Auden Schendler is a corporate sustainability practitioner and a climate activist. He has run sustainability programs at Aspen One for 25 years. He publishes widely on climate change and the outdoors. His previous book was Getting Green Done.
What’s the big idea?
Despite waving around climate pledges and sustainability initiatives as “proof” of eco-friendliness, few corporations do much of anything to support progressive policies and adopt effective planet-saving practices. Businesses have the power and influence to simultaneously profit from climate action and protect civilization from calamity. The seemingly impossible task of healing our environment is one of the greatest opportunities for heroism in human history.
Below, Auden shares five key insights from his new book, Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul. Listen to the audio version—read by Auden himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Businesses vowed “never again” to strict environmental regulations.
I grew up playing baseball just above the Lincoln Tunnel outside of New York City. I was born in 1970 when American infrastructure was in decline, interest rates were through the roof, and mortgages for houses were insane. There was terrible pollution. We’d just gotten out of the Vietnam War. It was not a great time in America. I remember being yelled at by my neighbors for sitting on their cars, which seemed unfair. That era felt like a mean-spirited time.
The pollution was so severe that rivers set on fire, the nearby meadowlands were full of garbage, and there was smog over the New York City skyline. The American people and government knew this was unacceptable. So, they passed the most significant environmental laws in the history of the world: the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. These acts were implemented over the course of the 70s and had a profound effect on society. They were unbelievably effective at cleaning up our rivers, streams, and air. They were also onerous on business.
Environmental legislation was both incredibly effective but also scary for business. This led to an approach to environmentalism that was fundamentally free market-based. Because businesses are powerful, autocratic, and motivated by profit to save money on energy costs, it was reasoned that they could be a meaningful part of the climate solution. It was thought we could solve the climate problem on a free-market basis because saving energy was profitable, and widespread adoption would drive the cost of renewable energy down. Some of this was driven by Reagan-era neoliberalism and was later supported by Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. But businesses still resisted regulation, and many have funded the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, to block progressive legislation.
2. Modern corporate sustainability is complicit with the fossil fuel economy.
If you make a list of all the sustainability actions that corporations typically take, you will include carbon footprint targets for emission reductions, reporting third-party certification, purchases of offsets, and blame-taking for the problem instead of finger-pointing. Then, do a thought experiment: If I were the fossil fuel industry and I wanted to neuter powerful corporations with immense wealth, big customer bases, political influence, and famous brand recognition, how could I get them to appear like they’re taking environmental action without interrupting the fossil fuel economy at all? Well, the answer would be the same list I just outlined.
“Because businesses are powerful, autocratic, and motivated by profit to save money on energy costs, it was reasoned that they could be a meaningful part of the climate solution.”
Essentially, corporate sustainability was a way to appear to be doing something for the environment without getting in the way of the fossil fuel status quo. The rate of CO2 emissions and total CO2 emissions confirm this. People like Ray Anderson, Paul Hawken, and Amory Lovins analyzed the corporate sustainability movement and were some of the first to point out that emissions went up, warming continued, and great catastrophes accelerated. The question becomes, what can we hope or expect corporations to do that might be effective?
3. Hypocrisy has been used to prevent action.
One of the ways that the fossil fuel industry neutered corporations is by using hypocrisy and accusations of hypocrisy as a tool for control. Think of it this way: I had a colleague tell me I can’t join an environmental foundation because I drive an SUV. Since I’m part of the problem, I can’t criticize inaction on climate change. But if you buy into the idea that citizens or corporations are guilty because they use fossil fuels, then you misunderstand history. Citizens never said that they wanted hot showers, cold soda, and faster mobility at the cost of destroying civilization. Citizens said they would like those services delivered by whatever mechanism makes those amenities more affordable.
Fossil fuels delivered those things amazingly cheaply. Don’t get me wrong, fossil fuels were an incredible boon to humanity. They lifted people out of poverty and helped us win wars. They were incredibly important agriculturally. And yet, there was a point at which the scientific community realized that there was a problem with fossil fuels, and that problem was their carbon emissions. In a functional governed democracy, you would use those scientific insights to guide policy. If we had done that in, say, 1977, when ExxonMobil fully understood the risks associated with carbon emissions, or in 1980, when Jimmy Carter suggested that we slowly and deliberately stop using fossil fuels, then we would have solved the problem by now without economic disruption. It could have been accomplished in a gradual way that would not have been problematic for jobs and society.
Instead, what happened is that the fossil fuel industry intentionally buried the science and made sure that elected officials would not vote for regulation. As a result, we are now in a crisis, and opponents of climate action insist that hindering the fossil fuel industry would be too disruptive for society.
4. How corporations can wield power for climate action.
If you look at the different levers we have in society to drive change, we don’t have that many. You’ve got civil society, voting, activist groups, nonprofits, philanthropy, religious communities, the legal system, and government. You also have corporations capable of driving change in the political arena and in society. We shouldn’t throw out corporations as part of this toolbox, but they must wield their power if they care about climate. By this, I don’t mean the kind of carbon navel-gazing corporations are doing where they focus on their carbon footprint. Power wielding says, What if we care about climate change? What would drive change?
“We shouldn’t throw out corporations as part of this toolbox, but they must wield their power if they care about climate.”
Imagine a powerful and influential company like Apple. Although Apple has primarily focused on its own operations, it has a huge audience of loyal and fanatical customers to whom it could stress the threat of climate change and the urgency of individuals and businesses taking action. What if Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an op-ed in The New York Times demanding climate policy? What if corporations used their lobbying power to drive climate action? Corporations all say they care about this problem, so what if they acted like it?
At Aspen One, we approach climate initiatives systemically in different creative ways. One example was when we realized we couldn’t cut our carbon pollution by using lighting or boiler retrofits. In green buildings, we realized that they were entirely coal-fired. To change our carbon impact, we had to change the utility. We spent a decade trying to get the utility board to change. This meant finding candidates and running elections. In the end, we succeeded. The board today is entirely climate progressive. The utility is 75-80 percent renewables and has a target of 100 percent renewables by 2030. Not only did this radically green our operations, but it changed the whole region. This utility has 60,000 customers and serves other big businesses. These are the kinds of systemic changes that need to happen. In our case, it was good for us. Our utility rates are some of the lowest in the country, partly because renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy.
5. Climate change is a borderline impossible problem to solve.
We’ve blown past the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius carbon target and will blow past 2 degrees Celsius soon. It is discouraging, especially when you see hurricane after hurricane hit the east coast of the United States, floods overtake Europe, and fires and droughts rage around the world. It feels like an impossible battle, but human beings are distinctly and uniquely equipped to take on impossible battles.
First, we’re mortal. Our very existence is about fighting a losing battle and learning to see life as a way of being more than as a win-lose battle. Also, our favorite stories are about fighting persistent evil that, ultimately, is undefeatable. We see that fight as a way of being more than we see it as a win-lose battle. For example, the Bible is about the persistent return of an evil that will never go away and must be fought against forever. In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien called the battle against evil “the long defeat.” At the end of the saga, the Shire was destroyed. Tolkien himself pointed out that he didn’t intend to say that evil had been defeated. In Beowulf, the great hero is dead at the end of the book, and his people are left unprotected. Harry Potter is another great example.
This is what we do as human beings. We take on these battles. Think of World War II or smallpox. We should see the climate threat as the greatest opportunity ever presented to human beings. We have a chance to save civilization. Who could not take up that opportunity? It’s too great a chance to lead extraordinary, meaningful lives.
To listen to the audio version read by author Auden Schendler, download the Next Big Idea App today:
