Corporate Responsibility

It is probably no surprise that some of today’s corporations offshore their dirty operations and then claim they are responsible citizens by publishing their standards of operation in this country – without ever validating claims of their offshore suppliers. Here is yet another example: The Truth about Battery Recycling

Please read the article in its entirety to see how the auto industry attempted to create a “green” battery brand and failed. I have been warning the EV industry that they too have a problem with their battery production like the blood diamond issue of years ago. Rare-earth element mining overseas often involves abuse of children and unsafe working conditions. We here in the United States largely turn a blind eye to these tragedies.

Similar problems exist within the United States in the proliferation of chemicals and “ultra-processing” of our food supply. After all, any food that doesn’t spoil in your fridge after a few months (or years) is probably food we shouldn’t be eating. Yes, the noose around the food industry is tightening, but not without a fight. The fact is that our foods are less healthy than most Europeans and the consequences are extremely serious to our health. 

Our food industry has been poisoning Americans for decades in their frenetic attempts to gain “belly share” as they define it. It used to be about marketing. Now it has become about deliberately producing food that is designed to be addictive. Remember the ads for Lays potato chips … bet you can’t eat just one? That was designed into chips then and that is the deliberate design for many other salty snacks.

The Netflix TV Series “Rotten” does an excellent job of uncovering the truth behind much of what we eat these days. It covers what is happening behind the scenes with avocados, garlic, chicken, bottled water, wine, and more. It is tragic and preventable. But it requires international law and enforcement … something the world seems reluctant and/or unable to do.

Electric utilities used to use the regulatory process of least-cost planning to account for factors that might otherwise not be considered in the supply of electricity. That was how they justified energy efficiency and conservation as rightful members of the energy supply portfolio. Otherwise, there was no incentive for a corporation to encourage consumers to use less of its product.

But along came the free market zealots with their claims of lower costs … and the result was predictable. Energy efficiency was no longer justifiable, as it kept costs higher than those of competitors who did not include it in their portfolio.

We attempted to warn the industry about this when we developed the simulation called Deregulation with the tag line “the game you must learn to play when you can no longer play monopoly.” Value-added propositions, like the green battery idea in the referenced article, are hard to make work in open, competitive markets. It requires value/price discipline, which our simulation showed was almost unachievable with three or more competitors.

It seems to me that our planet’s future rests on redefining the corporate responsibility equation so that responsible battery recycling is embedded into the business model. We must get off this treadmill of extractive business models. We owe it to ourselves and the generations to follow us. But are we willing or even able to go back to regulation to control markets?

Not sure how to fix it, but it’s clear we are not on the right path.