Sustainability Industry: Profiting from Crisis

How ESG and Green Transformation Sustain the System They Claim to Fix! What If the System Doesn’t Want to Be Fixed?

The sustainability industry is growing faster than the crisis it claims to solve.
As ecological breakdown deepens, so does the market built around managing it.

This raises an uncomfortable question: What if the system is not designed to eliminate the problem—but to sustain it?

French philosopher Michel Serres, in his 1980 book Le Parasite, advances an unsettling claim. The parasite is not an external anomaly infiltrating a system. Instead, it is a constitutive element of the system itself.

Serres layers three meanings of the word “parasite.” These include biological organism, social freeloader, and communication noise. This layering reveals a disturbing pattern. Beneath every orderly relationship lies an asymmetrical chain of extraction. The parasite does not destroy its host. It transforms it—often in its own favor.

So what does this have to do with the sustainability industry?

An Economy That Grows as the Crisis Deepens

The global ESG consulting market has surpassed $40 billion, with projections pointing toward $80 billion by 2030. The inclusion of carbon markets, certification schemes, ESG data providers, and reporting software creates an industry valued at hundreds of billions.

But what fuels this industry? Unsustainability itself.

The deeper the ecological crisis, the larger the market becomes. If emissions were to decline, biodiversity loss stopped, and water stress decreased, the industry’s very raison d’être would shrink. It would also fundamentally transform.

This does not require bad intentions.

Thinkers like Ivan Illich analyzed the “problem-generating” nature of modern institutions. He argued that institutions often begin by solving problems. However, they end up reproducing those problems.

The sustainability industry operates in a similar way. By translating unsustainability into something measurable, manageable, and monitorable, it sustains itself. This system is not designed to eliminate the problem entirely, but to render it governable.

This is not an individual moral failure. It is structural.

Everyone within the system—myself included—may genuinely want better outcomes. But the system does not reward outcomes. It rewards processes.

More Data, Less Meaning: When Sustainability Becomes Noise

The third meaning of Serres’ parasite is communication noise.

From information theory, we know—thanks to Claude Shannon—that when a message exceeds the capacity of a channel, it stops carrying information. When a message goes beyond the channel’s limits, it becomes noise. Instead, it becomes noise.

This is precisely what the sustainability industry is producing.

The volume of sustainability data generated by the average public company today is exponentially higher than a decade ago. Frameworks have multiplied: GRI, TCFD, CSRD, CDP…

More data, however, has not led to better decisions.

On the contrary, it has often legitimized inaction. “We don’t yet have enough data” has become the most refined form of postponement.

The results are visible: more reporting, more frameworks, a larger industry—yet global emissions continue to break records.

Correlation is not causation. The industry’s growth parallels the persistence of the problem. We must consider that expansion aligns not with resolution. It aligns with the chronicization of the crisis.

Complexity as Strategy: Who Benefits from ESG Systems?

The complexity of frameworks is not a law of nature. It is a design choice.

Consider the technical intricacies of CBAM, the double materiality of CSRD, or the screening criteria of EU taxonomy. Each serves a legitimate purpose. But is this level of complexity necessary?

Or does the presence of industry actors—consultants, rating agencies, software providers, certification bodies—within standard-setting processes structurally preserve that complexity?

The case of Türkiye makes this tangible. With CBAM, exporters face significant compliance pressure. Yet most companies are not building internal capacity; they are outsourcing it. Knowledge is not transferred—it is rented. When the service provider leaves, institutional memory disappears.

This is not capacity building. It is dependency building. And the industry has structural incentives to maintain that dependency.

Conclusion: Time for Intellectual Honesty

This article, too, is part of the industry. Writing about sustainability contributes to its noise.

Yet acknowledging this is not resignation. It is a try to start from a more honest position.

Perhaps what we need is not more data, but less—yet more meaningful data.
Not more frameworks, but fewer—yet more accessible ones.
Not a larger industry, but a smaller—yet more effective one.

We must confront this honestly. Until then, the sustainability industry will remain indistinguishable from Serres’ parasite.

It claims to transform its host but ultimately feeds on it.