German translation

Are we in a late-stage sustainability world or has this ecological virtue been completely abandoned? History will judge the political changing of the guards in Europe and America in 2024 through many lenses but it is likely that the underlying value shifts will affect the next generation in the same way as the dominance of sustainability as the millennial cardinal virtue has influenced the last generation.

It can be argued that this virtue of ecological prudence and precaution is losing its shine as political leaders pull back from previous seemingly unshakeable social and environmental commitments. And if so, what other values are rising to represent the interests and identities of their publics?

The concept (virtue) of sustainability emerged in popular Western discourse in the 1990s to serve as a general term encompassing sustainable development, the Triple P of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and, later, the finance industry-driven Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments. Sustainable development, as a baseline, argues that we should be meeting our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. As resources and ecological systems were argued to be under severe stress in the 1990s, sustainability was a call to live within our means (and where virtuous behaviour entailed environmental restoration and lowering our “footprint”).

As the concept evolved, certain campaigns and buzzwords articulated the sustainability drive: net zero, degrowth, conscious capitalism, stakeholder dialogue, resilience, regenerative, and stewardship. Sustainability leaders identified most western economic and social practices (based on capitalism) as environmentally untenable or destructive, with leaders and influencers consistently calling for transitions away from such wasteful traditional practices.

• Sustainable energy meant a transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewables;
• sustainable agriculture implied a transition in our food systems;
• sustainable finance was meant to drive the low-carbon, climate transition;
• sustainable packaging was the driving force toward the transition to a circular economy;
• sustainable economies could not tolerate endless growth targets so there needed to be a transition toward a degrowth, post-capitalist world.

Sustainability, as it evolved into a more extremist prescriptivism, assumed a disruptive political role and perhaps the 2024 electoral backlash was an expression of the desire for an end or a slowdown to the continuous policy of change and transition. Consumers saw prices going up and services going down as activists lectured the public on the impact of their lifestyles. Before examining the emerging (post-sustainability) values, it would be helpful to examine how and why sustainability became the dominant value over the past decades (and how it fell).

How did Sustainability Develop?

Sustainability is a relatively recent policy development. In the 1990s, corporate PR actors were still focusing on Total Quality Management and HSE (Health, Safety and the Environment). Certain events in the 1980s and 90s (from Bhopal to BSE – mad cow disease) meant that focusing on cleaning up rivers and air was not sufficient to stem the reputational decline of industry. Companies in the 1980s spoke about maximising shareholder value but with the industrial disasters of the 1990s, they could no longer focus just on profits.

The 1992 Rio Earth Summit introduced the concept of sustainable development: that humanity could not continue to take resources from future generations at their present rate to develop today. From this idea, industry developed a focus on a Triple P – People, Profits and Planet. Companies began to develop these ideas into a proactive concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In the 1990s, CSR reports replaced HSE reviews as companies began to adopt unified measuring and reporting standards. Enter the bean counters and the consultants.

In the 2000s, the issue of climate change started to dominate the public policy sphere and CSR was not sufficient. Carbon emissions reporting, focus on low energy, waste and resource management and lifecycle assessment strategies meant that all of the previous concepts were overtaken by the term: “sustainability” – an empty shell of a concept that could be filled with a wide variety of practices and policies.

Soon sustainable became a virtue adjective easily tagged to any environmental campaign:

• Sustainable agriculture could equally justify organic farming or using herbicides with GMO seeds to enable low-till farming and complex cover cropping.
• Sustainable energy could be framed along renewables like wind and solar or via nuclear and natural gas.
• A circular economy was the poster child of sustainability, but from that, almost any resource use could be defined as circular.
• Low carbon mining, aquaculture, low emission jet fuels, biofuels, cattle ranching… could all be enhanced through the use of that green virtue adjective.

The world of sustainability was a PR consultant’s dream come true. Then the activists got serious.

How did Sustainability Die?

Around a decade ago, net-zero became the buzzword and industry could no longer get away with just claiming to be moving toward a more sustainable means of production. The expectation of the NGOs, working with a more assertive UN, backed by foundation funding and the finance and asset management industry opportunists started to demand a transition to zero carbon emissions, zero waste, zero fossil fuels, zero plastics… Sustainability was now an ultimatum – all about a transition to zero in energy, food, transportation, waste…

As many of the demands for “zero” became unattainable for consumers and western economies, activists shifted their focus onto concepts like degrowth, agroecology, rewilding, and the inevitable transition to a post-capitalist economy. Politics and virtue signalling replaced ecology in the framing of what could be called late-stage sustainability. A global pandemic and constant climate anxiety relentlessly hammered in the media allowed these late-stage sustainability ideas to flourish. We were living in a zero-risk world, where Docilians accepted being locked down in their small apartments until it was proven to be safe to come out. The precautionary principle became the key regulatory tool, taking away any technology or substance that could not guarantee 100% safety and certainty (zero risk).

After decades of well-funded, relentless climate campaigns, the public were made terrified of climate change, to the point of believing humanity would go extinct in just twelve short years. The global financial industry (from banks to asset managers) got together to peddle their concept of ESG as a tool to extort all industries to either submit their carbon emissions disclosures or face the consequences. Then a Swedish teenager showed up in Davos, chillingly predicting the end of days … and world leaders were holding the microphone while she uttered her condemnations around the globe. Reason was silenced by a powerful climate movement and people were genuinely afraid … until they weren’t.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, food and energy prices, especially in Europe, shot up. This was coupled with inflationary trends following the fiscal levity at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The public saw the price tag of the activists’ green transitions and the loss of services and consumer goods, and became afraid of a continuous downward spiral led by a rather insensitive environmentalist dogma.

Sustainability had been pushed too far, too fast and too unreasonably. In 2024, most pro-sustainability (green) political parties lost at the ballot box. Climate change became less of a threat to the public than the risk of the lights going out, jobs leaving the economy, food becoming unaffordable and transportation and tourism being limited. The European Commission began to systematically role back its Green Deal commitments. And then there was Donald Trump’s war on woke.

A Post-Sustainable World?

The degrowth philosophy furthered by the World Economic Forum in recent years was the limit in the evolution of green policy stupidity. While they flowered it up with phrases like “conscious capitalism” or a “just transition”, the reality was that people don’t like their social goods and quality of life taken away from them (especially by smarmy green activists in expensive suits). They want their children to enjoy more of the benefits in life than they have (they don’t want to be told not to have kids). They don’t want to have to feed them insects rather than meat, in a cold house with limited comforts. Sustainability was accepted because it stressed the imperative to not be taking away from future generations. But it was a tenuous hold if it meant losing the benefits we had gained in our lifetimes.

Industry as well was pushed to the limit by an aggressive financial industry, led by zealots like Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg, to reduce their carbon emissions or face existential consequences. Banks and asset managers were literally extorting industry, and down market, consumers were paying the price. The finance climate transition, marching under the banner of ESG, became the sinister face of sustainability. True to form though, once opportunists like BlackRock saw more profits in investing in natural gas-powered data centre powerhouses, they themselves even abandoned their net-zero commitments.

The rejection of the degrowth-oriented transitions created a post-sustainable policy environment where the key issues (climate change, biodiversity, waste reduction) were no longer able to strike a significant chord in the public narrative.

What would replace sustainability in our public discourse?

The Age of Abundance

Despite a litany of personal weaknesses, Donald Trump did recognise that the public did not want to give up their access to energy, affordable food, holidays, technologies, innovations… To the contrary, the public wanted more and better: more affordable housing, better jobs, more manufacturing, more energy (especially for the AI data centres), more food, good infrastructure, better public services and more prosperity in general (something they felt was being taken away from them). The Trump voters also wanted fewer threats to these goods which translated into a dark xenophobia and protectionism. Trump promised “abundance” to the American electorate (framed as greatness) while the Democrats offered more regulations and more degrowth. Even a convicted felon could win that contest.

Abundance is a word popping up more frequently in our lexicon. In a recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson called “Abundance”, the argument is that the American Democratic Party’s emphasis on stifling regulations had eaten too deeply into social benefits. What was needed was an “Abundance Agenda” (a progressive supply-side agenda) for the left to reposition itself.

But abundance does not need to translate into more stuff and more waste (what was experienced in the last wave of abundance in the 1990s). People like Bjørn Lomborg and the late Hans Rosling have argued that the best way to fight climate change is to help developing countries to prosper. More stable economies have lower population growth rates, less poverty and therefore more efficient use of resources.

I have argued throughout my writing career that precaution was not a risk management tool but an uncertainty management omission of regulatory responsibility, of little use in the policy process. Precaution will always eat away at abundance, destroying access to social goods and doing little to better humanity and the environment. What we need, and what has been successful over the last century, are innovative technologies to continuously improve our living conditions, ensuring abundance while addressing our environmental health challenges via consistent iterations and developments.

A Return to Innovation and Product Stewardship

Scientific innovators have solved the problems threatening humanity with technologies to ensure food supply for a growing population, lower carbon energy production, better transportation, less waste and resource demand while not compromising on the access to social goods (preserving abundance). The zero-risk game that killed the concept of sustainability did not leave room for innovation to solve the challenges facing societies within a reasonable time. The research community became part of the problem, were not trusted by a regulatory mindset that had thought precaution would solve the problems. The precaution-first agenda had consumed the abundance agenda.

This continuous improvement strategy lies at the heart of product stewardship, an industry concept I was once articulating more than two decades ago at Cefic. When new products and technologies are developed, they must constantly be iterated so as to improve performance while reducing impact. Industry needs to step up and fill the void in a post-sustainability world to reassure policymakers that, as product stewards, we can have both abundance and address the major challenges facing our societies, be it basic services and infrastructure in developing countries or better quality of life in the wealthy West.

After the 2024 rejection of the green sustainability agenda, the time is ripe for industry to step up and return to their role as stewards of the markets, consumers and the environment (a new triple P). Can industry lead in this new Age of Abundance or have they become too shell-shocked from the relentless attacks of the last zero-risk epoch?

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