The Climate Movement and Businesses That Are Friends
Fields of Action Post #15.2
Businesses As The Good Guys and Gals
We discussed business foes in our last post.
What about other businesses? Can there be legitimate climate-friendly businesses?
Not only are there such businesses, including the clean energy industry and the clean energy storage industry (e.g. batteries) and those implementing net-zero commitments, but they have been and will be essential to achieving our Major Goal. (I’ve already discussed business coalitions here.)
It is through businesses — innovators, producers, buyers, sellers — that most implementation will take place.
Hold it. In previous posts I have argued that the Invisible Hand will never be able to play a part in overcoming climate change because of the Five-P’s.
Its chief, overriding motive for is Profit.
Profits within a competitive market system are driven in large part by Price.
Profits and price are focused on the Present, not the future.
Polluters and Producers of Polluting Products don’t
Pay anything for the pollution, dumping it into our environment for free, thus not reflecting the full cost in the price paid by consumers, depriving them of the information they need to make an informed choice.
And yet I’ve also argued that markets are already playing a vital role because profits and price now favor clean energy. To recap:
The green/climate economy has surpassed $5 trillion annually and will exceed $7 trillion by 2030.
To achieve 1.5C by 2050 — our temperature reduction goal — about 75% of needed mitigation efforts are cost competitive today (55%) or nearly so (20%).
Morgan Stanley reports that 86% of asset owners and 79% of asset managers surveyed in September 2025 expected they would continue to grow their climate/sustainability investments, up from 80% of owners and 78% of managers in 2024 (see graph, above).
Two charts (below) from the World Resources Institute (WRI) utilizing data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) clearly shows clean energy investments and jobs are going up, up, up, while the fossils are going down, down, down.
National and regional economies (e.g., the US, EU, South Africa) and major companies around the world (e.g. Apple, IKEA, Volvo) have decoupled economic growth from climate pollution. No longer does growth have to mean more pollution. In fact, the opposite is the case.
We’ve gotta beat bad with better, and we’ve got better.
What gives? How did profits and price become so favorable? It happened because the four Catalytic Sources of Transformation worked for decades to make it so. As I put it:
Climate action and clean energy advocates and supporters of both, ARTC, and governments have worked for decades to create these market conditions in the Present. It certainly has been a patchwork and a somewhat irregular affair. But they’ve gotten us here.
Governments-&-Markets: The Fourth Catalytic Source of Transformation
The fourth of The Catalytic-4 is Governments-&-Markets. The hyphens I’ve placed to connect them are there to emphasize that they must work together to play their part. “Governments” is put first because they must find ways to make markets achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal. This could result from a wide variety of government policies: incentives, taxes, regulations, mandates, codes, standards, public-private partnerships.
But to achieve the needed speed and scale of change, The Climate Movement, bolstered by Climate Action Supporters, must push governments to make the accelerating rate of tech change or ARTC strategic, and structure markets to achieve our purpose.
In keeping with our Movement Values of freedom and creativity, governments should use the least amount of power necessary to get the job done. Sometimes that could mean being quite forceful and directive, especially given the speed and scale of our challenge.
We must not hesitate to use government power when needed. To stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better and our future come faster, we cannot let free-market ideologues and those motivated by greed bully politicians and policymakers from using government power when it is called for.
Remember, as I said in part one of this two-part Subseries, we can determine business friends from foes by: (1) their profit motive, and; (2) the ideology, i.e., the ideas that shape behavior, of key decision-makers.
In stark contrast to our business foes — free-market ideologues and those driven by greed who don’t care about climate consequences — there are many people around the world working to have Governments-and-Markets play an indispensable part in achieving our Major Goal.
Instead of profits and the ideas that shape our behavior working against us, what we need to continue to do is make profits and behavior-shaping ideas work for us.
Instead of profiting from the causes of the problem, we must accelerate the shift to profiting from the solutions. We must make profits serve efforts to keep warming to 1.5 with minimal overshoot.
Instead of a rigid free-market ideology and greed, we must be guided by our Movement Values and seek to attain the behavior-shaping ideas contained in our vision, purpose, and Major Goal — a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
To make our future come faster, we need to continue to structure markets with government power so that businesses and their customers can do well by doing good, thereby stopping the bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better, creating beauty, enhancing freedom, and bringing sustainability into existence.
In short, we need markets working for us, but they must be molded and shaped to do so.
The Business of Climate Movement Artist-Athletes
What does all of this mean for Climate Movement Artist-Athletes?
As I have argued, for us to achieve our Major Goal, as individuals most of us must be a part of collective entities or social forms that are engaged in climate action. We will never embody our seven characteristics/imperatives/goals (see below) without such social forms. And we won’t achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal unless we embody these characteristics — including being together enough.
For many people on the planet, the one social form they are most involved in (besides their families) is where they work. There are many fields of climate action upon which we can perform. Where we work can be one of them.
We’ve All Got a Job to Do
It all leads to this: Climate Movement Artist-Athletes who work for a business: it’s your job, if you are able, to work with others at your place of employment to make the business work for us; it’s your job to help grow the Movement by encouraging your colleagues to join us. It’s your job to find ways for your business to support and create the needed synergy of The Catalytic-4.
If for some reason you can’t do these things you might consider finding another job where you can. If you can’t, then use wisdom to discern how you can advance our cause from within without creating resistance. Become wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
Climate Action Supporters: it’s your job to support Climate Movement Artist-Athletes leading the charge within your business, and strongly consider becoming an Artist-Athlete yourself.
Climate Movement Artist-Athletes and Supporters within businesses: You are vital. You are strategic. We need you working from within.
It’s very simple: without you we can’t make our future come faster and overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances the wellbeing of everyone and everything.
But just like all Climate Artist-Athletes and Supporters, we need you on the outside, too, on the two Olympian Fields of Action we all participate on: growing and improving The Climate Movement and pushing for public policies that will achieve our vision, purpose, and Major Goal.
For the rest of us, we have our job, too: as citizens and consumers we must create the conditions that lead to businesses working for us.
And so we see that the two Fields of Action upon which we all must engage — (1) growing and improving the movement and (2) engaging policymakers — are also to be found within and intersecting with the business space.
We must be striving from the inside and the outside to have businesses working for us instead of against us. And we will achieve this when we have both the profit motive and behavior-shaping ideas such as our vision, purpose, and Major Goal becoming a symbiosis that makes a major contribution to achieving them.
Because profits and price now favor clean energy systems in many situations, what The Climate Movement must push for is the needed speed and scale. That’s our job.
One of the things we can do in our businesses is create Climate Action Teams to support each other— one social form nesting in another. (I will discuss Climate Action Teams in more depth in the next Subseries in this Olympian Fields of Action Series.)
We’ve all got a job to do because we are the hope we’ve been waiting for. We are at work making the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!
If you are new here, check out our Intro Series, and other posts in this Olympian Fields of Action Series. If you like this post, please “like,” comment, and share. And thanks for all you’re doing.