Where businesses have a choice between different profitable options, some are beginning to look for  the more sustainable option. Which is clearly a good thing.

However, in many cases (and especially in the case of industries whose core products produce large amounts of carbon emissions) the changes that we desperately need are NOT currently profitable - BP isn't reducing the amount of oil it extracts, BA isn't cutting the size of its air fleet, Lafarge isn't making less concrete. Yes, there are still important savings to be made out there in energy and resource efficiency, but not enough to achieve the 90%+ cut in CO2 emissions that we need across the industrialised world. Yes, some companies can get a certain amount of added "brand value" from being seen to do a few high-profile "sustainable" things, but these are patchy at best, tokenistic at worst, and not relevant to the many companies for whom this kind of branding is not a major issue.

We desperately need strong regulation of companies, coupled with social and political shifts away from a reliance on huge, unaccountable corporations for the provision of goods and services. We need to create a new economic environment where sustainable practices are a legal norm, not an optional extra. The risk of relying on the voluntary approaches championed by this article is that it creates the false impression that all is well, companies are cleaning up their act and if we just leave things to the industry "experts" and "gurus" it will all be sorted out. In fact, we need to be campaigning like crazy and challenging the corporations more than ever before - if we leave them to sort it out, we are likely to end up with a host of supposed environmental "solutions" (such as biofuels, dodgy carbon trading schemes and large-scale technofixes) that may keep the companies in profit for a few more years but will do little to prevent runaway climate change and other ecological disasters.

For an excellent critique of the current "Corporate Responsibility" trend (to act as a nice counterpoint to this article) see the latest edition of the "New Internationalist" magazine - http://www.newint.org/bigbadwolf.

http://adaisythroughconcrete.blogspot.com

I'm bothered by the fact that for all of these sorts of surveys out there, no one can come up with an acceptable definition of what it means to be sustainable.  Given that flexibility, why should consumers responses to a survey about the nature of sustainability be any more meaningful than questions about the nature of happiness, emptiness, or any other koan-worthy ideal?

Consider: GE has put a lot of it's eco-imagination dollars into clean coal.  I think I speak for an awful lot of Gristers who would question how sustainable that is.  Yes, they've got other products in that mix as well, but it belies a problem that is much larger than GE.  Is it "sustainable" to provide mechanisms to raise the poor out of poverty?  What if as a result they become consumers who want cars, jet travel and plastic goods?  It is sustainable to sell cigarettes?  What if your cigarette company also owns a food company (think Altria, before they spun off Kraft.)  How about alcohol?  Is there a difference between malt liquor and organic wine when it comes to sustainability quotients?  How about if one sells pollution control equipment that drives down efficiency, raising GHG emissions in the name of NOx reduction - how sustainable art thou, oh selective catalytic reducer?

I cannot personally answer these questions, but my beef with sustainability as a discipline is that most never even bother to ask them.  And if we can't agree on the definition, then what good is the term?  And how do we conclude something useful from surveys about it?  

(BTW - for a great review of this question, check out Henry Blodgett's - yes, that Henry Blodgett - piece on socially responsible investing in the October issue of The Atlantic.)