{"id":625,"date":"2019-07-04T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T08:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/?p=625"},"modified":"2019-07-03T20:34:27","modified_gmt":"2019-07-03T19:34:27","slug":"business-as-usual-climate-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/2019\/07\/04\/business-as-usual-climate-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"Business as usual: Confronting the denial at the heart of the climate crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

London has declared a climate emergency<\/a>. In March, over a million young people around the world<\/a> took part in school strikes against climate action. Yet governments and corporations maintain a message of \"business as usual\". In this piece, Christopher Wright<\/a> examines how big business controls the climate debate.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Climate change has become the ever-present reality of human experience. We see it daily in our news feeds; whether it\u2019s the current record-breaking heatwave hitting Europe<\/a>, the record-breaking hurricanes<\/a> that battered the US last year, the huge wildfires<\/a> that burned through California, or in Australia, the death of half of the Great Barrier Reef in back-to-back coral bleaching events<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, while there is a clear scientific consensus that the world is on track for global warming of 4 degrees Celsius this century (threatening the viability of human civilization), our political and corporate masters double down on the fossil fuel bet, transforming perhaps the greatest threat to life on this planet into \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d. This raises the question, why would a technologically advanced society choose to destroy itself<\/a>?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Risk and opportunity<\/h4>\n

Over the last decade, I\u2019ve sought to answer this question by exploring how global corporations have contributed to the climate crisis. With my colleague Daniel Nyberg<\/a>, we have explored how businesses have framed climate change as a \u201crisk\u201d and \u201copportunity\u201d, sought to shape climate politics, as well as justify their activities in the face of environmental critique.<\/p>\n

In our book, Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations<\/em>, we argue that global capitalism is locked within a process of \u201ccreative self-destruction\u201d. By this we mean our economies are reliant upon ever more ingenious ways of exploiting Earth\u2019s fossil fuel reserves and consuming the planet\u2019s life-support systems. This is evident in the rush by the world\u2019s largest companies to develop new sources of fossil fuels such as deep-water and Arctic oil drilling<\/a>, tar-sands processing<\/a>, new mega-coalmines<\/a>, and the \u201cfracking\u201d of shale and coal-seam gas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, a key question is how corporations are able to continue such destructive activity despite the disastrous consequences for human society? We argue that corporations and their spokespeople are able to achieve this by incorporating criticism and reinventing the daily ritual of \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d as a perfectly normal and sound process.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Green capitalism and consumption<\/strong><\/p>\n

For instance, through the narrative of \u201cgreen\u201d capitalism, corporations and markets are portrayed as the only means of responding to the climate crisis. As business tycoon Richard Branson has proclaimed<\/a> \u201cour only option to stop climate change is for industry to make money from it.\u201d Many companies have established new practices to improve their eco-efficiency, green their supply chains, produce new green products and services, and market their environmental worthiness. This sparkling image of business sustainability falsely promises no conflicts and no trade-offs; that they can address climate change while expanding global consumption. In contrast to the evidence of ever-escalating greenhouse gas emissions, this comforting political myth promises no contradiction between material affluence and environmental well-being. We can have it all and, according to the myth of business \u201cgreening\u201d, avoid climate catastrophe!<\/p>\n

Moreover, citizens are called upon to enrol in this mythology as active constituents in corporate campaigns<\/a>, as consumers and \u201cecopreneurs\u201d in the quest for \u201cgreen consumption\u201d. We have become the brands we wear, the products we buy; and we are comforted by a future portrayed as \u201csafely\u201d in the hands of the market. The supremacy of \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d thus exacts a powerful grip on our daily thinking and actions. It is a grip strengthened by the promotion of new \u201cgreen\u201d products, a grip tightened through the establishment of sustainability functions in business and government, and a grip defended with every \u201coffset\u201d we purchase for a flight to a holiday destination.<\/p>\n

Of course, this is also a vision that fits well within the dominant economic ideology of our time; neoliberalism<\/a>. Alternatives, such as state regulation and mandatory restrictions on fossil fuel use, are viewed as harmful and unecessary. This is why the alternative to \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d is much easier to dismiss \u2013 what critics characterise as going back to living in caves or a return to the \u201cdark ages\u201d. Indeed, those environmentally aware citizens who argue that we need to leave the vast majority of fossil fuels \u201cin the ground\u201d are demonised as extremists and a threat to national prosperity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A regulatory solution<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, the reality is that climate change is a systemic problem requiring regulatory solutions. Corporate environmental initiatives, while appealing, lack both this broader impact and are inevitably compromised by the immediate needs of market return. As groups such as Extinction Rebellion<\/a> have highlighted, we need to visualise an alternative future that goes beyond the comfortable assumptions of corporate self-regulation and \u201cmarket solutions\u201d, and accepts the need for the dramatic decarbonisation of energy, transport and manufacturing and the mandatory regulation of fossil fuel extraction and use.<\/p>\n

To state such conclusions is of course heresy. We like to believe \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d can continue and that nothing radical can or will change. The irony of course is that if we continue as we have, everything will<\/em> change. Maintaining \u201cbusiness as usual\u201d presents an unimaginable future of large tracts of the Earth rendered uninhabitable, the collapse of global food production, mass species extinction, the acidification of the oceans, dramatic sea level rise of many metres, and storms and droughts of growing ferocity. This will be the future we bequeath our children if we fail to wake up from our collective climate denial.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Christopher Wright<\/strong> is Professor of Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School and is the co-author, with Daniel Nyberg, of Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction<\/a>. Their article in The Academy of Management Journal<\/a> explains how corporations translate the grand challenge of climate change into business as usual.<\/em><\/p>\n

Header image of\u00a0Vales Point Power Station on Lake Macquarie by Christopher Wright.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

London has declared a climate emergency. In March, over a million young people around the world took part in school strikes against climate action. Yet governments and corporations maintain a message of \"business as usual\". In this piece, Christopher Wright...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":943,"featured_media":626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,29,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-and-society","category-environment","category-sustainability"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/133\/2019\/07\/Chris_Wright_blog.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd4Pj1-a5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/943"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/business-and-society\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}