Inside ‘Business Sustainability’ (Yes, it’s just a front)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- May 5, 2025

“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.