The sustainability profession is having a crisis of conscience. After a decade of net-zero pledges, ESG frameworks, and annual sustainability reports, the uncomfortable question is no longer whether companies are doing something – it’s whether all that something adds up to anything. A recent conversation between two sustainability professionals, captured in a piece by the consultancy Trellis, frames the dilemma sharply: are practitioners making incremental changes inside a shareholder-primacy system that isn’t going to fundamentally shift on any timeline that matters, while the actual root causes sit entirely outside their job descriptions?
This question matters now because the gap between corporate climate ambition and physical reality is widening. Global emissions are still rising, even as thousands of companies publish net-zero roadmaps. The professionals tasked with closing that gap are increasingly asking whether their tools – carbon accounting, supply chain audits, efficiency programs – are fit for a problem that is fundamentally structural. The answer, emerging from both the Trellis conversation and the broader record of the energy transition, is more nuanced than either “incrementalism is futile” or “just keep going” would suggest.
The random acts of greenness problem
The Trellis piece identifies what it calls the “random acts of greenness” problem: sustainability work scattered across product redesign, supply chain tweaks, employee engagement, and philanthropy, without a coherent theory of how these pieces combine into transformation. Most corporate sustainability activity sits in the middle of a bell curve – between “do no harm” (compliance, efficiency, risk management) and “transform the system” (business model reinvention, policy advocacy, exit from fossil assets).
The structural constraint is shareholder primacy. Quarterly earnings cycles, activist investors, and fiduciary duty doctrine all push corporate decision-making toward short-term optimization. A sustainability director can build a compelling five-year plan, but if it doesn’t clear the hurdle of next quarter’s margins, it gets diluted. This is not a failure of individual will; it is a design feature of the system in which most sustainability professionals operate.
The psychological toll is real. The Trellis conversation invokes Sisyphus – the sense of pushing a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back. When the boulder is the global energy system and the hill is a 40-year decarbonization curve, the daily work of carbon accounting can feel absurdly small. That feeling is not a sign of inadequacy; it is an accurate perception of the gap between individual agency and systemic scale.
The narrative identity counterweight
The Trellis piece offers a psychological framework drawn from consultant Solitaire Townsend: narrative identity, or treating the current moment as the “cave” stage of a hero’s journey. The cave is the period of struggle, doubt, and unglamorous preparation before the transformation. Townsend’s point is blunt: sustainability professionals will work their entire careers for a world they do not get to live in. She draws the analogy to suffragettes who never voted and civil rights leaders who did not live to see a Black president.
The counter-argument, raised in the same conversation, is that the hero’s journey is an individualistic frame for a collective problem. Climate change is not defeated by one heroic actor; it is defeated by thousands of unglamorous decisions across millions of organizations. The synthesis is that both frames are needed. The individual frame provides psychological resilience – the ability to keep doing meticulous, unglamorous work without external validation. The collective frame provides strategic direction – the understanding that each incremental action only matters if it connects to a larger arc of change.
The renewable energy proof case
The strongest evidence that incrementalism can produce transformation is the renewable energy record itself. Townsend grew up in coal-heated government housing in the UK; that country now goes stretches without burning coal for electricity. This did not happen through a single transformational moment. It happened through decades of incremental policy, technology improvement, and market adoption that compounded into systemic change.
The cost curves tell the story. Solar photovoltaic module prices have fallen by roughly 90 percent over the past decade and a half – a cumulative result of thousands of incremental manufacturing improvements, not one breakthrough. Wind and solar are now the cheapest new sources of electricity in most of the world, a fact that has fundamentally altered the economics of energy investment. Renewable sources now account for roughly 30 percent of global electricity generation, up from around 20 percent a decade ago. None of these milestones made headlines as a singular event, but their compounding effect has been transformative.
The lesson is that incrementalism produces transformation when it follows a consistent direction over a long enough period. The direction was set by policy (feed-in tariffs, renewable portfolio standards, carbon pricing in some jurisdictions), amplified by technology learning curves, and reinforced by market dynamics. Individual corporate solar installations and procurement deals looked like “random acts of greenness” in the early 2000s; they now constitute a self-reinforcing economic logic that no major utility can ignore.
When incrementalism tips into systemic change
The renewable energy record suggests three conditions under which incremental work accumulates into structural change. First, technology cost curves: when incremental improvements make the clean option cheaper, adoption becomes self-reinforcing – each deployment drives further cost reductions, which drives further deployment. Second, policy feedback loops: when early corporate action demonstrates feasibility, it lowers the political cost of regulation. Companies that have already cut emissions are less likely to fight carbon policy than those that have not. Third, norm cascades: when enough companies adopt a practice, it becomes the baseline expectation – what was once a differentiator becomes table stakes.
The danger is incrementalism without direction. The difference between a transition and greenwashing is whether incremental actions are building toward a structural endpoint or merely deferring harder choices. Carbon offsets that do not represent real reductions, efficiency gains that are outpaced by growth, and net-zero pledges without capital expenditure plans all qualify as incrementalism that delays rather than advances. The Trellis conversation’s framing of “random acts of greenness” is a warning precisely because it describes activity without a theory of change.
There is also a real risk that incrementalism inside the existing system absorbs the energy that could go toward changing the system. If every talented sustainability professional is occupied with supply chain audits, who is advocating for the carbon pricing, building codes, and fossil fuel phase-out timelines that would actually bend the emissions curve? The answer, in practice, is that both are needed – but the allocation of effort matters, and the current allocation is heavily weighted toward the incremental end.
Who this affects
- Chief sustainability officers: The mandate now includes articulating a theory of change that connects your portfolio to systemic outcomes. If you cannot explain how your efficiency programs, supplier engagements, and product redesigns combine into a structural shift, you are doing random acts of greenness – and you should expect the question in the next board meeting.
- Policy analysts and advocates: The renewable energy record shows that corporate action creates political space for regulation. Documenting which corporate commitments are real and which are performative is not just accountability work; it is the raw material for policy feedback loops that make stronger regulation politically viable.
- Institutional investors: The distinction between incrementalism that builds toward transformation and incrementalism that delays it is now an investment signal. Companies with credible transition plans – capital expenditure aligned with emissions targets, board-level accountability, exit timelines from high-carbon assets – are structurally different from companies with pledges and no plans.
- NGOs and civil society: External pressure is what keeps incrementalism honest. The norm cascades that turned corporate climate action from fringe to mainstream were driven by campaigns, litigation, and public scrutiny. That role does not disappear as companies adopt climate targets; it shifts to verifying whether the targets are real.
What to watch next
- The pledge-performance gap: Track whether the aggregate emissions of companies with net-zero commitments are actually declining. The gap between commitment and outcome is the single clearest indicator of whether incrementalism is building toward transformation or deferring it.
- Transition plan disclosure requirements: Regulators in the EU and elsewhere are moving toward mandatory transition plans. If these requirements force companies to articulate a theory of change – including capital expenditure alignment and exit timelines – they will separate directed incrementalism from random acts of greenness.
- Clean energy investment relative to fossil fuel investment: Global energy investment is running at roughly $3 trillion annually, with clean energy taking a growing share. The crossing point – where clean investment exceeds fossil investment by a wide margin – will be the structural signal that incrementalism has tipped into systemic change.
- Policy milestones that only become possible after corporate action: Watch for carbon pricing expansions, fossil fuel phase-out dates, and building efficiency standards that would have been politically impossible a decade ago. Their arrival is the measure of whether corporate incrementalism created the enabling conditions for systemic policy.
Bottom line
The question is not whether incrementalism is enough – it is whether incrementalism is directed. The renewable energy record demonstrates that sustained incremental progress in a consistent direction can produce transformation on a global scale. But that direction must be explicit, and the professionals driving it must be honest about what their work does and does not accomplish. The psychological framework matters as much as the technical one: working for a world you will not live to see is not a failure of the sustainability profession. It is the job description.
Read the full report at Trellis
Note: facts and figures attributed above to GreenBiz reflect that outlet's original reporting. Broader context, cross-sector connections, and forward-looking scenarios reflect independent analysis by our editorial team.
About this article: Drafted by Energy Ai with AI-assisted research and writing based on public reporting, then reviewed under our editorial process before publication.
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