“Over the past two months, [I’ve had] close to 50 conversations with people working in corporate sustainability and ESG functions…. ‘It’s a bullshit job,’ ‘I’m the green fig leaf,’ and ‘We’re doing what we can, but no one in leadership truly cares’ are recurring statements, repeated again and again in various forms.” – Julia Vol (below)
Julia Vol last month wrote on the business social media platform LinkedIn:
OK, it’s crazy. Ever since I became outspoken about leaving corporate sustainability because I felt my work had no real impact on moving the needle toward actual sustainability, I’ve been inundated with messages from across industries and geographies telling me how much my message resonated with them.
She continued:
Over the past two months, those messages sparked close to 50 conversations with people working in corporate sustainability and ESG functions. Many of them feel they’re, at best, occupied with pet projects that have no real impact on the company’s core business, or, in the worst case, that they’re helping their employer greenwash through creative accounting and communications.
“It’s a bullshit job,” “I’m the green fig leaf,” and “We’re doing what we can, but no one in leadership truly cares” are recurring statements, repeated again and again in various forms.
What a confession! It’s a game, a front. Vol continues:
Most people don’t leave, and it’s easy to understand why. Corporate jobs pay well, and not everyone has the privilege to walk away from a good salary. But there’s something deeper. Many of them simply don’t know where they would go. Sustainability professionals are, by and large, people who entered the field driven by a desire to change the world. Now that they’ve realized they aren’t, many are left wondering: What would I do instead? Move to another company where it’ll be the same story? Better the devil you know.
Or check your premises and realize the “business sustainability” is inherently problematic. What is sustainable and worthy to one might not be to another. Experts, in fact, disagree.
And so, in more companies than you’d expect — including some of the industry’s biggest names — you’ve got sustainability teams on the payroll but disenfranchised and disengaged. That’s dangerous for any company. What will companies do about it?
Hopefully companies will cut out the corporate bloat, even with an outside expert explaining why “sustainability” actions might be counterproductive to human betterment.
Corporates worldwide are facing a real choice, especially in light of new market and regulatory changes: continue plodding along on the ESG window-dressing train as long as it’s viable, risking the loss of valuable employees to layoffs or disillusionment, or pivot.
Incorrect! The sustainability experts are a special interest that needs to be disbanded. The wealth redistributionists need to become wealth creators and work for viable parts of their company. This might require new education on core corporate functions, and a reeducation on the problems of ESG.
Start treating sustainability not as a reporting exercise, but as a strategic opportunity to future-proof the business. They already have the people who know how to do it. They just need to start listening.
Incorrect. I commented on this post (deleted but here):
The whole ‘sustainability’ industry was from government subsidies and political correctness, not underlying consumer demand. It is a dying industry–corporate bloat. An easy cut.
Classical liberal views on corporate governance are ripe for study to show that 1) ‘sustainability” is a subjective metric and 2) ESG, DEI, and climate alarmism are problematic for business. ‘Just Business‘ by Elaine Sternberg is an excellent book in this regard.
One-hundred-and -thirty-two comments followed, including “Fascinating post thank you for your honesty.” And from Alison Taylor, a professor at NYU’s business school: “100%! Hear this every day too.”
Jose Antonio Hopkins: “Appreciate you raising this, it echoes what I’m hearing across sectors too. Many professionals feel their roles are focused more on outputs and reporting, rather than enabling meaningful change.”
Harald Walkate: “Thanks for sharing your experience Julia. What’s sad is that I had the same experience four years ago – should it really take this long for people to figure these things out and pivot to something more meaningful to do?”
Then came some realism about “sustainability” from Denis Bednyagin: to Harald Walkate:
good thing to do as a first step is to educate yourself how silicon for solar panels is produced (hint: using coal not only as a power source, but also as a direct feedstock with a large amount of unaccounted CO2 and forced labor C+SiO2–>Si+CO2). Then you would realise that you’ve been lying to people in your ESG consultancy, academic, or corporate practice. Fake “green” energy that warms climate due to non-CO2 related factors (another thing to learn) has nothing to do with sustainability. True sustainability is about knowing what you are doing and recommending —> e.g. protecting not climate, but people from harsh natural climate conditions using minimum possible amount of resources
The BP experience came up:
This is unfortunately nothing new – in the early 2000s BP proved that it was much cheaper to invest in a global ad campaign than doing anything of consequence. IIRC the numbers were something like 200 million pounds invested in their Beyond Petroleum Campaign (beautifully done btw) and at the same time they spent about the same amount on K-Street Lobbyists to defuse, delay and dilute Climate Change legislation.
This is a post that historians should appreciate in the future. EGS dying from the inside–but for reasons the EGS industry (an anti-capitalist special interest) does not yet understand.
Congress Must Repeal All Green New Scam Subsidies
by Steve Milloy
https://dailycaller.com/2025/05/04/opinion-congress-must-repeal-all-green-new-scam-subsidies-steve-milloy/
“…A group of at least 21 Republican House members, none of whom voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, signed a March 9 letter to Speaker Johnson warning against repealing the subsidies. “We have 20-plus members saying, ‘Don’t just think you can repeal these things and have our support,’” Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who organized the letter, told Politico.
What exactly is behind this resistance to a President to whom many of the letter signatories may very well owe their seats?
While it’s often difficult, if not dangerous, to get in between politicians and their subsidies, the Biden administration made it especially so with the sheer amount of Green New Scam spending.
As of September 2024, Biden spent $147.4 billion in 41 states, including $63.7 billion in just seven 2024 battleground states. Eleven of the 21 signatories to the March 9 letter are from states that received at least $4.7 billion dollars. Eight signatories are from blue states and two are from ethanol subsidy-loving red states. Biden’s Green New Scam spending might be corrupt but it wasn’t stupid. These subsidies were obviously intended to purchase red state politicians so that it could be held over their heads and used against future repeal attempts.
In response to a recent X post by me about the letter, signatory Rep. Don Bacon (NE-02) wrote “Biofuels are important to Midwest. It is the reality.” He later added, “You might as well accept it… some of the tax incentives are going to remain. For one, folks already have invested billions based on the promise.”
Another piece of the resistance, according to two House members supporting the repeal with whom I talked, is coming from the oil and gas industry. The Inflation Reduction Act contains $8 billion in tax credits earmarked for carbon dioxide emissions capture and sequestration. This includes: (1) $85 per ton of emissions captured and sequestered from manufacturing and refining operations; and (2) $60 per ton of emissions captured during oil production.
None of this carbon capture and sequestration activity is meaningful to the climate. At best, it would amount to roughly 114 million tons of emissions captured and stored by 2031. Over that time period, global emissions will be on the order of 420 billion tons. That latter amount is about 3,700 times more emissions than the relatively trivial amount of emissions the oil industry would be paid $8 billion to capture.
The subsidy is outrageous waste, if not also fraud and abuse. First, the oil industry already has a tried-and-true business model that mints money without subsidies. Second, regardless of one’s views of climate science, the emissions capture and sequestration would be climatically insignificant. As trivial as the captured emissions would be to the climate, it’s not even clear that such a large amount of emissions could actually be physically captured and sequestered. Finally, President Trump is already undoing Biden’s regulations that hamstrung the oil and gas industry.
Yet the ungrateful oil industry is still demanding the subsidies. Its friends in Congress are willing to risk the Big Beautiful Bill, including maintaining the vital Trump 2017 tax cuts, for the sake of petty and pointless subsidies.
Candidate Trump made his campaign promises. Americans voted for them and elected a Congress to enact them. No one voted for the subsidies. President Trump has issued the necessary Executive orders and directives. It is now time for congressional Republicans to do what they were elected to do: Repeal the Green New Scam…
BP might be out of the ‘sustainability’ business.
oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/BPs-Head-of-Sustainability-Steps-Down-No-Successor-Named.html
Here is an apologist on LinkedIn
It’s a reasonable, brief documentary summarizing ESG. In this ESG escapee’s view, where ESG runs aground — which this video touches on — is twofold:
1) ESG principles were never designed to address the root causes of ecological and social harm that industry creates (aka “externalities”) but rather to organize and rank them in various ways to inform decisions. Without dealing with root cause, it was always a kinda lame party no matter how fancily we got dressed up for it.
2) There’s a heavy leaning towards carbon tunnel blindness (in this video, and ESG more broadly) as if the point was to “tackle climate change”. Meanwhile the term “ESG” is about as specific as the term “food”, i.e. it’s so non-specific as to be almost meaningless, which could mean it’s harmless or harmful or something in between (a bit like food).
It took me 20 years of creating, applying, strategizing, facilitating, and all-round trying trying and trying again, hoping ESG could be a meaningful step towards industrial healing, before I realized it simply can’t be without the designers and deciders wanting to heal.
I replied: “”industrial healing, before I realized it simply can’t be without the designers and deciders wanting to heal.” Maybe they were right. Costly and environmentally inconsequential. I would not put this in “healing’ terms at all.”
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7325512376806494208?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7325512376806494208%2C7325601580064350209%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287325601580064350209%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7325512376806494208%29
I responded:
Conferences, conferences:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timmalnick_so-many-fking-conferences-im-done-with-activity-7325897651399323649-YLcQ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAGV90kBtoxOIMAg-JwpHsSY2-j34xhgcC8