This arti­cle is part of Cov­er­ing Cli­mate Now, a glob­al col­lab­o­ra­tion of more than 250 news out­lets to strength­en cov­er­age of the cli­mate sto­ry.

The failure of corporate sustainability efforts also bodes poorly for the kind of laissez-faire policies that corporations hold up as the answer to climate change.

For­get the youth activists cap­tur­ing the country’s imag­i­na­tion with calls for a Green New Deal and the pro­gres­sive politi­cians push­ing for it: The clear­est sig­nal that cli­mate change demands action comes from the planet’s corporations.

Cor­po­ra­tions world­wide are announc­ing new plans to elim­i­nate cli­mate impact from their oper­a­tions, and would have you believe they are well on their way to build­ing the green econ­o­my vol­un­tar­i­ly, no need for major eco­nom­ic reform. It would seem the dirt­i­er the indus­try, the big­ger the ambi­tion. Hei­del­bergCe­ment, for exam­ple, the world’s sec­ond-largest cement pro­duc­er, pledged to pro­duce car­bon-neu­tral con­crete by 2050, a goal in line with the Paris Agree­ment. It was a first for an indus­try that is the world’s third-largest indus­tri­al ener­gy con­sumer, accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Ener­gy Agency. Xcel Ener­gy, mean­while, one of the biggest util­i­ties in the Unit­ed States, is clos­ing coal-fired pow­er plants and mov­ing aggres­sive­ly into wind and solar renew­ables, claim­ing it will be ​“car­bon-free” by 2050.

Cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty pro­grams today extend to sup­pli­ers and sub­con­trac­tors, as well, and some big banks are begin­ning to fac­tor cli­mate change risk assess­ments into their lend­ing deci­sions. Even Exxon­Mo­bil, arguably the most envi­ron­men­tal­ly unfriend­ly cor­po­ra­tion of all time, claims, ​“We believe that cli­mate change risks war­rant action and it’s going to take all of us — busi­ness, gov­ern­ments and con­sumers — to make mean­ing­ful progress.”

It’s lit­tle won­der that exec­u­tives are wor­ried: A 2019 sur­vey of 215 large com­pa­nies from the non­prof­it CDP found they expect to lose as much as $1 tril­lion from cli­mate impacts in years to come. Clean ener­gy would save mon­ey in the long run while win­ning rep­u­ta­tion­al cur­ren­cy with con­sumers. Yet few of these cor­po­ra­tions have put their heft behind robust gov­ern­ment cli­mate poli­cies. In fact, pol­lut­ing cor­po­ra­tions have poured mil­lions of dol­lars into lob­by­ing efforts against new envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions, sug­gest­ing they only want cli­mate action if they set the terms.

But could vol­un­tary cor­po­rate envi­ron­men­tal cleanups and self-polic­ing solve the prob­lem? To answer, In These Times looked back at some of the most ambi­tious cor­po­rate envi­ron­men­tal promis­es of recent decades. It’s not very encouraging.

1

The trans­porta­tion sec­tor is the biggest pol­lu­tor in the U.S., account­ing for 29% of total emis­sions in 2017, accord­ing to the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency. Medi­um-duty and heavy-duty trucks (for car­go, fire­fight­ing and oth­er ser­vices) con­tribute 23% of trans­porta­tion emis­sions; these emis­sions increased by 90% between 1990 and 2017. Com­mer­cial ground ship­ping is poised to remain a major pol­luter for the fore­see­able future.

The pic­ture once seemed rosier. In 2000, FedEx teamed with the Envi­ron­men­tal Defense Fund to devel­op a ​“rev­o­lu­tion­ary” hybrid truck design to bring down green­house gas emis­sions by 30% while reduc­ing air pol­lu­tion. FedEx planned to start replac­ing its dirt­i­er-burn­ing diesel trucks in 2003 with the poten­tial of rolling out 30,000 new vehi­cles in a decade. ​“I can’t envi­sion any rea­son why we wouldn’t roll this out over the whole fleet,” one exec­u­tive said.

“By mak­ing this com­mit­ment, they are tak­ing a giant step for­ward for the envi­ron­ment in the Unit­ed States,” Geroge W. Bush’s EPA admin­is­tra­tor, Chris­tine Todd Whit­man, told the New York Times.

The rev­o­lu­tion nev­er took hold. By 2010, FedEx had added only a few hun­dred elec­tric and hybrid vehi­cles, cit­ing the ​“daunt­ing” costs of pur­chas­ing or con­vert­ing vehicles.

Today, the com­pa­ny has few­er than 4,000 ​“alter­na­tive ener­gy vehi­cles” on the road — about 2% of its ground fleet of 180,000+ vehi­cles world­wide, lag­ging behind UPS (with more than 10,000 alter­na­tive fuel vehi­cles in its total fleet of 123,000).

After balk­ing at the cost of a new green fleet, FedEx (like much of the ground ship­ping indus­try) has refo­cused its ​“sus­tain­abil­i­ty” work on rel­a­tive­ly low-hang­ing fruit such as mak­ing improve­ments to its exist­ing fleet’s fuel effi­cien­cy (which can save mon­ey with­out major new invest­ments). FedEx has made strides, improv­ing fuel effi­cien­cy 39.6% from a 2005 base­line, and claims to still be ​“revolutioniz[ing]” the indus­try. But none of this moves to tran­si­tion cor­po­rate ground fleets to renew­able fuel.

2

Mar­itime ship­ping, one of the more dif­fi­cult sec­tors to decar­bonize due to the lack of viable alter­na­tive fuels at the ready, accounts for 2.2% of the world’s car­bon diox­ide emis­sions, accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations Inter­na­tion­al Mar­itime Organization.

In 2011, the inter­na­tion­al com­modi­ties trad­er Cargill cap­tured imag­i­na­tions by installing a giant kite on the dry bulk car­go ship Aghia Mari­na, mak­ing it the world’s largest kite­as­sist­ed car­go ship. The sys­tem works by har­ness­ing pow­er­ful high-alti­tude winds to pro­pel car­go ships, reduc­ing fuel con­sump­tion by up to 35% (depend­ing on weath­er con­di­tions) accord­ing to Sky­Sails, the Ger­man engi­neer­ing com­pa­ny that pio­neered the concept.

Fuel is one of this industry’s biggest costs, so adding sail tech­nol­o­gy seemed like a win-win. The pilot ship grabbed inter­na­tion­al head­lines and appeared poised to scale up to become a new indus­try standard.

Even the online envi­ron­men­tal site Tree­Hug­ger praised Cargill, say­ing, in 2011, that the project was ​“worth rec­og­niz­ing” (even as they remained crit­i­cal of some of Cargill’s oth­er practices).

But by 2015, Cargill was say­ing that it had ​“encoun­tered obsta­cles that demon­strate the chal­lenge of mak­ing wind­pow­ered ves­sels a real­i­ty,” and the project was end­ed. The Aghia Mari­na was sold in 2017, around which time the Sky­Sails sys­tem was removed, accord­ing to Sky­Sails founder Stephan Wrage.

“I think [the sail sys­tem] should have been installed on a new ves­sel,” Wrage says. But that nev­er hap­pened. Car­go ship own­ers, Wrage says, have gen­er­al­ly resist­ed adopt­ing new tech­nol­o­gy such as kite sails, despite the proven cost sav­ings. The rea­son is that car­go ship own­ers aren’t the ones pay­ing for fuel. Fuel costs are passed onto char­ter cus­tomers (like Cargill), so the ship own­ers gen­er­al­ly don’t make expen­sive ener­gy effi­cien­cy upgrades, no mat­ter the cli­mate-sav­ing potential.

Cargill, appar­ent­ly, was unwill­ing or unable to lever­age its inter­na­tion­al stature and busi­ness scale to push for a sea change in the ship­ping indus­try. Nev­er­the­less, today it still wants full cred­it for its short-lived sail exper­i­ment, insist­ing that its abort­ed pilot project ​“does under­score Cargill’s com­mit­ment to invest­ing in inno­v­a­tive ship­ping solu­tions that aim to trans­form the industry.”

3

Avi­a­tion makes up rough­ly 3% of glob­al green­house gas emis­sions, one of the fastest-grow­ing sources. Since the mid-2000s, some air­lines have offered pas­sen­gers a chance to assuage their own car­bon guilt by pur­chas­ing car­bon off­sets: For an extra fee, fly­ers buy into for­est man­age­ment and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly projects to bal­ance out the car­bon they’re using. Vir­gin Atlantic Air­ways helped lead the charge — on the pub­lic rela­tions front, at least.

Promis­ing its car­bon off­sets are test­ed against ​“strict cri­te­ria about what counts as a car­bon reduc­tion,” Vir­gin assures cus­tomers that car­bon cred­its sup­port envi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion and improve ​“people’s lives by deliv­er­ing house­hold sav­ings, health ben­e­fits and improv­ing water resources.”

But at least one off­set project adver­tised by Vir­gin has proved to be a sham. The envi­ron­men­tal and social jus­tice orga­ni­za­tion Fern issued a fail­ing grade, in 2017, to Virgin’s off­set cred­its for for­est con­ser­va­tion in Odd­ar Meanchey, Cam­bo­dia. An inves­ti­ga­tion found that near­ly half of the for­est that was sup­posed to be pro­tect­ed had been clear-cut. Fern’s Julia Chris­t­ian told the Phnom Penh Post those car­bon cred­its ​“are bogus — they are based on emis­sions sav­ings that nev­er hap­pened, because the for­est was destroyed, not protected.”

A few months after Fern’s report made inter­na­tion­al head­lines, Vir­gin stopped sell­ing the Odd­ar Meanchey off­sets.

A Vir­gin spokesper­son said the com­pa­ny had act­ed ​“in good faith” when select­ing the project, though crit­ics had pub­licly raised con­cerns years prior.

It’s not that pre­serv­ing forests isn’t an effec­tive decar­boniza­tion method, but that for­est off­set pro­grams too often fail to pre­vent defor­esta­tion. In May 2019, ProP­ub­li­ca issued an inves­tiga­tive report that exam­ined two decades of off­sets and con­clud­ed that for­est car­bon cred­its ​“may be worse than noth­ing,” giv­ing ​“pol­luters a guilt-free pass to keep emit­ting CO2” with lit­tle to no cli­mate ben­e­fit. The pro­grams are also con­tro­ver­sial with social jus­tice and indige­nous rights groups who see local com­mu­ni­ties los­ing their age-old ways of life after con­ser­va­tion­ists cut off their access to hunt­ing, fish­ing and foraging.

Despite these prob­lems, the Inter­na­tion­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Organization’s Car­bon Off­set­ting and Reduc­tion Scheme for Inter­na­tion­al Avi­a­tion (COR­SIA) is still rely­ing on off­sets for its indus­try-wide goal of car­bon-neu­tral growth by 2020.

4

Thomas Mooney, senior vice pres­i­dent for sus­tain­able growth at Fiji Water, claimed in a 2008 press release, ​“Con­sumers who choose Fiji Water will actu­al­ly be help­ing the envi­ron­ment by tak­ing car­bon out of the atmos­phere with every pur­chase.” Labels read­ing ​“every drop is green” appeared on Fiji bot­tles in super­mar­kets and hotel rooms, along with a ​“car­bon neu­tral” claim. But very few things in life are tru­ly carbon-free.

Pro­duc­ing plas­tic bot­tles and ship­ping water from Fiji to the rest of the world comes with a heavy envi­ron­men­tal cost, and Fiji’s promise to neu­tral­ize ​“120%” of its car­bon emis­sions was based on so-called for­ward cred­it­ing, a scheme that allowed the com­pa­ny to tout its car­bon-neg­a­tive sta­tus in 2008 even though its emis­sions wouldn’t (the­o­ret­i­cal­ly) achieve that sta­tus until 2037, accord­ing to cal­cu­la­tions by the inter­na­tion­al nature group, Con­ser­va­tion Inter­na­tion­al (CI), that part­nered with Fiji on the project. The idea was to rely on con­ser­va­tion projects in Fiji — which, we know, is no guar­an­tee of for­est preser­va­tion. Bil­lion­aire Stew­art Resnick, who co-owns Fiji Water, hap­pened to be a long­time CI board mem­ber, and CI worked for Fiji Water in exchange for con­ser­va­tion fund­ing. (Full dis­clo­sure: This author briefly worked for Con­ser­va­tion Inter­na­tion­al in 2006, which led to her whistle­blow­ing book, Green, Inc.: An Envi­ron­men­tal Insid­er Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.)

In 2011, a Cal­i­for­nia woman launched a class-action law­suit argu­ing Fiji was ​“claim[ing] cred­it for car­bon removal that may or may not take place — up to sev­er­al decades in the future.” The case was dis­missed, but the com­pa­ny has stopped using the car­bon-neu­tral label.

5

Remem­ber ​“Beyond Petro­le­um”? In 2001, the oil com­pa­ny BP (for­mer­ly known as British Petro­le­um) rebrand­ed as an envi­ron­men­tal cham­pi­on, adopt­ing its ​“Beyond” slogan.

Its solar sub­sidiary, BP Solar, was a big part of the Beyond Petro­le­um efforts. In its mid-2000s hey­day, solar pan­el man­u­fac­tur­er BP Solar enjoyed a brief era of prof­itabil­i­ty. In 2004, the com­pa­ny report­ed, ​“The solar busi­ness grew sales by 38% and deliv­ered a full-year oper­at­ing prof­it for the first time.”

Short­ly after that record year, how­ev­er, Chi­nese solar pan­el man­u­fac­tur­ers intro­duced cheap new prod­ucts to the mar­ket. By 2008, Chi­nese solar pan­els were sell­ing for 80% less than oth­ers in the indus­try, dri­ving out com­pe­ti­tion and allow­ing Chi­na to seize a lead­er­ship posi­tion in solar that it still maintains.

By 2010, BP’s solar sub­sidiary was already feel­ing the heat of Chi­nese com­pe­ti­tion when the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill left 11 work­ers dead and allowed 4 mil­lion bar­rels of oil to flow into the Gulf of Mex­i­co, a seri­ous crack in the company’s green image. BP Solar closed in 2011, suc­cumb­ing to Chi­nese com­pe­ti­tion, and the Beyond Petro­le­um slo­gan soon fad­ed away.

BP did not buy its way back into solar until Decem­ber 2017, with a $200 mil­lion invest­ment in Europe’s largest solar devel­op­er, Light­source. But the com­pa­ny has nev­er been close to going beyond petro­le­um — then or now.

Even in 2004, 96% of BP’s net prof­its came from dirty old fos­sil fuels, with just 4% com­ing from solar and oth­er renew­ables. In 2018, mean­while, the com­pa­ny report­ed $12.7 bil­lion in under­ly­ing replace­ment cost prof­it (effec­tive­ly net income), which high­lights the tiny nature of its $200 mil­lion Light­source solar invest­ment. As Valenti­na Kret­zschmar, the direc­tor of research at oil analy­sis firm Wood Macken­zie, put it in 2018, ​“the amount of mon­ey spent is still peanuts com­pared to their core business.”

6

U.S.-headquartered com­modi­ties traders Archer Daniels Mid­land (ADM), Bunge and Cargill, which sup­ply world mar­kets with a vast array of raw mate­ri­als, have long stood accused of encour­ag­ing farm­ers to cut deep­er into the Ama­zon and oth­er forests, bull­doz­ing bio­di­verse ecosys­tems to make way for fields of soy­beans, African palm and oth­er cash crops.

Var­i­ous cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty pro­grams have com­mit­ted to stop pur­chas­ing com­mod­i­ty crops grown on recent­ly defor­est­ed land and all three of the afore­men­tioned big traders have turned to ​“trace­abil­i­ty” sys­tems to account for every grain, seed and fruit in a sup­ply chain and link them back to where they grew. Bunge says it has achieved more than 90% trace­abil­i­ty for farms it sources from direct­ly in ​“high-pri­or­i­ty areas” around the world and is mon­i­tor­ing more than 6,700 farms and 200 inde­pen­dent grain ele­va­tors. Cargill has pledged ​“to trans­form our agri­cul­tur­al sup­ply chains to be deforestation-free.”

How­ev­er, ​“The Ulti­mate Mys­tery Meat,” a 2017 inves­ti­ga­tion by the activist orga­ni­za­tion Mighty Earth, charged Bunge and Cargill with dri­ving defor­esta­tion in Brazil and Bolivia.

“Bunge has adopt­ed a strong pol­i­cy on paper to pro­hib­it defor­esta­tion in its sup­ply chain, but hasn’t wide­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed the pol­i­cy to its sup­pli­ers,” the report reads. And ​“Cargill has giv­en itself until 2030 to elim­i­nate defor­esta­tion from its sup­ply chains, giv­ing soy grow­ers and oth­ers almost 15 years to race to clear as much for­est as possible.”

The prob­lem is indus­try­wide. Geospa­tial ana­lyst Philip Cur­tis, a researcher with the Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Con­sor­tium, found that for­est clear­ing for com­modi­ties crops remained steady between 2001 and 2015, with an area the size of Cos­ta Rica lost every year to indus­tri­al agri­cul­ture. ​“The scale of the loss was stag­ger­ing,” he told Sci­ence.

Cor­po­ra­tions clear­ly have robust infor­ma­tion about cli­mate impacts, and the sig­nif­i­cant resources need­ed to address the prob­lem. And despite ram­pant green­wash­ing (reveal­ing a com­mit­ment to pub­lic rela­tions rather than real sus­tain­abil­i­ty), cor­po­rate lead­ers have unde­ni­ably ele­vat­ed the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion about cli­mate change while politi­cians have too often remained silent. Arguably, how­ev­er, they do so only as far (and as often) as pub­lic opin­ion requires.

As we’ve seen from FedEx, Cargill and oth­ers, some of today’s most suc­cess­ful and ruth­less­ly com­pet­i­tive cor­po­ra­tions — despite claim­ing to be trans­form­ing an indus­try — have exhib­it­ed a sur­pris­ing lack of grit, qui­et­ly fold­ing at the first obsta­cle to their bold­est green ambitions.

This appar­ent incon­sis­ten­cy often seems delib­er­ate, with com­pa­nies demand­ing cli­mate action while sup­port­ing trade asso­ci­a­tions and politi­cians who deny that cli­mate change is even hap­pen­ing. Many con­tin­ue pro­tect­ing old busi­ness mod­els, while hedg­ing their bets with new clean tech prod­ucts and ser­vices. Some of today’s biggest pol­luters — oil and gas com­pa­nies and big util­i­ties — are plan­ning for big prof­its from the renew­able ener­gy tran­si­tion, even while con­tin­u­ing busi­ness as usu­al for as long as possible.

His­to­ry shows that indi­vid­ual cor­po­ra­tions have failed to fol­low through on promised change with­out gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­to­ry action. ​“I don’t think [the trans­porta­tion] indus­try would [decar­bonize] if they are not high­ly incen­tivized to do it, or required in some aspects,” says Lewis Ful­ton, direc­tor of the Sus­tain­able Trans­porta­tion Ener­gy Path­ways pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis.

The fail­ure of cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty efforts also bodes poor­ly for the kind of lais­sez-faire poli­cies that cor­po­ra­tions hold up as the answer to cli­mate change. These include mar­ket-based pric­ing mech­a­nisms, such as cap and trade, which not only rely heav­i­ly on off­sets but implic­it­ly trust cor­po­ra­tions to set their own path toward sus­tain­abil­i­ty with lim­it­ed state inter­ven­tion. ​“Mak­ing tweaks to a mar­ket mech­a­nism and hop­ing that indus­try will respond cor­rect­ly” will like­ly be insuf­fi­cient, says Bri­an Now­ic­ki at the Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty. What’s need­ed are ​“bold actions where we actu­al­ly redi­rect where our resources are and what we are invest­ing in as a state and as a country.”

The renowned late envi­ron­men­tal­ist David Brow­er is cred­it­ed with say­ing that all envi­ron­men­tal vic­to­ries are tem­po­rary, while each defeat is a per­ma­nent loss. The oppo­site could be said of cor­po­rate sus­tain­abil­i­ty claims: Cor­po­ra­tions want ever­last­ing cred­it for their invest­ments in nature, but for their fail­ures to be instant­ly forgotten.