Business Can Play a Profitable Role in Combating Climate Change, with Andrew Winston

Andrew Winston is a bestselling author and business strategist who has advised some of the world’s top companies on environmental matters. In his new book, The Big Pivot, Winston advocates for a major shift in business priorities away from short-term earnings and toward long-term sustainability. Despite outside pressure to achieve quick wins, Winston believes the business community can help tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues (such as climate change) “using the tools of capitalism, markets, and competition to do it most profitably.”

In his recent Big Think interview, Winston calls climate change “arguably… the greatest challenge we face for humanity.” Not only does it have a negative effect on our environment, climate change has been and will continue to be catastrophically expensive for both the public and private sectors. Yet, thanks to efforts to raise awareness about its many costs, Winston expresses confidence that the growing environmental movement can make a lasting impact. All they need is help from the outside.

Winston illustrates two key reasons why the business world is sometimes sluggish on environmental issues. The first is that common myths still plague sustainability, most notably the myth that "there’s this fundamental trade-off between trying to manage these big challenges in a profitable way and just managing your bottom line in a normal way." For a long time, green products and services were known to be quite expensive. That dated reputation has persevered despite the fact that it's no longer steeped in truth. Businesses are slowly coming to realize this:

"There’s a whole category of things that companies do that save money very quickly. All things that fall under kind of the banner of eco-efficiency or energy efficiency. I mean, in part, green is about doing more with less. That’s just good business and so that part of the agenda has become much more normal in companies and they’re finding ways to cut costs dramatically."

More than just these quick and easy fixes, it's never been more economical to do something like install solar panels on the company's roof:

"The cost of that has been dropping dramatically, 70-80 percent reduction in cost of, you know, using solar power in the last five years. So the economics have shifted. This is now very good for business. Almost all of the agenda of The Big Pivot is good for business in the long term, in the medium term and very often in the short term. So there isn’t this tradeoff. This is the path to growth. This is the path to innovation."

The second obstacle facing Winston's big pivot is the media, specifically its unsettling reluctance to cover issues related to climate change. Winston points to the recent climate march in New York that drew 400,000 people to the Big Apple yet was barely a blip on the press' radar:

"There’s a very strange thing that’s happened where, I don’t know, climate change is boring, it’s not sexy, it doesn’t seem exciting and so it doesn’t get the coverage it needs... And it’s a shame. I think there’s an opportunity to highlight how far we’ve come and the opportunities we have to change our lives for the better and make business a part of the solution and make it more prosperous and more profitable. And I think we’re missing out on telling that story."

So Winston's goals for enacting the ideas espoused in his book are to dispel the common myths about the monetary price of going green and to raise awareness through media channels. Once those benchmarks are cleared, there will be little standing in the way of a business-led environmental revolution. 

You can learn about Andrew Winston's work as an environmental strategist at his website, andrewwinston.com.