Corporate power and the climate catastrophe

"These creatures don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so. ...It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it." (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)

Business decision making often causes harm

It is nothing new to observe that companies make business decisions which cause harm to those around them. The quote above is just one such example and has become well-used by those concerned about corporate power. John Steinbeck was writing in 1939 about the families evicted from their farms in Oklahoma following a series of droughts in the Great Depression.

Large companies will make hundreds of business decisions like this each day. Some of these will cause harm, and the people making these decisions (not always men these days) will not all be happy that they are having to make them. These decisions may mean choosing tax avoidance, workers' exploitation, animal abuse, or environmental damage over an increase in “costs” for the company.

Economists have given the name “externalities” to some of the damage caused by companies in this way. In the past, governments would pass laws (such as anti-pollution laws) to prevent the worst types of externality taking place.

However, in 2026, we have reached a particularly difficult place where government regulators have, in many cases, become “captured” by powerful corporations.

The turning point of climate and nature

Societies may have been prepared in the past for a trade-off between accepting some externalities in exchange for the extraordinary trappings of modernity: mass car ownership or mobile phones or affordable flights. The problem with corporate power is that its lobbying approach has become so effective that it can throw sand in the wheels of pretty much anything it wants to.

And, in the words of the excellent Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, writing in early 2025:

"We have taken a giant step into the Sixth Extinction. All the national pledges for controlling carbon emissions have failed. Our international climate conferences last year, biodiversity in Colombia, reparations in Azerbaijan, plastics in Korea – were all ambushed by corporate saboteurs, marketers, and lawyers."

Corporate capture has become so effective that its ability to prevent regulation, in the case of climate change particularly, has become an existential crisis for humanity. By way of illustration, the table below (titled "Corporate indifference to life on planet earth") shows how most sectors have actors making poor decisions in this way.

The trouble with treating climate and nature as an externality is that, if the planet becomes uninhabitable, then even the trappings of modernity are scant consolation. Being flooded out of your home every year is no exchange for 800 TV channels.

The need for fundamental change is starting to become apparent, not just to left-behind populations, but to everyone else too.

Fundamental change is needed

Many large companies themselves are keen students of science and they know about the need to make changes only too well. In the last twenty years, and in the pages of Ethical Consumer particularly, we have observed companies developing a plethora of multi-stakeholder projects, net zero targets, and climate transition plans.

However, at least two things are happening to prevent the necessary changes taking place.

Firstly, companies are missing their targets. In some cases, it is likely that they were never intended to be much more than greenwash. In other cases, it appears that the pressures from elsewhere within companies for short-term profits, in the hundreds of decisions they take, are simply overriding the choice to avoid climate impacts too often.

Secondly, companies particularly threatened by climate transition (largely oil and gas) and companies ideologically opposed to challenges to corporate power, are deliberately funding misinformation and far-right parties to prevent change from occurring. Naomi Klein is just one author who has written extensively about this in her books Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything.

“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.” (Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, 2014)

Changing the system by upgrading the corporation

There is nothing new in identifying that what we have with the climate crisis and corporate power generally are system-level problems that require system-level solutions.

Over the last year, Ethical Consumer has been examining the essential pieces of the solutions jigsaw that are likely to be required. They include several familiar pathways such as:

• breaking up monopolies
• fewer corporate rights and more corporate responsibilities
• permitting courts to issue equity fines
• reforming public procurement.

However, we have also been asking questions about the nature of the corporation itself. What if the unreformed shareholder-owned corporations that dominate commerce today were to become a thing of the past?

What if other stakeholders were not just consulted but had power in boardrooms? How might this look in practice? This has led us to gather together some other elements for the jigsaw such as:

• innovating forms of public ownership
• building community-owned projects locally
• encouraging companies to convert to alternative business models
• putting “nature” on corporate boards.

The tables below are intended as loose sketches of:

• what the system-level problems look like at a glance
• what the system-level solutions might look like at a glance

Examples of corporate indifference to life on planet earth

In the table below we highlight a few examples of environmentally-damaging behaviour by corporations in a few different sectors like finance and food.

Examples of providing services while preserving life on planet earth

In this second table we highlight some examples of companies operating in ways that are more conducive to a sustainable environment. 

Taking decisions as if life on earth matters

The underlying issues are of course huge and much more complex. In most of the sectors on the “Providing services while preserving life on planet earth” table, for example, we could probably find examples of shareholder-owned companies working in the right way too.

We are unlikely, however, to be finding co-operatives and charities exhibiting most of the behaviours observed on the “Corporate indifference" table.

Upgrading the corporation offers a system-level solution because we might be able to design trading businesses where the hundreds of decisions taken each day are taken with life on the planet in mind. And, if this is the case, then the need for regulation, and indeed lobbying for less of it, could decrease systematically instead.