance.
Reining in TNCs will require multiscale and multilayered governance, as no single state, international organization, or activist network will ever be able to do this alone. Stronger incentives and regulations to enhance corporate disclosures and the accuracy of consumer information would help. So would more laws to increase the transparency of the global financial system, such as the 2010 US Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. There is also a need for more auditors and government inspectors with enough power to truly investigate big business practices.
It would further help to enhance the legal powers of governments and international organizations to hold corporations accountable for handling illicit products causing social conflict and environmental destruction. Countries of the European Union, for instance, have been trying to do this since 2013 with the EU Timber Regulation that requires companies to conduct “due diligence” to “make every effort to ensure that the wood they trade in is legal.”8
Binding international agreements to constrain the tax, environmental, labor, and human rights practices of transnational firms would also go a long way toward reducing the damage of TNCs. One example would be a treaty like the one the UN Human Rights Council is now considering “to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises.”9
More generally, governments could reduce the damage of big business by passing stronger environmental legislation with ambitious targets and timelines, moving faster and harder than industry will go voluntarily, pushing back when big business is recalcitrant. Here, it is vital to give indigenous peoples and local communities more say when granting extraction and production rights to TNCs. Imposing higher levels of precaution when approving new chemicals, technologies, and industrial processes would help, too. So would holding more producers liable for post-consumer waste – what some governments are calling “extended producer responsibility.” Incentivizing manufacturers to reuse more of the material and energy from consumer waste streams would also help. And so would closing legal loopholes, reducing the influence of big business on all levels of politics, and enforcing the laws currently on the books.
But states alone will never be able to fully restrain the destructive compulsions of big business. We need community activists, investigative journalists, and NGOs like Global Witness and Greenpeace to continue to expose corporate crimes, from bribing politicians to deceiving regulators to smuggling blood diamonds. And we need environmental and consumer activists to keep fighting as politicians backed by big business maneuver to repeal regulations already in place, as happened in 2017 with the Dodd–Frank Act after President Donald Trump came to power and the Republicans gained control of Congress.
At the same time grassroots movements will need to continue to oppose development projects and industrial extraction that is destroying local environments, as happened in El Salvador leading up to the 2008 moratorium on large-scale metal mining and the subsequent 2017 formal ban (to protect the country’s freshwater supply). Social media campaigns will need to keep challenging the narrative of consumer capitalism and keep reminding people of the consequences of wasteful and excessive consumption. Activists will need to continue to expose – and shame – brands for evading taxes, employing slave labor, and falsifying certification. And resistance campaigns like the Occupy movement will need to keep disrupting the rationalizations of elites who are getting rich by destroying the planet.
Going forward, governments and civil society organizations must be careful to not let the feel-good rhetoric of CSR and the incremental advances from corporate sustainability further weaken their resolve to dismantle corporate monopolies, oppose corporate mergers, and confront the growing inequality of wealth and consumption. We need states to prosecute TNCs for corruption, misconduct, and fraud, as attorneys are now trying to do in the USA with ExxonMobil. And we need them to prosecute corporate executives for participating in transnational environmental crimes, supporting organizations such as the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which in 2016 announced it would start treating “the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land” as crimes against humanity.10
Of course, such actions to rein in big business are going to face strong opposition. If anything, the next few decades are likely to see even bigger, more powerful transnational corporations with even more control over our planet’s fate. Unless it is in their interest, TNCs will never simply roll over to the demands of social movements, governments, or communities. And they’ll never stop contesting norms, discourses, and laws that challenge their capacity to extract profits, concentrate wealth, and gain power.
Nor is corporate sustainability ever going to lead us to planetary sustainability. Yet, as this chapter shows, there are ways to push big business to go beyond corporate sustainability. And there are some hopeful signs this is beginning to occur.
All TNCs have an innate vulnerability: they need public trust, markets, and resources to thrive. Intriguingly, the strategy to brand themselves as responsible and sustainable has left TNCs more financially exposed to environmental criticism. While the power of big business over global governance is clearly rising, so is the power of social justice and environmental advocates to devalue brands by exposing their illegal, unethical, and unsustainable activities. This growing power to cut into the financial bottom line of TNCs may offer a way to push big business to do even less damage to the earth, as long as regulators, activists, and consumers can avoid being lulled into complacency by the money, first-class comforts, and modest gains on offer from voluntary corporate governance.