David Delaney, Ottawa
Public corporations cannot operate sustainably under current rules. It’s simply impossible for them to do so and continue to exist. The future wealth of their managers, directors, and shareholders demands continual growth. Any sign of persistently slowing growth gets managers fired and boards of directors replaced. Sustainability of our industrial society requires zero growth of the throughput of matter. The total amount of matter processed by corporations and turned into garbage in the environment must remain constant after descending from current excessive levels to sustainable levels. Sustainable rules would not allow most corporations to grow at all. Only a corporation whose growth would enable the forced shrinkage of other corporations by more than its planned growth would be able to negotiate a licence to grow.
Corporations can move in the direction of sustainability for a while, as long as they make only reductions of matter-input and garbage-output that improve their profitability, or are neutral with respect to profitability. Lovins’s message is there are quite a few opportunities for such reductions. Unfortunately the totality of all such moves cannot get any corporation anywhere near sustainability as long as the imperative for growth remains, since unconstrained growth is unsustainable, and because corporations cannot choose to internalize currently externalized costs.
Any corporation currently profits from many large externalized costs. No individual corporation or group of corporations can choose to internalize such costs without losing competitiveness with respect to those who do not. Yet internalization of such costs, or some other effective way of having social control over the costs externalized by each corporation, is required for sustainability.
Corporations will use all of their power to prevent the introduction of rules which would make them sustainable. All of the individuals who make decisions in corporations will get rich quickly only by creating growth, and will get rich only very slowly, and much less often, under sustainable rules.