Sustainable businesses

Apparently, sustainability has become an teachable issue by one professor in at least one university. It needs to expand. My comment:

This post leaves out the relevant relationship between business and economics: business (in the context of business school) is applied economics. Issues of 'Climate change impacts every resource used by businesses: from agriculture, water, land and energy to workers and the economy' and sustainability are derived from economic principles. The strongest example is economic 'externalities' where economists do not factor the role of environmental services into their models. Thus far, neither business schools nor economists show any ability to evolve their thinking to correspond to the risk of loss of the environmental/ecological services necessary to human life and economies. If economists cannot incorporate sustainability into business, it may be time for other fields of endeavor to incorporate business into sustainability.

One independent reform would be to increase transparency. Consumption drives economic activity. Currently, businesses do not inform consumers of the wage and ecological consequences of goods and services they market; businesses determine the environmental impact of consumption. If consumers know and understand the human and environmental costs of their spending, their consumption decisions would determine the environmental consequences of consumption.