Category: Sustainability
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Learn About Business Before Discussing Business
Businesspeople can often think they know more about the world than they do. CEOs share their barely coherent thoughts on current affairs. It is annoying. People involved in sustainability are right to be irritated when they hear such nonsense. Yet, the opposite is also true. If you don’t know anything about business, it is not…
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Teaching About Climate Change
Teaching about climate change is a significant problem in modern universities. Ahmed Afzaal has a book that addresses university professors who are teaching, in what he calls, our Predicament. The title, Teaching at Twilight, suggested a more downbeat view of the world than I have but that is an excellent reason to read a book.…
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Hiding Their Good Works
There is plenty of bad environmental news and even worse news about environmental policy. (And not just in the US but that is the epicenter). Still, there are reasons for optimism which are often worth holding onto and sharing. Andrew Winston, a prolific writer on sustainable business, gave his views on 2025’s Climate Week in…
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Information Is Key To Recognizing Progress
Hannah Ritchie’s Clearing The Air is a must read for anyone interested in the challenge of greenhouse gases. She answers fifty common questions about how the world can make progress addressing climate change. Almost everyone can learn something from the book. You may have been able to answer some of the questions, but few people…
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Applying The Genetic Fallacy To The Carbon Footprint
I have just finished Hannah Ritchie’s Clearing the Air. More on that later — spoiler, it is a great book. As such, I was interested to see what a review that appeared in The Guardian newspaper had to say about it. The writer overall liked the book, which makes sense. But he didn’t stop there.…
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Considering Stakeholder Psychology
An important book in the world of sustainable business is Leveraging Corporate Responsibility by CB Bhattacharya, Sankar Sen, and Daniel Korschun. It was published in 2011, so things have moved on, not least the terminology. In 2025 they might well have decided to use the term sustainable business rather than corporate responsibility. Still, their basic…
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Academics Can Be Biased Too
Academics are human beings. Pick a human flaw and they have it. Of course, human beings are better at seeing the flaws in arguments that they don’t approve of than those they nod along to. This holds for academics. After all academics can be biased too. Allen Mendenhall and Daniel Stutter, two senior scholars one…
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Do Americans Believe In Climate Change?
Today I’ll look at some data from the Pew Research Center. Pew is a wonderful resource for understanding public attitudes. They even make a lot of their data available for additional research. It is a center I admire. One of the things they do investigate is the US public’s views of science, including what they…
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Greenhushing Is A Big Problem
The Economist recently highlighted the phenomenon of greenhushing. This is when firms keep quiet about their genuine sustainability achievements. This is the opposite of greenwashing — which is when firms trumpet dubious claims to sustainability. At first glance greenhushing doesn’t really seem to be a big problem. After all the firm is doing the good…
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Can Virtuous Capitalism Be Sustained?
Can virtuous capitalism be sustained? That is one of the questions that motivated James O’Toole and David Vogel in their discussion of the conscious capitalism. They are mostly positive — but being academics they have to have some reservations. New Lanark And The Challenge of Sustaining Virtuous Capitalism The authors discuss Robert Owen. Two hundred…
