Is anyone else out there as cynical as I am about Newsweek's 2009 Green Rankings for the largest 500 corporations in the United States?
I have to grant that the efforts put forth by the top five companies in some cases are fairly impressive. We do need corporations to take on the responsibility of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and use of toxic materials. We do need to have a standard of corporate ethics with relation to the environment, as opposed to solely considering maximizing shareholder profits the One True Good. It's wonderful to hear that companies like Dell and Intel are strong supporters and users of renewable energy. We need all of these efforts, and more.
Ultimately, though, these companies are not green in any deep sense, and to portray them as such runs the risk of greenwashing us into believing that just buying from the right companies will be sufficient to halt or reverse current trends towards environmental degradation. I am not arguing that these companies are lying to us about their GHG statements, environmental policies, or even their earnest desire to mitigate their environmental impacts. Rather, I am simply pointing out that the decontextualization of the survey blinds us to broader patterns of environmental degradation via overconsumption.
What does it actually mean to argue that a top-500 corporation is "green"? Green in comparison to what? Well, maybe these companies are more green than smaller mom-and-pop businesses because economies of scale allow for better energy efficiency in larger companies. That might be the case -- I'm not in a position to say. On the other hand, you don't get to be top-500 without a belief in one principle that is, in its very essence, anti-green: the right (or even responsibility?) to continue economic expansion indefinitely. You can't be a highly successful company without putting out a product or service that people want or need, and are willing to pay for, preferably repeatedly over time. In other words, these very "green" companies depend for their survival on a truly anti-green concept: continually expanding consumption.
In this context, that four of the top five companies in Newsweek's green rankings are computer companies becomes sort of ironic: this is an industry which tends to double its capacity every year and a half. The computer I am using to type this post right now is over seven years old, and in computer years, that's downright ancient. The rapid rise in computing capacity is a fantastic triumph for technology and the industries supported by this massive computing power (my own included). Environmentally, though, it's a nightmare, due to the energy and material inputs required to churn out new models every few months, to say nothing of the energy needed to actually run the things, whether they are fully on or nominally "off".
So who is more green: the companies building ever-faster computers through their consumption of cleaner energy, or the companies that are currently working hard to develop the clean energy sources in the first place? Unfortunately, we can't really include the latter in the survey anyway, since most of them aren't top-500 companies to begin with. Sorry kids, come back and try again next year. Maybe we'll have a category for little bitty corporations by then!
Contrast again the clean energy producers with, for example, Coca-Cola, whose winning a first place berth in the "Food and Beverage" section probably required a complete dissociation from the fact that its flagship product is categorically unnecessary to anyone, anywhere. While Coca-Cola does market some snack foods with marginal nutritional value, by and large I would argue that this company is essentially promoting the use of productive farmland to generate snacks which contribute to the epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes in this country. We could be using that farmland instead to grow decent leafy greens, actually producing health(!) from our agricultural land instead of chronic illnesses which then severely impact our health care system and individuals' quality of life. But leafy greens aren't terribly sexy, and they probably would never make Coca-Cola a top-500 company.
I suppose if I were to suggest that the real green heroes in America today aren't corporations at all, but the individuals who are working to figure out how to live simply, how to minimize their consumption of material and energy inputs, and how to provide clean, renewable energy sources and healthy foods that aren't dependent on indirect inputs from fossil fuels, Newsweek would simply ask me why they should advertise such individuals' efforts when they have so little to give back to the media themselves? Such individuals, after all, can rarely afford a decent advertising budget.
To that I can only say, money ain't everything.
