Eight years ago, the world’s largest sports apparel brand made a bold commitment. Nike was embarking on what it called a moonshot: doubling its business while halving its impact on the warming planet.
To get there, then-CEO Mark Parker said the Oregon-based company’s innovations in environmental sustainability would become a “powerful engine for growth,” a catalyst capable of changing industries. The company’s chief sustainability officer at the time, Hannah Jones, said achieving the goal would take “innovation on a scale we’ve never seen before.”
Nike’s Sustainable Innovation team embodied the commitment. It looked for environmentally friendly new materials, like leather made from kelp and foams made from plants, that could replace some of the hundreds of millions of pounds of rubber, leather and cotton used in traditional Nike products. It assisted in testing and refining the foam in the new Pegasus 41 that Nike says cut the carbon footprint of the shoe’s midsole by at least 43%.
So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.
I can confidently say that every single corporate initiative like this always eventually reveals itself as just a feel-good public relations veneer designed to dress up business as usual. Even if some of the individuals working on these things believe they are accomplishing something, the organization never, ever really means it. Purely capitalist systems simply cannot and will never be able to organize meaningfully around goals that require long-term planning. Those systems are fundamentally oriented toward goals that span quarters, maybe occasionally years, but nothing longer. The only chance society has for meaningfully planning around climate issues is through government. Until people assert themselves (via governments) as a check on those corporate systems, we will continue to suffer through an ever-degenerating dystopia dressed up by glossy corporate lies like the ones Nike marketed for years.