{"id":67456,"date":"2015-12-14T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=67456"},"modified":"2015-12-10T16:52:28","modified_gmt":"2015-12-10T16:52:28","slug":"corporations-will-never-solve-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/12\/corporations-will-never-solve-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporations Will Never Solve Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"harvard<\/a><\/p>\n

4 Dec 2015 – <\/em>The American climate activists who have flocked to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this week tend to have one thing in common: many own the \u201cit\u201d car for their tribe, the VW Jetta Wagon TDI. At 49 MPG, the Jetta does better than many hybrids, and drives German, too. Car and Driver<\/em> magazine celebrated it as a \u201cgreen\u201d car that even an auto enthusiast could love<\/a>. That led to its cult status among greenies; for years it was hard to find one even in the want ads.<\/p>\n

Now we know that vehicle wasn\u2019t green<\/a>. It came by great gas mileage on the back of a scam: The car\u2019s supposedly low emissions were fraud \u2014 perpetrated by VW engineers who designed the car\u2019s software to lower emissions during testing, only to let them bump back up in real life use.<\/p>\n

The whole notion of green business rests on the assumption that corporations want to solve the societal or environmental problems they take on,\u00a0that they are not lying to us, and that we can trust what they say about their products and practices. As an eco-conscious TDI owner recently asked one of us: What am I supposed to do now?<\/p>\n

The facts about VW \u2014 combined with recent revelations about Exxon-Mobil\u2019s long history of misrepresenting what they understood about climate change, as well as BP\u2019s failure to get \u201cBeyond Petroleum\u201d \u2014 spell the end of the old notion of green business, the idea that a big piece of the environmental fix might come voluntarily from the corporate world. It didn\u2019t have to turn out that way.<\/p>\n

Both of us came up through a green-business movement that endorsed the notion that the most pressing problem of our time, climate change, would be solved by a coalition of entities \u2014 government, individuals, nonprofits, and, most important of all, corporations. One of us wrote a book addressed at business titled Getting Green Done.<\/em> The argument for the inclusion of the business community went like this: corporations have the combination of skills, resources, motivation, and agility to implement changes on a global scale. Roughly half of the world\u2019s hundred largest economic engines are corporations, not governments. If we could harness the profit motive in a green direction, a lot could happen, and quickly.<\/p>\n

But something happened on the way to the parade. It arguably started with BP. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster revealed that not only had BP not moved beyond petroleum, but that its former CEO John Browne, who launched the beyond petroleum campaign, never had support for his vision<\/a> in the company. By the time of Deepwater, BP was moving to sell its wind and solar businesses<\/a>, and was drilling in deeper, more difficult locations. It turns out they had an abysmal safety record<\/a>, to boot.<\/p>\n

More recently we learned something that those close to the issue long suspected: that while Exxon-Mobil was publicly insisting<\/a> that climate science was too uncertain to justify a move away from fossil fuels, privately they were aware of the science, and using it to plan expanded operations in the melting Arctic. No one ever expected Exxon-Mobil to lead the charge into renewables, but the obfuscation and deceit was still shocking.<\/p>\n

When groovy VW admitted to gaming emissions tests, many green-business enthusiasts reached their breaking point. It became clear that the idea of business leading the charge was flawed, because as consumers we cannot take companies at their word. Like the scorpion who asks the frog for a ride across the river and then stings him, killing them both, it is simply in corporations\u2019 nature<\/em> to internalize profit and externalize costs.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the sentiment the Paris \u201cbrandalism\u201d campaign has captured. That campaign, intended to call out corporations on the hypocrisy of supporting climate action, installed some 600 posters throughout the city, including a fake Air France ad that reads: \u201cTackling Climate Change? Of course not. We\u2019re an airline,\u201d and a clean, VW-style ad that shows a Jetta with the text: \u201cWe\u2019re sorry that we got caught. Now that we\u2019ve been caught, we\u2019re trying to make you think we care about the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reality is that voluntary corporate greening measures don\u2019t achieve scale, and therefore aren\u2019t climate solutions. A recent UK report<\/a> argued against the efficacy of voluntary measures, but the presence of 400 ppm CO2<\/sub> in the atmosphere should be\u00a0enough to prove the point. The market-mechanisms that were thought to be a business-friendly way to cap emissions have failed too \u2014 in Europe in large part because they were de-fanged by the business lobby and in the U.S.\u00a0they were derailed entirely on the federal level. Now we are left nearly empty-handed, with no meaningful regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, and no market-based mechanisms to control them, either.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the heroes of the VW story are not in the private sector, they include an academic engineer funded by a small non-profit who discovered the fraud; the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which corroborated it<\/a>; and the EPA, which did its job, followed up, and issued a letter of non compliance<\/a>. In recent decades it has been fashionable to criticize the EPA for over-reach and regulation in general for stifling innovation, but the reality is without the CARB and EPA doing their jobs, VW would still be perpetuating its deceit.<\/p>\n

The private sector has had two\u00a0decades since Rio, the seminal Earth Summit in 1992 that started the global conversation about climate action, to come up with technological innovation or to show the power of its voice and influence to solve this problem. But it just hasn\u2019t happened. The time has come to stop using hope as a strategy. We have to acknowledge what we should have known all along: even a well-intentioned wolf can\u2019t be a shepherd, and the dirty work of protecting the planet will be done, as it always has been, by government.<\/p>\n

The businesses we admire are those that recognize this hard truth. Eighty-one\u00a0companies, including GE and Apple, recently signed<\/a> a White House pledge<\/a> asking for a strong agreement in Paris. CERES (The Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies) announced that more than 1,000 companies have signed the Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) declaration<\/a>, saying that tackling climate change through policy mechanisms is \u201cthe right thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course these sorts of toothless statements are often undercut by corporate actions that do have teeth. Shell Oil, for example, publicly declared the need for sensible climate policies, while, at one time,\u00a0supporting the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which works to prevent them. Shell\u00a0went on to cut ties to ALEC<\/a>, due to the group\u2019s\u00a0stance on climate change.*\u00a0But each declaration about the need for policy mechanisms to tackle emissions helps undermine the myth that climate change will be stopped by the magic of the marketplace<\/a>. It\u2019s not enough to sign a pledge. You have to fight for that pledge too, something that even progressive corporations have been generally unwilling to do. Business could isolate and marginalize the anti-climate voices \u2013 like Americans for Prosperity, which currently opposes a carbon tax in Massachusetts \u2014 instead of quietly tolerating them. CEOs could editorialize about the pressing need for climate action, like the CEO of The North Face just did<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In short, our new message for executives is this: Empower policy makers to do their job. You do your job and let them do theirs.<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/p>\n

Naomi Oreskes<\/a> is professor of the history of science and an affiliated professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. \u00a0She serves on the board of Protect Our Winters<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Auden Schendler<\/a> is vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. He serves on the board of Protect our Winters<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

*Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0We\u2019ve updated this article from its original version to reflect that Shell Oil cut ties with ALEC in August 2015 and that the Rio summit was two decades ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 hbr.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The facts about VW \u2014 combined with recent revelations about Exxon-Mobil\u2019s long history of misrepresenting what they understood about climate change, as well as BP\u2019s failure to get \u201cBeyond Petroleum\u201d \u2014 spell the end of the old notion of green business, the idea that a big piece of the environmental fix might come voluntarily from the corporate world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67456\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}