As a former sustainability executive at Google and Facebook, I worked my heart out to lower the companies’ emissions in operations, supply chains, and products. Today, thousands of sustainability professionals – a growing cadre – are making tremendous progress in those areas. But sustainability professionals can super-charge their effectiveness by speaking out for climate policy, and being explicit about the need and opportunity for companies to use their enormous influence to support climate policy. They have every reason to do so, because companies won’t make their own net zero goals without public policy to speed the way and spread the progress.
I’m writing this issue to explain why and how sustainability professionals can raise their voices – individually and collectively – and make a difference for climate policy. Last month, at the annualGreenBiz conference, I invited the sustainability community to speak up by signing the LEAD statement – and the response was electrifying: more than six hundred have signed to date.
The potential influence of the community of sustainability professionals is huge. Many have been saying privately what NGOs (including ClimateVoice) have been saying for several years: that the business community has enormous influence on public policy, but when it comes to climate-related policy, most companies that we would otherwise consider leaders on climate are virtually silent, while the fossil-fuel industry and big influential cross-sector trade associations obstruct progress – so we need the climate leaders to break their silence and use their power and influence to accelerate policy progress. The LEAD statement is a vehicle for the community of sustainability professionals to say this publicly, together – and we believe that will help spur more companies to speak up.
Let’s dig in!
Connect the Dots is all about exploring the relationship between companies, the exercise of political influence, and the effect this has on passing (or defending) critical climate policy in the United States. So far we’ve examined why policy is so important, the ways the companies engage (or, more often, sit on the sidelines), and the impact of trade associations in obstructing action.
This month we’re zooming in on one critical and growing workforce cadre: sustainability professionals – and the unique potential and pressures they face:
- Many sustainability professionals understand the importance of policy to their work, but they rarely discuss this openly.
- Other sustainability professionals may not yet see the different pieces of this work (such as reducing company emissions and passing strong legislation) as connected.
- The government affairs department ultimately manages engagement with public policy. While sustainability professionals usually have relationships with people on the government affairs team, they can influence but not dictate the company’s public policy agenda.
- There is a huge opportunity when everyone at a company connects these issues and works together to balance the risks and opportunities.
Action Items
If you are a sustainability professional, sign the LEAD statement (representing yourself as an individual, not your company) to add your voice to hundreds of others. (Curious about who has already signed? Check out the full list of public signatories. Also note: you can choose to sign publicly, where your name and affiliation will appear on the public list, or confidentially, where we count you in the total number of signatories, but will not reveal your name or affiliation.)
Share this social media post about the LEAD statement, and share it personally with other sustainability professionals.
Check in with your company: ask your CSO and other execs if they agree with the statement, if they have signed, and where the company stands on obstructing trade associations
The Big Picture
Sustainability Professionals Have a Key Role to Play in Driving Climate Policy Forward
We all know that our companies have voices – powerful ones. They use them to influence public opinion and public policy – and to burnish their reputations. But if we are to make that transition from fossil fuels the world endorsed at COP 28, companies need to do more than publicize their latest innovative work, as vital as that is. They need to speak up for policy progress in city halls, statehouses, Washington, D.C., Brussels, Seoul – wherever they operate. Binding policy – laws and regulations – not just voluntary agreements.
We’ve got another big policy year ahead of us:
- We need to protect the Inflation Reduction Act’s $369 billion federal investment enacted in 2022 that is accelerating the clean energy transition in the U.S. This is not just a huge investment of public money – it is transformative because it unlocks much greater amounts of private capital. And that 2022 law is a start, not the end point – we all know lawmakers should be doing even more. But right now fossil fuel interests are lobbying like crazy to pump the brakes, and even reverse course.
- We need to support crucial regulatory work at the EPA, the SEC, and other agencies, and avoid catastrophic rulings in court cases.
- We must enact new state and local policies to accelerate progress on the grid, on transportation, and on buildings.
That’s just this year – then we need to continue to drive progress next year and beyond.
In the end, it’s all about speed and scale – moving faster, and at a far greater scale – not just to decarbonize company by company, but to do it across the entire economy.
We have made amazing progress in the last two decades: on wind, solar, EVs, and other technologies, on corporate action on climate, and even on policy. We spend a lot of time celebrating that progress – and it is worth celebrating – and gives us hope we can address the climate crisis.
At the same time, we know we are not on track. We need to move faster to avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change. Global emissions are still rising, when they need to start falling – and very soon.
And we keep hitting new records for global temperatures – our carbon budget is literally going up in smoke. Society won’t achieve a just and equitable transition from fossil fuels to a zero-carbon economy without binding policy.
Sustainability professionals have an important role to play. They are dedicating our careers to combating climate change, and they have great expertise and a powerful commitment to this issue. But as individuals, many feel boxed in by their roles – unable to speak out on issues of climate policy because they are limited by the org chart and by the day-to-day demands of their work.
At the same time, sustainability professionals are the world’s leading experts on corporate sustainability. And together, their collective voice carries real weight in the corporate sector. A collective voice can make it easier for companies to do what we need them to do.
Let’s take a deeper look at what’s going on with companies and sustainability.
For a Deeper Dive
What is Holding Sustainability Back
Ideally, the job of sustainability professionals is to help transform their companies to lead the way to a more sustainable, more prosperous, and more equitable future. That requires looking far into the future to understand risks and opportunities – including complex risks like the climate crisis. Day-to-day, however, many sustainability professionals are focused on measurement and reporting, on compliance, and on executing plans to meet the targets they’ve set. Most have little time to devote to understanding the public policy landscape – except perhaps when there is a clear impact on meeting key goals (e.g., the ability to buy and consume clean power).
Also, to be blunt: the sad truth is that in many companies, other policy issues (taxes, trade, immigration, antitrust, etc) take precedence over engaging on climate policy. Climate has been politicized (especially in the U.S.) – so companies see risk in taking a strong stand on climate policy. When there is a clear direct benefit to speaking up, they do – but otherwise they are mostly silent. And when they do speak up, it is often at a whisper, especially compared to the roar of obstruction coming from fossil-fuel companies and big cross-sector trade associations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Many companies have set ambitious goals around climate. Most will not meet their goals – especially those related to Scope 3 (supply chain and value chain) – without significantly more stringent public policy. That alone should be reason enough for many companies to be more vocal about climate policy.
A key point: most sustainability professionals, and arguably most of the companies they work for, say they’re doing the work they do to help society make the transition to a zero-carbon economy. Making that real requires thinking beyond a company’s own operational decarbonization goals and the policies they need to achieve those goals. They need to think about the policies needed by every region they operate in – every city, county, state, and country – for that region to decarbonize. A company might be focused on energy policy because buying clean energy is the key thing they need to do to make their own net-zero goals. But their employees, and customers, and suppliers all use transportation – which makes transportation policy (transit, EVs, etc) relevant to the company.
Bottom line: progress on sustainability-related policy is hampered by organizational structures, by companies prioritizing other business-related policy issues, and by companies focusing narrowly on sustainability policy issues where they can see a direct near-term benefit to them (“we should stay in our lane,” they often say). The opportunity is for companies to clearly connect their sustainability work to the larger societal objective that work is in service of – to get out of their narrowly defined lane and lobby like they mean it – lobby hard enough to counter the obstruction coming from defenders of the status quo.
For sustainability professionals: sign the LEAD statement to help grow the chorus of expert practitioners saying this publicly – and raise this issue with top execs and the board (many of whom think setting and making progress toward a net-zero target is the pinnacle of leadership). This may involve uncomfortable and challenging conversations, which are rarely fun or easy. But the urgency of the climate crisis gets clearer every day. That makes it vital to make the time to pick our heads up from the hard day-to-day work of compliance, reporting, buying clean energy, etc. and put real time and energy into driving the corporate and societal transformation we need.
For other corporate employees: discuss this with your peers, with the CSO and other sustainability professionals, and with top execs. Your company has an opportunity to help “bend the emissions curve” quickly, but it will require getting out of its narrow lane and really leaning in to support climate policy – everywhere it operates.
Coming soon...
A closer look at the recent trade association audit Microsoft conducted that uncovered misalignment on key climate policies.
Have a specific question about Corporate Political Responsibility that you’d like us to address? Shoot your questions to us with subject line "Connect the Dots."