Lourenço Bustani & Marcelo Gleiser
- Apple released a film with CEO Tim Cook and Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer to celebrate its progress on environmental issues.
- The film has a number of blind spots, which challenge the integrity of the corporate story, and require us to reexamine its merits.
- In order to be credible moving forward, Apple needs to stop talking about the design of its new products and start reflecting on the design of its business model.
Apple’s recent film, “Mother Nature,” in which the company describes its own progress against a series of sustainability markers, has been heralded as a masterpiece in corporate storytelling. But a closer look reveals an altogether different story. Indeed, the speed and ease with which so many people applaud this film tells us a bit about why there is still so much denial of the climate crisis and delays in radical climate action, despite decades of scientific evidence. Audiences can’t process the cognitive dissonance — how can a company that epitomizes the culture of “take, make, use, lose” against a backdrop of endless growth be the same company that now pats itself on the back for its progress in combating carbon emissions? Audiences are choosing what to believe because it is more comfortable, more reassuring, and less challenging to the relationships they have built over the years with the brand.
We are living through a number of crises at the moment, but one that might not be mentioned enough is the crisis of illusion.
This emerges each time a lack of awareness, or alienation, clashes with real life phenomena such as extreme poverty, heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and pandemics. Illusions convince us that we have nothing to do with the problem in question, preventing us from understanding their root cause. At the same time, illusions can make us think that we are, somehow, part of the solution. They can trick us into thinking we’re running ahead of history when in fact we’re running behind it. These illusions are most commonplace among climate change deniers and delayers but also visible among incrementalists, those who find solace in thinking that something “less bad” or “just a little bit better” is enough to course correct the hazardous path humanity has been on, creating a false sense of progress that ultimately only sets us back.
In practice, however, the nature and scale of efforts to salvage our project of civilization must be tantamount to the forces that are threatening it.
Illusions are made up of blind spots over things that our current state of awareness cannot or does not want to see. Blind spots can be powerful, and can affect anyone. Apple’s film has a number of them, which challenge the integrity of the corporate story, and require us to reexamine its merits.
1. Emissions are not the enemy
A culture of overproduction and overconsumption of goods we don’t need is. Apple epitomizes this self-defeating culture by thriving on planned obsolescence. Its business model, like that of most other technology firms, is premised on its products having a short and finite shelf life, with a company focus on developing new models and new features, with limited to no opportunities for device repair or upgrades. In this way, it relies on repeatedly and artificially resetting consumer “needs” so that it can continue to dip into their pockets year after year.
How can a company that relies on the periodic cannibalization of its products be celebrated for its progress on sustainability?
The climax of this irony in the film sees Apple CEO Tim Cook pushing its contentiously named “carbon-neutral” watches to “Mother Earth.” The drive to sell “stuff” is so ingrained in Apple’s culture that it couldn’t even refrain from doing it in a film that ostensibly seeks to address the consequences of overselling and overconsuming.
So why didn’t a broader critique of excessive consumerism make it into the script, if it’s such an important part of the sustainability story? No doubt it is too inconvenient to admit, and would poke a hole through the company’s business model and profit margins. Some companies are beginning to develop a very different operational model. As consumers, meanwhile, we will continue to be complicit with this hypocrisy until and unless we decide to purge our excesses and start to stand up and argue for the ideal of a collective livelihood that meets the needs of all people within the means of our planet.
2. One of the most telling indicators of the demise of modern civilization is the accelerated widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
According to Oxfam and the World Bank, the richest 1% now own almost half of the world’s wealth, while about half of the world’s population makes do with less than US$7 per day. The prevailing economic system runs on a rigged playing field, which enables and indeed encourages the further accumulation, concentration and enclosing of economic wealth and political power within a tiny elite. As a result, the gaps between the extravagantly rich and the miserably poor compound over time, making it increasingly difficult to reach a steady state where everyone’s basic needs are met. Against this backdrop, brands have a choice about how they project themselves and what kind of a world they aspire to. Apple has chosen prohibitively expensive price points (excluding the bulk of the Global South) and premature obsolescence (fuelling consumption by those who can).
3. Many people want to believe that this type of film helps mainstream the discussion around sustainability.
They claim that levity and humor, combined with high production values, will engage citizens all over the world in a global discussion. This might be the case, if it weren’t for cherry picking and sugar coating data. Good storytelling is unequivocally truthful first and foremost. Aesthetics can never override ethics.
Sanity checking the film against the UK’s Green Claims Code, the film doesn’t pass the test on a number of its criteria. For one, some of its claims are neither clear nor unambiguous. Phrases such as “in the process of” and “phasing out” don’t tell us what we need to know. How far in the process are you? How long before full phase out is actually achieved? When speaking of carbon neutrality, Apple does not consider the manufacturing sites in Asia responsible for 65% of its total emissions. In citing the 300 suppliers that have committed to 100% clean, renewable electricity by 2030, not only do we not know what proportion of its supplier base this represents, but the fossil fuels intensively used to mine metals — from which a considerable part of the footprint actually originates from — are overshadowed. According to the film, Apple’s water usage is down by 63 billion gallons, but it fails to disclose its total water usage or the fact that this reduction is actually an aggregate over the last 10 years. Is this a lot or a little?
Numbers can look big out of context, particularly when they are not compared to baselines, and can create a false sense of progress.
Gaya Herrington, a Club of Rome advisor, calls this toxic optimism, “founded on a few cherry-picked facts taken out of context, untethered to any comprehensive analysis.”
Apple is not alone in this exercise, of course. The ratings and standards used in ESG reporting under the Sustainable Development Goals are similarly not context-based, but detached from environmental thresholds and social foundations in a way that prevents us from assessing whether certain metrics represent a fair allocation of a particular company’s impacts within the carrying capacities of our planetary systems.
4. As depicted in the film “Mother Earth” appears to be in great health.
Truth be told, Mother Earth is most likely on a respirator, liable to go into cardiac arrest at any moment. Here’s why: Mother Earth is composed of nine systems that have held the planet in a stable state for the last ten thousand years. Each of these systems has a quantitative point, called a boundary, past which we risk triggering nonlinear, catastrophic changes to the planet, which directly impact its ability to support all forms of life. We’ve already overshot these boundaries in six of the nine systems. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, forests are becoming savannas, coral reefs are bleaching, biodiversity is disappearing, air is becoming unbreathable, fertilizers are contaminating water, plastic is replacing fish, and the list goes on. The film mentions none of this.
Apple attracts the world’s sharpest minds. The prevailing paradigms for business success taught at the business schools from where executives at Apple and its fellow technology companies graduated are often still rooted in the pursuit of endless growth, with its extractive and degenerative strategies. What would it take for those conditioned minds to break free from the complacency of the current system’s false promises, given the tyranny of short-term shareholder returns that set the terms of business?
When will Apple stop talking about the design of its new products and start reflecting on the design of its business model?
For those willing to give Apple a vote of confidence, 2023 may go down as the year the question above really began to resonate. Over the past year, the company has made significant progress sourcing from recycled material, accounting for two-thirds of all aluminum, nearly three-quarters of all rare earths, and more than 95 percent of all tungsten in Apple products. Moreover, this past September, Apple announced — after years of opposition — that it is finally supporting California Senate Bill 244, the “right to repair” bill, which requires manufacturers to allow customers to fix damaged devices, extending their lifespan. Maybe too little too late for some, but behind these moves there appears to be some degree of recognition that the way it’s done business to date would not withstand the test of time. Perhaps this mea culpa is the missing element in the film’s script. In its absence, the film inevitably comes across to many as a textbook case of how a brand lives an illusion of its role in the world, telling stories about how it’s trying to fix the system that it helped to break.
To read this article in Portuguese, click here.
Lourenço Bustani is a Brazilian entrepreneur, consultant, board member and investor.
Marcelo Gleiser is a physics, philosophy and astronomy professor at Dartmouth College and the 2019 Templeton Prize laureate, an honor he shares with the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the scientist Freeman Dyson.
