122: Tom Lyon. We’re going backwards on corporate environmentalism

Professor Tom Lyon has been studying corporate environmentalism for decades, and he thinks that, unambiguously, we’re going backwards.   The blast of greenwashing over the past five to seven years was the result of the tremendous incentives and pressures on companies to respond to ESG investing.  Now that the world has awakened to the fact that very few companies are pure-play environmentalism, what’s now vividly clear is that we need better regulations and public policy to resolve marketfailures in pollution, R&D, and experimentation.   The biggest issue is that the barriers to accomplishing this require political reform particularly in the US, particularly around the role of money in elections and lobbying.