Good Business: Three Case Studies in Corporate Power Wielding on Climate Change

Auden Schendler

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.

About the Author:

Auden Schendler, Senior Vice President, Sustainability, at Aspen One and author of the newly released

Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering our Soul.


PHOTO: Dan Bayer | Aspen One Utility Scale Solar Array | Carbondale, CO, USA

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Can sustainability be saved by tackling loneliness, not just CO₂ emissions?

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By Nicole Cacal, MSc, • October 30, 2025
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Research shows that selecting smaller, purpose-fit AI models for specific tasks can achieve nearly the same accuracy as their larger counterparts while reducing global energy demand by up to 28% . Twenty-eight percent. That's not marginal; that's transformational. Think about what your organization actually needs. Are you processing customer service inquiries? Analyzing spreadsheet data? Generating product descriptions? Most of these tasks don't require a frontier model. A fine-tuned, task-specific model will do the job with a fraction of the computational overhead. The shift we need is cultural as much as technical. We need to move from asking "what's the most powerful AI we can deploy?" to "what's the most appropriate AI for this specific use case?" That question changes everything, from procurement decisions to vendor relationships, internal training, and infrastructure planning. 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Measuring What Matters: Beyond Energy to Net Benefit But here's the challenge: if we only measure AI's direct energy consumption, we miss the full picture. We need frameworks that capture both the operational cost and the systemic benefit. This is where life cycle assessment combined with comparative modeling becomes essential. We need to ask: compared to what? And over what timeframe? The sectoral success stories are compelling when you run the numbers: Building automation systems powered by AI are consistently achieving energy savings in the range of 20-30% across diverse building types. One documented case study of a commercial office building in the United States showed a 32% reduction in overall energy consumption with a 2.4-year return on investment (a $2.1 million system investment generating $875,000 in annual savings). In Stockholm, the SISAB school building portfolio achieved similar results with a two-year payback period. 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It requires companies to demand more of their technology providers and deploy their systems sustainably when greener options become available. But (and this is crucial) these benefits only materialize when we pair the right AI with the right infrastructure and the right deployment strategy. Which brings us to governance. The Path Forward: Governance, Transparency, and Adaptive Thinking The sustainability community, including organizations like ISSP, is actively developing shared frameworks for assessing AI's net impact. These emerging approaches include system-level energy auditing, selective task deployment protocols, and strategies for minimizing "dark data" (the vast amounts of stored data that's never used but still requires energy to maintain). Multi-stakeholder governance initiatives are bringing together technologists, policymakers, environmental scientists, and business leaders to create adaptive standards. 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