Big busi­ness is envi­ron­men­tally destruc­tive: a wide­spread and almost unques­tioned assump­tion. A false assump­tion, accord­ing to Jared Dia­mond, not­ing that prof­its often arise from green ini­tia­tives and envi­ron­men­tal con­cern is of inher­ent impor­tance to many large cor­po­ra­tions.

The story is told through the lens of Wal-Mart’s trans­port and pack­ag­ing ini­tia­tives, Coca-Cola’s con­cern “with prob­lems of water scarcity, energy, cli­mate change and agri­cul­ture” and Chevron’s pol­icy of rigourous envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion (of which any­one who has read Diamond’s Col­lapse, will be acutely aware):

The embrace of envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns by chief exec­u­tives has accel­er­ated recently for sev­eral rea­sons. Lower con­sump­tion of envi­ron­men­tal resources saves money in the short run. Main­tain­ing sus­tain­able resource lev­els and not pol­lut­ing saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoid­ing oil spills and other envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters — reduces crit­i­cism from employ­ees, con­sumers and government.

It’s not just big busi­ness we make assump­tions about: as Tim Har­ford points out after read­ing Prashant Vaze’s The Eco­nom­i­cal Envi­ron­men­tal­ist, some typ­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal deci­sions are some­times based on incor­rect assump­tions:

Envi­ron­men­tal­ists have been slow to realise that the fash­ion­able eco-lifestyle is rid­dled with con­tra­dic­tions. The one that par­tic­u­larly exas­per­ates me is the “food miles” obses­sion, whereby we eschew toma­toes from Spain and roses flown in from Kenya, in favour of local prod­ucts grown in a heated green­house with a far greater car­bon foot­print. Other less-than-obvious truths are: that pork and chicken have sub­stan­tially lower car­bon foot­prints than beef and lamb (yes, even organic beef and lamb); that milk and cheese also have a sub­stan­tial foot­print; that dish­wash­ers are typ­i­cally more effi­cient than wash­ing dishes by hand; and that eco-friendly wash­ing pow­ders may be dis­tinctly eco-unfriendly because they tend to tempt peo­ple to use hot­ter washes.

Jared Dia­mond piece via Mar­ginal Revolution