Sustainability is Better Business – And We Can Prove It

[kristopher]

Sustainability is Better Business – And We Can Prove It

The Guardian 17 January 2014

by L. Hunter Lovins


"Every global indicator of the health of our planet has continued to trend in the wrong direction" - Rick Ridgeway, Patagonia. Photograph: Getty Images

It’s become weirdly fashionable to criticise companies cutting their impact on the environment and implementing more sustainable practices as insufficient.

A recent piece by Charles Eisenstein* claimed: “Let’s be honest: real sustainability may not make business sense.”

That’s just wrong. More than 50 studies** (PDF) from the likes of those wild-eyed environmentalists at Goldman Sachs show that the companies that are the leaders in environment, social and good governance policies are financially outperforming their less sustainable peers. Sustainability is better business –and we can prove it.

Richard Smith in “Green Capitalism: The God That Failed”, gets it even more wrong. He asserts: “The results are in: no amount of ‘green capitalism’ will be able to ensure the profound changes we must urgently make to prevent the collapse of civilisation from the catastrophic impacts of global warming.” He calls for “abolition of capitalist private property in the means of production and the institution of collective bottom-up democratic control over the economy and society.”
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More at: http://natcapsolutions.org/2014/01/18/sustainability-is-better-business-and-we-can-prove-it/#more-4029


* http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/sustainability-business-sense-profit-purpose

** http://www.natcapsolutions.org/businesscasereports.pdf

[Demeter]

1. And in any evernt, doing nothing is worse

Nothing ventured...

[kristopher]

2. I thought the two articles were good point/counterpoint. nt

[hunter]

3. I don't think a consumerist society is compatible with "sustainablilty."

Hunter and Amory have made a good living greenwashing.

Have they slowed us down on this highway to hell? Yes.

But whether or not we are driving at 55 mph in our "green" cars, or a 100 mph in our SUVs, the destination is still the same.

A truly sustainable human society doesn't look anything like what we have now, and there's probably no big money to be made there.

If we're lucky medicine will be good, food plentiful, communications rapid, birth control universally available, and human populations declining. But consumer society will be gone. Dead. Buried in the landfills. Nobody will remember Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs, or Patagonia.

Even in the more likely "unlucky society," with lots of people dying prematurely of climate change, pollution, and resource depletion, with hordes of hungry peasants storming the fortresses of the very wealthy and eating them, consumer society will still be just as dead and just as forgotten.

The future I believe in is wildly optimistic and more achievable than that of L. Hunter Lovins. Yes, people will walk to work and won't generally have cars or a hundred varieties of breakfast cereal in the supermarket to choose from. But they will probably be healthier and happier than we are now in the U.S.A..

[kristopher]

4. What is the root of consumer society - what 'enables' it?

Once you identify that, you'll know how to address it.

Since you are completely off target with your criticism of what the OP is about, it is clear you have no idea what they've identified as the enabling problem in consumerism, nor could you therefore be aware of their solution.

I'm not surprised you're critical of Lovins without actually knowing what his writings are about, though; since that is a hallmark of all nuclear proponents.

[hunter]

5. Both these Lovins and I have history...

... late 'seventies, early 'eighties.

We went our separate ways.

I maintain some slight anonymity here on DU, not for myself, but for others.

No, that's not noble and it's probably cowardly. (People who have seen me naked!!!)

But I'm much less a loose canon (or firecracker) now than I ever was then.

I've been inside the gates of San Onofre and been interrupted by "security" as I dug through the garbage of General Atomics. Food, papers, all good. My temp worker / homeless dude persona is still pretty solid. Probably more so I if I ever die on the streets under newspapers and cardboard.

I often wander through life on foot as I please. I've seen much.

Nope, you've nailed me, you are right. Demon nuclear doesn't scare me any more than demon fossil fuels.

[kristopher]

6. And yet you clearly have no idea what they are advocating...

Most would consider that to have a very strong bearing on your credibility (or lack of).

[hunter]

7. I don't measure "success" or credibility in dollars or celebrity.

I'll always be true to my self and my science.

[kristopher]

9. Right. You measure success in how well you can smear actual progress to dump nuclear.

[hunter]

11. I confess. I'm as indifferent about nuclear as I am about Barry Commoner's "natural" gas utopia.

Or any "Hydrogen Economy."

Or any Buckminster Fuller's worldwide electric grid.

Sorry, if I'm a cynical, blame Garett Hardin.

I've interacted with all them, in various places, and both Lovins too.

No, I do not think "dump nuclear" is the most important thing in the world.

Dumping consumerism and reducing the human population is.

I stand by this:

The most effective answer is to limit human populations. Generally, people will have fewer children if they have easy access to birth control, medical care is good, people are educated (especially women!), standards of living are comfortable, and elderly people are financially independent of their own children or grandchildren.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024503483#post10

[kristopher]

12. I only seldom believe the claims you make...

...about yourself. But sometimes I do. For example when you wrote "I've been inside the gates of San Onofre". Just that, not the rest of the sentence. Or, when you wrote "I do not think "dump nuclear" is the most important thing in the world" I take that part of your statement as true, but judging by your pattern of deriding renewables while promoting nuclear, I believe the next statement should have been "I think preserving nuclear is".

I can't tell you how much fun it is watching an anonymous, closet nuclear proponent use the internet to lay claim to being anti-technology in order to greenwash their pronuclear actions.

[hunter]

15. It's a marketplace of ideas too, not just money.

I'm not really anonymous here, it's just a game of "plausible deniability."

Send me a P.M. if you like. I've never refused to answer questions about myself honestly.

Search DU, look at my journal, that's me naked as always, opinions evolving over time.

[GliderGuider]

8. I don't think the words "Business" and "Sustainability" even belong in the same sentence.

By using them together one displays, a priori, a flawed comprehension of one or the other term. Or maybe even both.

[kristopher]

10. Of course you don't.

We've seen more than once your claims that your thought processes have less than nothing to do with fact based reasoning and everything to do with your "feelings' of what is true.

Transactions among humans are fundamental to our existence. Denying the existence of and need for 'business' is as wild a claim as denying the need to eat or breath.

The works of Lovins etal take the things you claim to value and bring analysis of the problems into the real world. Their work starts with the conclusion that the key to curbing excess consumption is properly valuing the "natural capital" that we all depend on for existence - the environment in other words. Their answers are founded in the best knowledge we have about human behavior and the limits of the natural resources of the planet.

IOW they do with science what you run around pretending to do with woo and truthiness.

An example of your woo based approach is in this subthread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112764136#post44

[GliderGuider]

13. Thanks for flagging my work, kristopher. I appreciate the exposure.

[kristopher]

14. You need to watch those typos

That should be "woo", not "work". I flagged your "woo".