The Big Green Lie
The Hope and the Hype
Someone asked me recently, “I know green is popular now. But what’s next?”
I said: “Honesty.”
Consultants tell you that green business is profitable. Stories of businesses successfully implementing green programs are all over the media. Former EPA chief William Reilly touts a new green business book as “a compelling blueprint for how companies can address critical environmental problems, from climate change to water, and improve their performance, gain competitive advantage, make money, and win friends.” It sounds so tidy. But it’s not. Implementing sustainable business practices is closer to trench warfare than surgery.
I work at a business-Aspen Skiing Company-that is remarkably supportive of environmental projects. Yet we find that it’s very difficult to do what matters most from an environmental perspective: cut carbon dioxide emissions. We’ve eliminated millions of pounds of CO2 through retrofits, green construction, on-site renewable energy, and widespread efficiency measures, but our emissions are creeping upward. At the same time, scientists say we must achieve 80 or 90 percent reductions to slow climate change.
We struggle with barriers that are seemingly universal in the business world. For example: this year our various departments submitted $40 million in requests for capital spending (new roofs, retiling a leaky hotel swimming pool), but the company only has $9 million budgeted. The important green projects-a solar electric installation or energy-saving repairs to a heating system-might be out-competed by that roof leaking onto a guest’s bed. Necessities may trump even profitable green projects, especially if those projects aren’t profitable enough.
Other companies struggle too. Wal-Mart is spending $500 million annually on green programs. But last November the company released its first sustainability report, which showed CO2 emissions climbing an average of 8.6 percent from 2005 to 2006. What’s going on?
Cutting CO2 emissions is difficult, even for a motivated company. That’s because energy is cheap; there’s limited incentive to conserve it. Businesses will cherry-pick projects that save the most energy at the lowest cost but decline to make the deeper, less profitable (or even costly) emissions cuts necessary to solve the climate problem.
Meanwhile, making money means creating more carbon emissions, often through growth. The reality that finding emissions reductions isn’t like hitting the jackpot over and over again may come as a surprise. After all, the story we tend to hear is that such actions are cost-effective, smart, and relatively easy to pull off. Governments want their typically lame, voluntary “technical assistance” programs to appear successful. Nonprofits and consultants make their case, or their money, by selling the “green is green” story. And corporations are often pitching profitable environmental progress to customers as well as shareholders.
Where does hope end, and hype begin? It is not that businesses can’t cut emissions profitably (to a point), or that existing efforts are pointless and futile. It’s that at current energy prices, even ragingly successful emissions reductions will only cut your emissions by a third, at best, because it isn’t profitable enough to do more. But we must do much better than that, and soon.
Instead of being Pollyannas crowing about a climate-solutions cakewalk, let’s be realistic about the scale of change needed. The most important corporate climate action might not take place in the factory or the boiler room, but in Congress, in the streets, and on the barricades.
Auden Schendler is director of community and environmental responsibility for the Aspen Skiing Company.
© 2008 Orion
Why is common dreams running this pathetic excuse letter from an environmentally destructive industry? Aspen? Where the eco-criminals go to celebrate?
He wants us on the barricades, while his company is allowed to continue it’s charade, and remain profitable? Okay, I’ll gladly join the barricades, let’s start with, all roads leading into Aspen.
Ramsay
Thanks for the frank talk about how your company operates.
Next week, in my town, a representative of blue Cross/Blue Shield is going present the Western PA Coalition for Single-Payer healthcare with their excuse.
Only we wealthy can afford to destroy the planet. Why care about our own children? Flying to a ski weekend is more fun. Bring “Tale of Two Cities” for some light reading.
“Let’s be realistic”? OK. We live in a civilization which is unsustainable and also unrepairable. The only realistic ’solution’ is a collapse of this civilization and a huge decline in the number of people living on the planet along with a 99.99 % reduction in energy use per capita. Use as much energy as you and your domesic animals can produce. Also you can burn as much wood as you can grow. Ever watch wood grow? You can also burn the dung of yourself and your animals. That’s how it was done for millenia and that is how it will be done in the future by a greatly reduced population.
if you can look past your reaction to his Aspen ski industry job, and think about the substance of what he is saying, you might find that he is correct in his point.
No matter how much you want businesses to do otherwise or how much certain businesses do on their own initiative for whatever reasons, in the aggregate they will act in their economic interests. If carbon-producing behavior is cheaper than clean behavior, businesses will produce carbon, even if it destroys the planet.
So, you have to force them to change. That can be done either by making carbon-producing behavior (1) more expensive (making them pay the full social costs of pollution making it impossible to make a profit on such behavior, boycotting the product to deny income to polluting behavior, increasing the costs of polluting inputs to force the use of clean alternatives, etc., etc.) or (2) illegal (which is really just a different means of making it more expensive). The way you do this is, as the author says, changing the law or taking the issue “to the streets” in one form or another (the later may result in the former). You can’t sit back and hope that businesses will do it, even the businesses that may really want to.
Cracker1,
Good points. But the same businesses that say the’d like to be greener are also the ones who pushed institutions on us like NAFTA or the WTO, that gave capitalist investors the power to veto any of the governmental actions you suggest.
I’m with cracker1–y’all are trying to kill the messenger here. The point he or she is trying to make (is Auden a boy name or a girl name?) is that businesses can’t operate on an ethical level like people can–they NEED government regulation to allow them to make the necessary changes and still compete. Without regulation, the company that puts environmental or social responsibility ahead of profit will lose against those that don’t, and disappear. The other point is that there is a lot of happy noise about successful programs to green up and cut emissions, because such stories are very popular–but Auden is in a position to see the reality and wants to clue us in–we will need much more drastic change than what comes easily, or voluntarily.
cracker1 and mwildfire:
You are obviously not aware that corporations control the regulatory process, via the funding and financing of “our” representatives, in our so called Democracy.
That in many cases, the laws are written by corporate lobbyists, and then rubber-stamped by legislators.
It’s all well and good for Auden and y’all to say that the solution is going to have come from the passage of laws. But when the lawmakers get paid by the lawbreakers…I could go on but it’s pointless.
Yes, I did wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, so please excuse my grumpiness and don’t take it personally.
It was the “I’ve done my part, I’ve greenwhashed my sins, y’all are gonna have to set-up a barricade to get any real change. Excuse me up here in Aspen, while I enjoy a hot brandy by the fireplace, with the SVP of Communications of Walmart.” attitude that set me off.
Ramsay
For the past 71 years, Corporate America has been winning the greenwashing war against us for one and only one reason. The very same resource that can completely replace petroleum and doesn’t require a drop of it to produce is HEMP. Now I know all you people out there have been fucked into buying the NAZI “reefer madness” propaganda and are too used to badmouthing hemp as “pot”. But let’s consider the fact that it was FDR who signed the OBSCENE Marijuana High Taxation Act which allowed Big Oil to operate freely without any healthy competition from non-THC Industrial Hemp. You progressives and liberals will first have to get your act together and SHUT DOWN THE DRUG WAR. Hemp requires no petroleum, does not deplete, requires less land, and can be grown at ANY temperature. Nearly everything that currently uses petroleum to manufacture and produce can be completely be replaced by hemp oil, not to mention the other plant oils that never get a say such as flax, jute, etc… . Now let’s all stop being losers and start putting the 25000 uses of Industrial Hemp to use. The “conversation” stuff will take care of itself from there. Now who’s ready to be a winner and who’s going to stick to the losing side of staying the petroleum course?
The OP is just bunk. The human race has exactly one, single chance to get this right. We get our GHG output to a net negative profile worldwide before the permafrost melts and releases gigatons of methane or most of us, our our children die. The computers ticking away in your Aspen ski resort are going to get awfully lonely waiting for new check-ins then.
Anybody who thinks corporate greenwashing is anything but cynical marketing is truly deluded. Most of these companies have people near the top that can understand the consequences of not having an arctic ice cap. They are all just practicing an I got mine now bub, policy at the executive level. Or haven’t you noticed that GM’s executives still get paid millions while the company loses billions of dollars per year?
The fundamentalist christians that disdain greens are just one mega-tornado from turning into fundamentalist Amish. When god starts hunting you down personally and hammering your churches and destroying your towns down to the last outhouse it could be time to listen. When they do us liberal greenie weenies may be tolerated but those too stupid to make the switch and caught in last minute profit-taking are going to be strange fruit on the old oak tree.
Americans have no problems with human sacrifice. Push them hard enough and they won’t wait for new laws and new courts. These people are being pushed very, very, hard by Wall Street and the GOP now and they are getting the idea about where their real enemies are.
The problems with wars of conquest have always been that the soldiers come home full of killing, rape and looting. They get used to it you see; not all of them but enough.
If change is to happen it must begin with you. Stop consuming and the levels of CO2 emissions will decline. Stop looking to others for change. If you can’t do it, it will not happen. You are the key. You.
“scientists say we must achieve 80 or 90 percent reductions to slow climate change.”
What they don’t tell you is for some the real plan is to eliminate 80-90% of the population to do so.
Also, when people talk about less energy consumption, they are really talking about lower standards of living. You gave to learn how to interpret the Orwellian newspeak.
This is truly amazing.
“Carbon footprint thinking” has truly got to be one of the most effective propaganda snowjobs in the history of the world!
It just makes all other pollution disappear from people’s mind like Magic Thought Remover.
AND it somehow gets everyone talking like there was no Environmental Movement BEFORE “global warming”.
While you all jerk off to thoughts of the apocolypse, the North Pacific Plastic Soup slowly, and unceasingly grows.
Even the tropical rainforests only seem to matter to people anymore because of the loss of “carbon sinks”.
Ohnoes! My grandchildren will suffer because of a changed climate!
‘Course, they’ll never be born because nuclear waste made me sterile, gave me cancer and killed me, but still I worry for them.
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Get over yourselves.
You’re going to die because you are a MORTAL BEING, dying’s one of the things you do, better get used to it.
To need to imagine Total Global Cataclysim in order to face your Mortality is pretty sick, and pretty pathetic.
If Climate Change is going to turbo-screw things up than we should get ready for a rough ride, nuff said.
If Climate Change is going to release the “killer methane” and we’re all gonna die, than we should reflect on the beauty and love of the world, look the Reaper in the Eye and say, “Where to next, Boney?”.
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Kudos to Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, and everyone else ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THINGS THAT ARE ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
Shame to the Cowards and their pathetic love affair with “carbon footprints” and the End of the World.
I’m starting to think the goal of some of this crap is to turn people away from good, important causes, by inducing in them sheer exasperation!
-matti
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/home-detox/
matti
You are absolutly correct, no one gets out of this alive. It does matter what you do while you are here though, we are a long way from living natural lives and there are lots of people that want to keep it that way…very ugly…very greedy…very dishonest…people.
Auden Schendler is a guy. Check Orion Magazine version article for a picture (https://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2846).
According to a Business Week article by Ben Elgin about Auden Schendler and his concerns about corporate environmentalism entitled “Little Green Lies: The bitter education of a corporate environmentalist” (www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_44/b4056001.htm), prior to joining Aspen Skiing Company Schendler worked at the Rocky Mountain Institute where he learned about corporate environmentalism from Amory Lovins, the “prophet of the movement”. It has been a long, long time since I heard Amory Lovins speak. But recently I heard his ex-wife Hunter Lovins talk as a member of a panel. If Amory Lovins talks a line anything like Hunter Lovins then there isn’t a whole lot of healthy skepticism regarding corporate environmentalism at the Rocky Mountain Institute. Perhaps you can see for yourself (www.rmi.org/).
try free public transit
http://frepubtra.blogspot.com
.
If any company is serious about going green. Then it can be done with very little cost.
How ? use less packaging. Trust the Customers again instead of all those fancy plastic containers.
Oh and only use recycled material.
The more recycled material is use The less the cost.
Transportation eats into manufacturer’s budgets.
Ship by rail more often eliminate as much truck traffic as they can. The goods will still get where they are going.
Set reasonable limits in their production. Don’t make hundreds of thousands more items then they need. And go for quality People will wait for quality goods and even pay a little more.
Cut back on buying goods from the Far East. Move you manufacturing closer The carbon savings from just that would be huge.
Cut advertising especially in too many magazines.
If their product is good word of mouth will sell it.
Cut the size of all corporations so that they do not have a big advantage over the rest of their industry. This will stimulate compitition which they all claim they support. And the consumer will get the best value for their money.
So look what I just wrote, If they would follow just these few ideas .They already would be going green without spending even a dollar,and they would have more money for the larger green projects later.
Why do these ideas have to come from someone like me. They have always been quite obvious
I’ve decided to exhale only once for every two inhales. Will that help?
Seriously, if I only questioned the will of society to stop destroying the planet, I’d have hope. People can change their minds. Unfortunately, I also question our ability to control the beast we’ve created. I’d love to fly like Superman, I do not have the ability.
On a personal note, I’ve acquired a fuel-efficient small car. I am only too aware that the amount of energy it took to make it may completely outweigh the energy I’ll save by driving it (and I’m not talking about my fuel expense here). The fact is that the car I replaced still exists, and, no matter how little I use it (it is garaged about 9 months of the year), it still will require fuel when I do use it.
No free lunch.
The hidden question behind all this is that of “profits.” Profits cannot exist because they would violate the second law of thermodynamics. The appearance of profits come from victims: workers, the public as customer, the public as living beings, the animals, and so forth. Without an economic theory based on science, people are discussing the nebulous insubstantial ideas of alchemy and astrology, regardless of their intentions.
“Without an economic theory based on science” is what you have now. Essentially it is the problem.
Retire Green:
I am (as I am sure others here are) quite cognizant of the control moneyed interests exert over our regulatory bodies and the sophistication by which they do so at every level. I am also aware that there spending some of their time and energy fighting to change this. If you really give a damn, work to change it. If not you, who? If not now, when? At least the Aspen guy is trying to do something from where he is at the moment.
Abu Dhabi is building a completely enclosed ski resort with air conditioning and artificial snow.