#11 Corporate Sustainability: Rethinking Responsibility and Impact with Auden Schendler

Can global brands really lead the charge against climate change, or are they just playing a part in a much bigger distraction? Join us in a thought-provoking conversation with Auden Schendler, Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, as he pulls back the curtain on corporate sustainability efforts. With a bold critique, Auden challenges the traditional focus on individual carbon footprints, arguing it often distracts from the systemic changes necessary to dismantle the fossil fuel economy. Through his own journey from various humble jobs to a pioneering role in sustainability, Auden shares his experience in transforming a coal-powered utility into a clean energy success story, emphasizing the urgent need for businesses to prioritize sweeping systemic shifts over voluntary eco-friendly gestures.

The conversation doesn't stop at environmental issues alone. We delve into the vital intersection of climate change, corporate responsibility, and social justice, exploring how businesses can transcend mere economic interests in favor of ethical imperatives. Auden makes a compelling case for merging climate and equity movements, envisioning a more inclusive path forward. Amidst global polarization, he remains optimistic about the future, underscoring that structural political challenges are surmountable. With insights from his upcoming book "Terrible Beauty," Auden paints a hopeful picture of businesses adopting a values-driven approach, fostering lasting social and environmental impact beyond the bottom line.

More inspirations from Auden... https://audenschendler.com/
Link to his latest book, Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul. https://a.co/d/1RKMeUh 

Please visit our website, www.businessandsociety.net, for more inspiration.

Chapters

• 1:04 What brought you into corporate sustainability?
• 1:57 Are corporate sustainability efforts making the impact we need in the world?
• 3:21 On climate complicity
• 7:17 Are concepts like Net zero nonsensical?
• 8:45 Is it business's responsibility to solve society's problems?
• 9:32 Importance of politics, policymakers and legislation to tackle sustainability problems
• 13:05 Nexus of climate and equity
• 15:05 Corporate sustainability arguments: Ethics vs profits
• 19:09 Central argument of Terrible Beauty
• 21:33 Managing differences of opinion/setbacks
• 22:44 Skills required for sustainability leaders
• 23:44 Book recommendation

Transcript

Senthil

00:03

Hey, it's Senthil here. Welcome to the Business and Society podcast. Every fortnight we speak to a world-leading thinker to better understand the role of business and society. Joining me today is Auden Schendler. Auden is the Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company and has published widely, including in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Financial Times and the Atlantic. You may have read his book “Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.” His new book is coming in November from Harvard Business Review Press, titled “Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul.” I sat with him to draw some lessons from his experience and thought leadership in the corporate sustainability. Thanks so much for joining me today, Auden. It's a pleasure having you with us. 

Auden

01:02

My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Senthil

01:04

Tell me, when I was reading your website, you mentioned you've worked as a burger flipper, Bobcat driver, medic on a rural ambulance, junk sorter, gas station attendant. What brought you into sustainability that too two decades back, when the topic was in no one else's mind? 

Auden

01:21

Yeah, I mean there was nothing to study in that era, so I studied biology and then I went out into the world with this notion of wanting to do something environmental. But kids who just graduated from college have no skills and I was in the West so I had to do whatever job I could and really my path was to always be looking for that opportunity to do the thing I wanted to do. But before I did that, I ended up flipping burgers and driving a Bobcat and you know it took a while to get there. 

Senthil

01:57

Well, in the past two decades there has been a massive uptake in corporate sustainability efforts. Is it working or making the impact we need in the world? 

Auden

02:07

Yeah, I mean the one-minute summary of my career is that I was at the vanguard of that movement and the vision of the movement was that climate's a hard problem. Business is nimble, it's autocratic, it's powerful, it's influential and it can be the agent of change on climate. And I believe that there were stories about changing light bulbs and saving 100%... like when you change the light bulb you start saving money and it was wonderful. And they're cascading benefit stories where the light bulb isn't giving off heat, so your air conditioning goes down. So, I bought into that a hundred percent. And the story of my career is that I slowly got disillusioned in the notion that that would solve the climate crisis or that it could, and then my thinking evolved over time to think that that was actually a barrier to solutions and, as we'll discuss, I'm not negative on our ability to solve climate, but I think that the corporate sustainability field has been hugely problematic. 

Senthil

03:21

You wrote, and I quote sustainable business practices haven't just been a distraction nor a dodge of hard controversial work, nor even intentionally duplicitous. The approach has been evil because it represents complicity. Why do you say that? 

Auden

03:40

Yeah, so you know I described what sustainable business is, which is we're going to reduce our emissions at a profit and we're going to solve climate that way. And I spent years on it. And one day I was riding my bike at lunch and thinking about what I was doing and this word popped into my head, and the word was complicity. And here's what I mean by that. If you were the fossil fuel industry and you wanted very powerful organizations, corporations with huge influence, lots of money and lots of ability to influence others, if you wanted them to appear that they were being environmentally conscious, but to not actually get in your way, the suite of things you'd prescribe for them to do would be the suite of things that fall under the category of ESG or corporate social responsibility. So, you'd want them to measure stuff, you'd want them to certify to third-party standards, you'd want them to publish reports to reduce their own carbon footprint, but to do so in a voluntary way. In other words, if you look at these things, what I call it it's carbon navel-gazing… You're sort of messing around in your own backyard but you're never influencing systems, and so, in a way, corporate social responsibility, sustainable business practice enabled the continuation of the fossil fuel economy because it never got in the way, but it made business appear to be green and media gave business a pass. They said this is great. We love what you're doing. 

Senthil

05:25

So, it seems you're unhappy that businesses take responsibility for the climate problem only as their own individual emissions challenge, instead of seeing it as a systemic issue. I'm wondering at a time when businesses are struggling to find ways to reduce their own carbon footprints, how does such an approach help? 

Auden

05:47

Yeah, so you know my expertise is in a corporation reducing its carbon footprint. I've done it and what I learned is, if you're a business that cut its carbon emissions 30% by fair means and we'll call that energy efficiency, renewable energy, lighting, retrofits, those kinds of things, boiler retrofits, green buildings… You're amazing, you're Superman. It's really really difficult to do that, it's expensive, it's distracting from other priorities, and so we're asking business to cut its emissions really 100%. Right, every business has to cut its emissions 100% by 2050 to solve the climate crisis. So, it'll never happen because it's all voluntary. 

06:35

And the way to think about how to drive the bigger change was our experience where our emissions weren't going down initially. And we dug into it, and we realized that our utility was entirely coal-powered, coal-fired, and so we spent a decade working to change the board of that utility so that the utility would move to clean energy. That happened. It was hard work, but when it happened, our carbon footprint started to plummet. But the lesson there is a bit of an epiphany, which is to change your own carbon footprint. You have to change the system's footprint, and that's sort of a metaphor for the entire conversation. 

Senthil

07:17

There's quite a bit to unpack there but let me just get this carbon and net zero started. Net zero or carbon neutrality is all the rage now, but you seem to oppose that idea. You argue that concepts like net zero are nonsensical, what should businesses use as a quantifiable objective when they refer to against climate change? 

Auden

07:47

Yeah. So, you know. Business, I think, needs to say how are we going to meaningfully solve the climate problem and the problem with net zero? It says we're going to solve the climate problem for our own selves and we're going to do it using… the only way a business gets to net zero is by using offsets, and those are typically very sketchy financial instruments. So, if a business looks only after itself and let's say it were 100% successful in legitimately reducing its emissions to zero, that still doesn't solve the climate problem. And so, you can imagine a conversation with the CEO… tell me about your climate work. Well, we've cut our emissions to zero. Tell me, CEO, is that going to solve the global climate problem? Because nobody else has done it, no other countries are doing it and it's entirely voluntary. Well, you're right, it won't solve the climate problem. So just to be clear the corporation's climate solution doesn't solve the climate problem. 

Senthil

08:54

But, Auden, is it business's responsibility to solve society's problems? Because, you know, some scholars argue that no, you know, they work in free markets and they act out of free will, whereas policies are the tools government should use to influence system exchange. What are your thoughts on this? 

Auden

09:11

Yeah, I mean. The problem is you could agree with that, but all of the businesses I'm talking about, and criticizing have said we care about climate. We're going to help solve the problem. It is a major priority. If you don't care at all, it's not a problem. But these are businesses Microsoft, salesforce, Google, you know that have said we care deeply, and we want to fix it. So that's the problem. 

Senthil

09:41

A bedrock of your argument is the importance of politics, policymakers and legislation to tackle sustainability problems such as climate change. At the same time, as you observed, leaders in the corporate sustainability movement are more or less silent on policy. Why is it this way? 

Auden

10:01

If you're a corporation, you're very twitchy about sticking your head up on public policy, especially publicly traded corporations. So, if you take a position on tax policy, that makes sense, it's going to improve your revenue, and so forth. If you take a position on climate, it's seen as ancillary to the mission of the business, and so that subjects CEOs to enormous public criticism. Now my feeling is and this gets at your earlier question about the role of business my feeling is that in the modern world where we're seeing catastrophe after catastrophe. Europe is seeing some of the worst flooding in 20 years, but it happens every year. Climate is obviously an impact to business… supply chain, everything it does, customer base, manufacturing, and so my sense is business is starting to understand and, at the very least, ought to care about solving this problem systemically. 

11:04

So there seems to be a case for that now. In the same way that business wants governance, right, we want a good system of laws, and we might advocate for that. Well, that's a stable society. Another aspect of a stable society is a stable climate. So, the other piece of it is when businesses lead on these type of things, they garner all kinds of good PR. That helps them retain employees and get free press and advertising. So, I'm starting to think that business does have this role to play, but it hasn't really seized it at the meaningful level that I'm describing. 

Senthil

11:45

Where do you get the signals for this climate emergency, Auden? Look, I work in the non-profit space. Climate change is a huge issue for the communities we serve, but after reading your work, the urgency you have shown, the impatience you have to solve this problem, is clearly visible. And is it because you work in a skiing company where you see ice around? What is the trigger? 

Auden

12:09

Right… You know, my book, which is called Terrible Beauty, is about basically the things that you love deeply your family, your children, your environment, your neighbourhood, the place you grew up and then knowing, because of what we understand about climate science, that those things are all threatened, and that is a terrible beauty. It's a horrifying thing to experience, and yet it's also a human thing, right, we're all mortal, so all those things are threatened by mortality anyway. The urgency comes from this feeling that we have this small window in time and now is the time and we have this opportunity to fix it. And there's a sort of tragic optimism in the idea that if you're capable of doing something of great moral worth and great civilizational importance, you know how to do it, you're obligated to act. So that's part of what's driving. 

Senthil

13:14

Interesting… One of the hallmarks of your argument is the nexus of climate and equity. You have argued that the social justice revolution now happening in American streets is the climate revolution. Please help us understand this. What do issues such as racial or gender equity have to do with climate change? 

Auden

13:33

Yeah, so there are many different connections that I lay out in my book, but one of the most practical issues with the environmental movement globally has been it's been too small. It's always been the sport of the elite. And you know, in the United States there's expression save the whales, right, and it's making fun of environmentalists because basically, you may not be able to feed your family, you may have to pay college debt, you may be suffering from disease or whatever, and you've got these wealthy elite environmentalists saying save the whales. So, the environmental movement has never been big enough. And yet all of the things that environmentalists care about are common within the justice community as well. They're voting for the same people. In many cases, they're advocating for the same solutions. 

14:26

Dense housing on mass transit is a justice and equity solution, but it's also a climate solution. So, the key point is that these movements have to merge and arguably, labour is another piece of what could be this broad movement on one hand, and then there's another piece of it that is about ethics and respect and how we are as people. The United States has a thing with race, as a black friend of mine says, and until we reckon with that, the reality on the ground of how we've treated members of our society. We're not going to reckon with another issue of dignity and respect that requires us to see the world clearly, which is climate change. 

Senthil

15:14

Let me bring this ethics argument into a corporate sustainability role. Should businesses look at sustainability as a value-creating opportunity or should corporate sustainability interventions offer a payback such as profit or brand differentiation? Let's say, when you speak to your CEO about a sustainability project, do you make economic arguments or ethics arguments? 

Auden

15:39

You know, I've long argued that if you try to pursue sustainability purely based on economics, you're going to fail. Because, as we discussed, you can cut a certain amount of emissions out of profit, but then it gets really expensive, and so I'm more and more leaning into ethical arguments that are tied to. You know what we care about as human beings, and that's a corporate issue, because in the workforce today it's hard to get quality employees and retain them, and our sustainability work in our business does that. We hear that all the time. But another piece of this is that there seems to be like climate change is a big global problem that is in everyone's faces. Young customers, young employees all understand it, and it ranks very highly in polling on what people care about. So, I just believe there's a business case that you can't monetize with hard numbers. That is, leadership in this arena, in addition to protecting your business, is going to attract customers and employees and get you good PR. 

16:50

And this is an important point. No corporation has actually seized the banner as the obvious leader on climate change. And yes, Patagonia and Ben and Jerry's, but those are exceptional companies with ownership from the beginning. That was very progressive. I'm talking about big, publicly traded companies. It seems to me if a Coke or a Pepsi started doing the things I'm describing, by wielding power and using CEO voice on climate and moving policy and creating social movement, they would own that space forever and their competition would never catch up to them. So, I think there's all kinds of opportunity here. But to answer your question, it can't just be an economic argument, it can't be a pure business argument. There's an element of ethics here. 

Senthil

17:41

So, let's take a business like Coke or Pepsi. They operate in multiple countries, they have multiple product lines and of course, there are multiple sustainability issues they can get in and try to solve. I speak to a lot of business leaders. One of the biggest challenges I see in the corporate sustainability space is about prioritizing. You advise businesses to ask what is our greatest area of leverage when tackling sustainability issues? Is it the same as materiality assessments? How are businesses doing here? 

Auden

18:15

Yeah, materiality assessment is part of what I call the complicity problem. You know, those are basically looking at how environmental change affects your business, which makes no sense. It's really, if you care about climate, it's how your business is affecting the climate. So, I think that it's very difficult for businesses to prioritize climate. Coke and Pepsi are both a good and a terrible example. These are basically of the fossil fuel industry. They use plastic which is made from fossil fuels and their whole business model has been around essentially preventing anyone from stopping them from using a lot of plastic. So, some businesses simply can't be sustainable, and those two cannot unless they radically change their business model. Now, there's a way to do that, but they're not going to do it. So other businesses though… it's not such a reach to be a leader in sustainable practice and policy and power wielding. 

Senthil

19:18

Auden, what is the central argument of your forthcoming book, Terrible Beauty? The subtitle talks of climate complicity. Is the book addressed primarily to corporations or individuals as well? 

Auden

19:29

No, and here's my chance to sell the book a little bit. But you know, if I'm in this field and so are you. And if you hear, hey, there's another climate book coming out, my response is I don't care, I've read them all, they're all boring, I don't want to read it. So, this is a climate book for people who have that reaction. 

19:49

It opens with my friends and I chasing a dust devil in the desert. The first chapter is about my son chopping wood. So, this is part memoir, it's part history of the failure of the modern environmental movement. It's part polemic about how we can drive change, but it's interspersed with stories about family and life, because we'll never solve this big global systemic problem unless we tap into, basically, our souls that are threatened by the problem. 

20:22

The essential argument of the book is that the modern environmental movement has failed. We need to think differently about it, and I lay out how to think differently around wielding power and driving big systems change instead of rinky-dinking around the edges of the problem. And then the other part of the thesis is that the thing that will motivate us is our profound love of existence, the beauty of the world, our families. This is just so powerful to all of us. And one of the contradictions I point out is if you ask an American citizen or a global citizen, what do you care about, they say my family, my children, my faith, my community. And then if you say, well, there's a threat to all of that, it's called climate change, what are you doing about it? And they say they'll literally basically answer with nothing, I don't even vote. You know like that's the extent of at least American lack of concern. Or maybe they recycle and drive a Prius, but their fixes don't scale with the level of love and passion they have for these things they care about. 

Senthil

21:33

That's fascinating, Auden. I very much look forward to reading this book. Auden let's move to the segment how I Did it, where we ask all our guests three personal questions to draw lessons from their life and career. How do you handle conflicting views or setbacks? 

Auden

21:50

You know, I've always viewed my work as I've used metaphors like a street fight or a bar fight or trench digging, and those are all things that you grind through. So, you try one thing, and it doesn't work, and you try another thing, and you don't give up. I don't know if you've seen the film Cool Hand Luke, where Paul Newman gets knocked out in a fight, but he gets up and he gets up like 50 times and that's sort of the battle. And the point is I see all important human struggles as basically continuous defeat with small patches of light, and so that approach has allowed me to do that. If you don't solve it one way, you try another, you slowly educate people to get them on your side, you evolve the way the corporation thinks, and so that's the philosophical approach. 

Senthil

22:49

Interesting. In your experience what are one or two essential skills required for sustainability leaders? 

Auden

22:58

You know, these are the same skills that you need in anything, which is you have to be a human being, and so you have to look people in the eye, you have to care about them, you have to be friendly, you have to listen to them. You can't think you're better than them morally. You can't condescend. You have to treat every person equally, so you have to treat the least important person in a room full of celebrities as important as the president of the United States. So those traits, these are human traits that you know if you look at the core of most world religions, this is what they tell you to do Treat people well, treat them as if they were you, and that is more important. Communicating and being human is so much more important than being able to dial in an Excel spreadsheet. 

Senthil

23:53

Finally, can you recommend a book or two on sustainability to our listeners? 

Auden

23:59

You know I want to recommend two books. One is Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's book the Big Myth, which is about how free market ideology kind of took over the United States and the strategies that the right used to make that happen. And the reason that's really important to my field is all of corporate sustainability is just an expansion of this idea that regulation is unnecessary and that free markets can solve all our problems. And climate's the ultimate example of... you need regulation and even, interestingly, even the forefathers of the free market, neoliberal ideology, Friedrich Hayek being one of them even he said we need regulation, so it was never part of that ideology. 

24:51

And then the other book guests on your show typically don't recommend books they haven't read yet, but this has just come on my radar and it's really something that I think is relevant. It's called the Unaccountability Machine, why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions and how the World Lost Its Mind by a guy named Dan Davies, and he argues that big systems like governments. For example, they can act like artificial intelligence, in the sense that they make their own decisions and produce outcomes that you didn't want. And this is sort of what we're seeing in American society. You know a lot of the things that are happening, say, in the United States. Nobody wants it, and even the right doesn't want it, and yet we're here, and that's because of this interesting problem that Davies lays out. 

Senthil

25:41

Interesting. One last question, because you raised this polarization. We see this phenomenon across the world in terms of geographic polarization or ideological polarization. Would you see this will have any impact on corporations' sustainability efforts, particularly multinationals operating in many regions and countries? 

Auden

26:03

Yeah, it is happening because it is affecting sustainability work, because corporations are scared, you know, of taking strong positions on policy or on even ethical questions. I'm you know, the world goes through phases of polarization and obviously we're in one now, but I'm optimistic that this will pass, and part of the reason is, if you look, at least in the United States, most of us agree on most things, even the things that polarize us, whether it's women's health care or even climate change, most Americans agree. So, we're almost dealing with a political system problem, the infrastructure of our political system is broken versus a democracy and agreement problem. 

Senthil

26:52

Excellent. Thank you so much, Auden, for joining me and sharing your valuable perspectives, and I very much look forward to reading your book Terrible Beauty. It was an absolute pleasure talking to you today. 

Auden

27:04

Thank you so much for having me and I appreciate your thoughtful questions. 

01:03 / 27:43