Auden Schendler, Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen One, argues that market forces and corporate voluntary efforts alone are decidedly failing to address climate change. Drawing from his newly released book, Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul, he shares key actions for scaling impact, whatever size your organization might be.

The corporate sustainability movement arguably began when multinational corporations like Toyota, 3M, and DuPont started thinking about manufacturing differently in the late sixties. Most of their solutions saved money and energy while reducing pollution. 3M developed water-, not solvent-based processes, both saving on cost and ensuring regulatory compliance. DuPont developed solutions to the ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon problem that the company itself had created. And Toyota pioneered the idea of lean management, where process efficiency enabled energy and materials savings. This was exciting stuff — author Paul Hawken incorporated some of these approaches into his 1993 ecological-business manifesto, The Ecology of Commerce. That book got into the hands of Interface CEO Ray Anderson, and the modern corporate sustainability movement was born.

The Corporate Sustainability Thesis

In short, this movement posited that business could be a meaningful part of solving global environmental problems — at a profit — for some of the same reasons that 3M, Toyota, and DuPont were so successful. There actually were business drivers behind those solutions! Given that it was cheaper to save energy than to make it, couldn’t business also lead the way on climate solutions and even model the how-to for governments and policymakers? The benefit was that these fixes would all happen on the free market, without regulation.

Thirty-plus years down the line, it’s pretty clear that thesis has failed. Not only do global carbon emissions continue to climb, but resulting natural disasters continue to wreak havoc on economies, supply chains, and human lives. Looking back, the approach, even at Toyota and DuPont was entirely voluntary and therefore not systemic, seems complicit with the fossil fuel industry’s desires. After all, if that industry had wanted to design an approach to environmentalism that would distract these wealthy, powerful, global, and nimble organizations while making it seem like they cared, corporate sustainability would be it — earnest tokenism, but no disruption.

Given this situation, it’s worth asking what meaningful actions business can actually take to address the climate problem at scale. Below are three case studies from my own experience in the United States — yet which apply internationally — to help business leaders think through their own opportunities to scale regenerative impact.

Holy Cross Energy: Changing Utility Leadership to Cut Carbon Footprint

Early in my career I deployed all the energy savings techniques I could think of at the business at which I work, which runs ski resorts, hotels, and restaurants. We had implemented lighting and boiler retrofits, green building construction techniques, equipment controls, and high-efficiency pumping systems and motors. But our carbon footprint didn’t budge. After some analysis, we realized we couldn’t move the needle because our electricity came from coal, and the percentage of coal used by our utility was going up. We would never be able to overcome that carbon burden with efficiency alone: we needed to change supply. The story of how we became community organizers over many years to change the board of our local utility is described in a chapter of my new book, Terrible Beauty. In a nutshell, it required literal door-knocking, phone banking to find potential board candidates, arm-twisting, and then elaborate, highly strategic electronic campaigning. It was not easy, but over a decade (starting in the late 2000s) we tipped the balance of the board from coal boosters to clean energy advocates. That utility’s energy supply went from 6% to 80% renewables, with a goal of 100% by 2030. Our carbon footprint, and that of our whole region, plummeted accordingly. Ironically, rival businesses that declined invitations to participate in our community organizing also benefitted, making progress on their own carbon goals thanks to this work.

Kimberly-Clark: Exerting Public Pressure on Business Partners

Our second win was similarly complicated. In 2007 we were invited to join Greenpeace’s boycott of the large, multinational forest products company Kimberly-Clark, which was logging endangered forests to manufacture Kleenex, a facial tissue. Surely they could improve forestry practices, use post-consumer waste, and therefore meaningfully move the needle on climate which is, in substantial part, about how we manage forests. Our small company mattered little on the balance sheet — we spent $30k annually on the product — but our brand (perhaps the most famous ski destination in the world) meant a lot. As a result, weeks after joining the boycott, the CEO of Kimberley-Clark asked to talk to our own CEO. Think about that: the ratio of our revenues at the time was on the order of 200 to 1. And yet they cared about damage to their own image through our brand power. We engaged in a healthy and civil dialogue. 700 other companies also joined the boycott. And three years later, Kimberly-Clark significantly changed how it practiced forestry. Military historians have a term for this: asymmetric warfare. Businesses can use the power of their brand to drive disproportionate change.  

Using Advertising as a Tool for Activism

As we pursued this “power wielding” approach to driving meaningful action on climate change, we turned to our marketing program. It made sense: we reach millions of individuals through our advertising. We knew that most ski resort advertisements are boring and undifferentiated: they feature skiers on a blue-sky day. But if every ad is the same, how do you get a viewer’s attention? We decided to try something new: combine climate activism with marketing. In 2017 we developed a campaign called “Give a Flake,” which featured postage-paid postcards to U.S. Senators who are swing votes on climate policy. The day the campaign launched — with thousands of postcards appearing in a half dozen different magazines — the office of one Senator called us, irate. “What are you doing attacking us?” they asked. Our CEO took the call: “You’re not doing enough on climate. We’re asking you to do more.” In the United States, elected officials had never experienced consequences for denying climate science or failing to take meaningful action after saying they cared. This was one of the first instances of a consequence: public, political pain.

While our own campaign didn’t change policy in its time, it was part of an evolution in the American zeitgeist. When the country's most significant climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, came in front of the U.S. Senate in 2022, swing senators declining to support the bill came under enormous public pressure, including from the ski and resort industry, and consequently voted for it.

Meaningful Corporate Climate Action is Good Business

The hard truth is that the corporate sustainability movement is a failed experiment. Most multinational corporations profess to care about the essential sustainability challenge — climate change — but their actions are token, intermittent, not to scale, and their net-zero targets are managed through unregulated and questionable carbon offsets. Net Zero Tracker reports that over one thousand companies from the Forbes 2000 list have made such pledges. The simplistic concept of carbon neutrality captured the public's imagination because the climate issue is complex: it sounds like a winning solution. Yet most research on offsets show that "the large majority are not real or are over-credited or both," as Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, said in 2023.

And in many cases, corporate pledges to net-zero are overtly duplicitous ­— making bold decarbonization announcements while simultaneously selling technology to expedite fossil fuel extraction as Microsoft has done; or, like Salesforce, affirming climate policy leadership while paying dues, along with peers like Microsoft, to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable — which work directly to counter those goals.

This is all ultimately bad business: climate is in fact a threat to operations; and duplicity crushes reputation and credibility. Whistleblowers and NGOs that recognize this are cropping up. They are the tip of the iceberg, and business should see them as opportunities, not threats. Why? Because corporations are made up of, and serve, human beings, each a universe unto themselves, with hopes and aspirations, lives filled with epic love and loss, and the desire to live a “right” life.

These individuals' goals are consistent with a fundamental definition of business: “the practice of making one’s living by engaging in commerce.” And one does not “make a living” by destroying spirit and home.