When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria switched to disposable plastic trays because the paper ones hurt trees. Stupid, I know… but are today’s initiatives any better?
When I was in elementary school, the cafeteria switched to disposable plastic trays because the paper ones hurt trees. Stupid, I know… but are today’s initiatives any better?
A corporate problem and a societal problem are two sides of the same coin. Corporations don’t make money in isolation, they make money because they sell things that (directly or ultimately) are bought by consumers.
You could choose to imagine a scenario where the CEOs of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, etc just voluntarily decide to stop extracting oil overnight, and think that would be more impactful than billions of individual consumers slashing their demand for carbon-intensive products and fuels. But if the consumers don’t change their behaviour and continue to demand this stuff, other companies would just step in to fill the gap, takeover the old oil fields, etc.
The sustainable way to change corporate behaviour is through changing their end-consumers’ behaviour - i.e. if end-consumers stop directly buying carbon-intensive products and stop buying from carbon-intensive companies.
The MOST sustainable way to change corporate behavior is to make it prohibitively expensive for them to engage in behavior that is bad for the environment by levying major financial penalties and taxes on the offending corporations.
Corps frame it as an individualist problem because they don’t want regulation, which is really the only viable way to attack the problem (and regulations needs to be backed by treaties with teeth since it is a global problem).
You can’t expect every consumer to research every product and service they buy to make sure these products were made with an acceptable footprint. And if low-footprint products/services are more expensive or somehow not quite as good, there will be a financial incentive to use higher footprint products (if individuals acted “rationally,” this is what they would do).
Consumers are also voters. Corporations are not. Whether through the products we purchase at the shops or the politicians we elect at the ballot box, it will be the behaviour of individuals that creates the incentive set within which corporations profit-maximise.
Telling ourselves that this is a corporate problem and our individual behaviour doesn’t matter is a comforting fairy tale but it will accomplish little.
Corporations are financial supporters of politicians, though, and they do a good job of making sure any viable political choice is on their side.
It’s false choices all of the way down.
Capital has already shifted toward green energy and renewable systems. Capitalism is way ahead of any other process in terms of fighting climate change
https://www.strategy-business.com/article/A-rising-tide-of-green-capital