Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?

Peter Dauvergne

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509524013, 9781509524006
• eBook ISBN: 9781509524044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Walmart. Coca-Cola. BP. Toyota. The world economy runs on the profits of transnational corporations. Politicians need their backing. Non-profit organizations rely on their philanthropy. People look to their brands for meaning. And their power continues to rise.

Can these companies, as so many are now hoping, provide the solutions to end the mounting global environmental crisis? Absolutely, the CEOs of big business are telling us: the commitment to corporate social responsibility will ensure it happens voluntarily.

Peter Dauvergne challenges this claim, arguing instead that corporations are still doing far more to destroy than protect our planet. Trusting big business to lead sustainability is, he cautions, unwise — perhaps even catastrophic. Planetary sustainability will require reining in the power of big business, starting now.

1
Total Destruction?

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

Pledging sustainability

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?

Big-business sustainability

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.

Better than nothing?

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. Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Total Destruction?
• 2 The Rising Power of Big Business
• 3 The Business of CSR
• 4 The Dark Side of Big Business
• 5 The Consumption Problem
• 6 Less Destruction
• End User License Agreement