When we talk about business and sustainability, the conversation usually begins with operations. We ask what companies can do to clean up their own acts—reducing emissions, using clean energy, and minimizing waste across supply chains.
These internal changes are important, and they may slow the pace of climate change over the long run. But they leave us with a much larger question: Should the public demand that businesses use their immense wealth and expertise to help solve global sustainability crises, rather than just cleaning up their own backyards?
The public has every right to demand that corporations become active parts of the solution. This right rests on two fundamental pillars.
First, the environment is a common good. Life cannot exist without a healthy planet. The future of humanity and the ecosystems that make organized civilization possible are of absolute, existential importance to all of us.
Second, corporations have driven this crisis. For decades—with a massive acceleration since the mid-20th century—large multinational companies in particular have inflicted trillions of dollars in damage on the Earth’s ecosystems through resource extraction, toxic emissions, and waste generation.
The scale of this destruction is staggering:
A 2013 UN report estimated global environmental damage from business activities at $7.3 trillion per year. The report noted that high-impact sectors—including agriculture, forestry, mining, oil and gas, and utilities—would actually lose money if they were forced to pay for the damage they caused.
A decade later, a 2024 UN study revealed that air pollution and industrial food production alone inflict more than $8 trillion and $10 trillion in damage to human health and the environment every single year.
How do businesses get away with destroying our shared environment on such a massive scale? They leverage their enormous economic power to buy political influence.
Corporate profits are at historic highs. U.S. companies generated over $3.8 trillion in after-tax profits in 2025, while non-U.S. companies’ profits reached nearly $450 billion in 2024.
In the U.S. especially, this wealth is systematically deployed to influence elections and lobby officials to ensure that legislation protects and expands corporate power. Elected officials are acutely aware of how critical money is to their political survival; more than 90% of better-funded candidates win their races for Congress. Most of that campaign money comes from corporations and wealthy individuals. For example, during the 2024 election cycle, business interests poured nearly $6 billion into national campaign contributions and spent more than $4 billion on federal lobbying in 2025.
Not surprisingly, as the 2024 UN study noted above bluntly concludes, “…States are complicit in the planetary crisis by enabling and subsidizing destructive business activities.”
The most glaring example of this complicity is the relationship between governments and the fossil fuel industry. In the midst of an accelerating climate crisis, the world’s six largest fossil fuel companies—pulling in nearly $100 billion in annual profits—received $1.2 trillion in 2022 and $600 billion in 2023 in direct subsidies from governments worldwide. Meanwhile, trillions of dollars in additional damages to human health and the environment are deferred to the public every year.
What Should the Public Expect from Business?
Historically, the public expected businesses to do a few basic things: provide goods and services, create jobs, generate economic value, and obey the law.
But our worsening environmental and social crises have permanently changed the context of modern business. Climate change, ecosystem collapse, resource depletion, and systemic inequality cannot be solved in isolation. Because these problems are deeply structural, they can only be resolved through solutions built across all social and economic institutions.
Isolated “sustainable business practices” are no longer enough to maintain an ecosystem capable of supporting human society—let alone corporate profitability—over the long term.
As a public, we have the right to ask every corporation five core questions:
Are you, at a minimum, reducing the harm caused by your operations?
Are your products and services actively contributing to a sustainable future?
Are you using your economic and political influence to support systemic solutions?
Are you helping dismantle the legal and economic frameworks that reward unsustainable behavior?
Are you actively investing in the well-being of the communities and ecosystems your business relies on?
These questions push us past the narrow focus of whether a single company is minimizing its own footprint. They challenge us to demand something far greater: that corporations become active, accountable architects of a sustainable global economy.