This text is the sibling of another. The paper on the climate conferences from the Megamachine perspective describes what the conferences achieve today and what they do not. Here we set out where the format comes from — the historical moment at which it arose, and the person in whom the turning point became concentrated. Taken together, the two texts give the picture of a configuration that has developed its own logic and has not departed from it since.
The occasion for writing this text is a book that appeared more than three decades ago and that we hold in our hands today: “Kurswechsel — Globale unternehmerische Perspektiven für Entwicklung und Umwelt” by Stephan Schmidheiny, German edition 1992 — in English, “Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment”. The book was presented on 5 June 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It has been translated into fifteen languages. The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership counts it among the fifty most important sustainability works of all time.
It is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. It brought into the world a concept that today turns up in almost every investment decision: eco-efficiency. It founded an institution that today comprises two hundred corporations: the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. It established a procedure that shapes the relationship between business and global environmental policy to this day. And it has not influenced the climate curve — which has risen by seventy-one per cent since then.
The title of the book is a punchline its author cannot have intended. There really was a change of course in 1992. It was not the one Schmidheiny announced. It was a different one.
I. What came before 1992
The environmental and climate movement of the 1970s and 1980s was a movement. The word means something specific here: it was locally rooted, often confrontational, methodically non-cooperative with industry, programmatically critical of growth, organisationally decentralised. It had its roots in the citizens’ protests against nuclear power stations, in the anti-nuclear-weapons movement, in the first ecological farmers’ groups, in the squatter scenes, in the early environmental initiatives of the West German republic against forest dieback. Greenpeace had been founded in 1971 to block nuclear weapons tests off Alaska — through direct action, not negotiation.
The intellectual template of this movement was critical of growth. “The Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome, 1972. “Small is Beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher, 1973. “Limits to Growth” as diagnosis, “conviviality” as counter-concept in Ivan Illich. The movement understood the ecological problem not as an efficiency problem of capitalism but as a structural problem of the industrial mode of production itself. The solution lay not in a better economy but in less economy — in renunciation, shrinkage, local self-sufficiency, cooperatives, exit from the growth society.
This movement was not harmonious. It was internally diverse, internally contentious, often radical, sometimes naive. It had the strength of conflict and the weakness of dispersion. What it did not have, however, was a shared format with industry. Industry was an adversary, not a partner. Whoever sat in the Hambach Forest did not talk to the energy utility. Whoever blockaded nuclear power stations did not negotiate with the nuclear industry. The separation was constitutive.
II. Maurice Strong and the strategic decision
Maurice Strong, born in 1929 in Manitoba, was one of the few grand organisers of global environmental policy. In 1972 he had led the first UN environmental conference in Stockholm — the birth of the UN environment programmes. Twenty years later, in 1990, he was appointed Secretary-General of the second great UN Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED, planned for 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.
Strong faced a problem. Stockholm 1972 had indeed produced the UN Environment Programme, but had achieved little concrete effect on global industrial practice. In the twenty years in between, environmental conditions had deteriorated massively: the ozone hole had been discovered in 1985, acid rain had attacked Europe’s forests, Chernobyl in 1986 had dramatised the risks of nuclear energy, climate change had become an established term. The Brundtland Report of 1987 had introduced the term “sustainable development” — as an attempt to defuse conceptually the tension between development and environmental protection.
Strong’s diagnosis was pragmatic. As long as industry stayed away from the conference — as addressee, not as participant — the resolutions of Rio would share the fate of the Stockholm resolutions: high-flown words without operational implementation. Business had to come to the table. But it had to come to a table at which it sat as a partner, not as the accused. That was the strategic decision from which everything else followed.
In 1990, on the sidelines of a conference in Norway, Strong met a Swiss industrialist who seemed to him suited to building this bridge. Stephan Schmidheiny, then forty-three years old, heir to one of the largest industrial fortunes in Switzerland, had in the 1980s — so his public image read — initiated the withdrawal of his Eternit group from the asbestos business. Strong saw in him an industrialist who had personally carried out an environmental transformation and could therefore represent it credibly. Strong appointed him “Principal Advisor for Business and Industry” for the Earth Summit.
III. Schmidheiny — the figure and the fortune
Stephan Schmidheiny is a figure of a type that has become rare today. He is the heir of an industrial dynasty — since the middle of the nineteenth century the Schmidheiny family built brickworks, later cement works, later the Eternit group — and he has combined this inheritance with a reflectiveness that finds no counterpart in the generation of today’s tech billionaires. He writes books. He founds foundations (AVINA in Latin America). He thinks in generations, not in quarters. He sees himself as a patriarch in the classical sense — as someone who administers a fortune in trust and is responsible for its long-term effect.
At the age of twenty-eight, in 1976, he took over the Swiss Eternit group from his father. Eternit fibre cement, made with an admixture of asbestos fibres, was a central building material of the twentieth century — fireproof, durable, cheap. The health consequences had been scientifically known since the 1960s: asbestosis, lung cancer, mesothelioma. Industry had dealt with this knowledge in different ways. In the late 1970s and in the 1980s Schmidheiny decided to end asbestos processing in his plants. Italy banned asbestos in 1992 — six years after the end of Eternit SpA in Italian hands.
This decision was, measured by the standard of the industry at the time, far-reaching. It was also, measured by what the asbestos dead would have needed, far too late. Both statements are true. In the criminal trials that have been running in Italy since then — since 2001, with verdicts going back and forth — the question being tried is whether Schmidheiny, as majority shareholder in the period from 1976 to 1986, is criminally responsible for the asbestos deaths. The question is legally open. The question of whether thousands of people died of asbestos in Italy’s Eternit plants is not open. Since 2008 Schmidheiny has voluntarily paid compensation — more than two thousand people have accepted the offer, in the high tens of millions.
For our subject, this prehistory is not a scandal apparatus. It is the experimental basis of his later thesis. Schmidheiny believed, with justification, that he had personally carried out an industrial environmental transformation. From this experience he formulated the thesis that made him world-famous: industry can deliver environmental transformation. Whoever has done it himself can show others how. That is the logic by which Strong chose him. It is the logic by which Schmidheiny legitimised himself.
The structural punchline is that the environmental transformation he believed he had carried out had, in one respect, not been carried out: the dead whom asbestos had already produced only fell out of the statistics decades later — mesothelioma has a latency of twenty to fifty years. What Schmidheiny could read off his Eternit experience as a success was a success whose price only fell due when the book was already a classic. The model of the success report — industry carries out its transformation and the consequences become visible only decades later — is precisely the model that was transferred to the climate debate.
IV. Changing Course — the book and the doctrine
Schmidheiny founded the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) in 1991, after travelling the world for a year to win about fifty CEOs of large corporations for the work. Chevron, DuPont, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Shell, Volkswagen were among them — almost all the major industries of the Western world. The BCSD met for the first time in 1991 in The Hague. Out of this work came “Changing Course”, presented on 5 June 1992 in Rio.
The central concept of the book is “eco-efficiency”. The thesis: economic growth and environmental protection are not opposites. More than that: efficiency gains in industrial production can serve both at the same time — companies, because they lower costs, and the environment, because they save resources. What long appeared as a conflict between profit and planet is in reality a conflict between inefficient and efficient capitalism. Efficient capitalism solves the problem.
This thesis is, philosophically considered, a turning point. It turns a structural question (Is capitalist accumulation compatible with ecological stability?) into an optimisation question (How can capitalist accumulation become more efficient?). With that, the strategic possibility of questioning capitalist accumulation as such disappears from view. It is replaced by a question that stays within the logic of accumulation. The movement of the 1970s had asked the first question. Schmidheiny’s doctrine replaces it with the second.
The attraction of this turn is immense. It allows everyone to stay where they are. No one has to give up power, surrender profit, vacate a position. The market itself becomes the solution. Corporations become partners, not adversaries. The environmental movement becomes a stakeholder, not opposition. Politics becomes mediator, not referee. Everyone benefits — and the climate benefits too, through the magic of eco-efficiency.
It cannot be denied that this doctrine has produced real effects in the decades since. Energy intensity per dollar of GDP has fallen. Efficiency gains in industry are real. The cost curve of renewable energies is impressive. Anyone who reads eco-efficiency merely as ideology will underestimate its operational effects. But measured against the claim to stabilise the climate, the balance is unambiguous: global emissions have risen by seventy-one per cent since 1992. Whatever efficiency gains were produced could not compensate for absolute growth. That is the Jevons effect on a global scale: whoever increases efficiency without limiting consumption increases consumption in sum.
V. The professionalisation of the movement
What took place after 1992 is the actual historical shift this text is about. In 1995 the BCSD became the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The annual climate conferences — beginning with Berlin in 1995 — became a permanent institution. A whole profession arose: climate diplomacy as a career, sustainability consulting as a branch of business, ESG reporting obligations as a compliance requirement, sustainability degree courses at the universities. Corporations set up sustainability departments, with a Chief Sustainability Officer, with annual sustainability reports, with their own conference travel budgets.
In parallel, the NGOs professionalised. Greenpeace, which had begun in 1971 with three activists in a fishing boat, became a global organisation with hundreds of millions in donations, a personnel department, a marketing budget, observer status at the UN. WWF went from an animal protection foundation to a large organisation that cultivates corporate partnerships with Coca-Cola, IKEA and other large corporations. What would have seemed betrayal to one generation — the NGO in a suit, at the sponsorship dinner with the energy utility — became a matter of course for the next.
The old adversaries became “stakeholders”. Industry, NGOs, politics, science, media — all sat at the same table, all had the same status, all shared the same vocabulary apparatus. Whoever did not master the vocabulary apparatus stayed outside. Whoever mastered it was in. What happened inside was negotiation. What remained outside became invisible.
The grassroots movement of the 1970s and 1980s did not dissolve. It shifted into niches — the eco-villages, the communes, the permaculture projects, the radical-left climate justice movement of the 2010s. But from 1992 onwards the main stage of the climate struggle no longer belonged to it. The main stage was the UN conference, the WBCSD forum, the Davos panel, sustainability reporting. The movement was at a table at which it sat as an equal stakeholder and at which its structural questions could no longer be asked.
VI. The balance after more than three decades
In 1992 global CO₂ emissions stood at about twenty-two gigatonnes. Today, in 2026, they stand at about thirty-seven. In 1992 the atmosphere contained about 356 ppm. Today 425 ppm. Global mean temperature has risen by about 0.9 degrees Celsius. In this time there have been thirty-one UN climate conferences. “Kyoto” happened, “Paris” happened, “Glasgow” happened, “Belém” happened. The sustainability industry has grown to hundreds of billions of dollars. The ESG complex today steers investment decisions running into many trillions. And the curve keeps going up.
An accounting of the thirty years that does not gloss over anything: measured against its own claim, the 1992 doctrine of changing course has not been fulfilled. It has produced real effects — many of them positive — but has not solved the main problem. Structurally, it could not solve it, because it did not ask the growth question. As long as growth outpaces efficiency gains, the efficiency gains are ineffective for the climate. That is an arithmetical problem, not a moral one.
VII. What this reveals about the Megamachine
We come to the actual structural observation of this text. It is not the suspicion that Schmidheiny or Strong or the fifty CEOs of the BCSD had evil intentions. They had none. They wanted to solve the global environmental crisis. Strong had devoted his life to this task. Schmidheiny invested his own fortune and his reputation in the project. The NGOs that joined later did so out of the conviction that participation in the process could achieve more than opposition. Everyone wanted the best.
The Megamachine does not work with villains. It works with good intentions. What it produces are results nobody wants — but it produces them reliably, because its structure gives the good intentions a particular form. This form is called professionalisation. This form is called stakeholder dialogue. This form is called eco-efficiency. This form is called the annual conference with a final document. This form is called integration instead of conflict.
The genius of the Megamachine logic does not lie in crushing resistance. It lies in absorbing resistance. It turns the adversary into a stakeholder, the activist into a consultant, the movement into a conference. It gives him spaces, budgets, career opportunities, recognition. What it does not give him is the ability to question the system as such — for that ability stems from the outside position, and the outside position is given up on joining.
Schmidheiny is not the architect of this logic. He is its operational executor in the climate context. The logic itself is older and larger than any person. But he staged it so convincingly for the climate question that it has determined the playing field ever since. That is the “change of course” that actually took place: not capitalism’s change of course towards sustainability, but the environmental movement’s change of course from the outside position into the stakeholder role.
The Megamachine does not defeat its critics. It integrates them. What remains after integration is a form in which the original critique can no longer be voiced. The movement becomes an event. The event becomes an industry. The industry produces conferences, reports, posts, careers — and at the end of the year still the same climate curve.
VIII. Coda — the industrialist and his situation
There remains the question of Stephan Schmidheiny the man. We know little about his inner movements. We know that he is seventy-nine years old today, that over the last twenty years he has been prosecuted in several Italian criminal proceedings, and that he has publicly described himself as the “scapegoat” of a “failed state”. We know that he has paid compensation to two thousand people without being under any final legal obligation to do so. We know that he continues to publish books, continues to advocate the doctrine of eco-efficiency, continues to take part in the conferences. What he privately thinks when he looks at the global emissions curve, we do not know.
It is possible that he rightly sees himself as someone who tried his best and achieved a great deal that is concrete — eco-efficiency, ESG frameworks, a living WBCSD, loss-and-damage funds, the Paris Agreement. Much of this would have come about with greater difficulty without him. It is also possible that he privately suspects the doctrine has failed without being able to admit it publicly — for public admission would dissolve his life’s work. It is also possible that he does not see the failure, because the concepts in which he thinks do not make the failure visible as failure.
These speculations are not decisive. What is decisive: Schmidheiny is not an exception but a type. His type was the patriarch of the old school, who thinks in generations, who understands his inheritance as responsibility, who writes books, who founds foundations, who keeps the welfare of his employees in view. This type is largely extinct today. The billionaires of the twenty-first century — Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Andreessen — are a different type. They do not write books about sustainable development; they buy companies and political influence. They do not think in generations but in disruption cycles. They do not leave foundations for Latin America behind, but platforms for their own ideologies.
If Schmidheiny is a tragedy, then not the personal tragedy of a man who wanted the best and brought about the wrong thing. Rather, the structural tragedy of a configuration in which the best is no longer enough. That is the observation we take away from the book in our hands. It is not a reproach to Schmidheiny. It is a diagnosis of the system in which someone like Schmidheiny was the best this system could produce — and in which even the best could not change the climate curve.