A Roadmap for Santa Marta

January 24, 2026

Roughly a century and a half ago a quiet revolution took place in the laws governing corporations. The several states of America, eager to attract new business, entered into a competition to attract corporate formations. They assured investors that they might form companies within their borders, and that the law would require of their directors but one thing only: that they pursue the company’s “best interests.” Every former idea—that a corporation owed a duty to the public, or must avoid causing it severe harm—was cast aside.

This alteration struck at the moral foundation of economic life. It declared that the sole purpose of a corporation was money—making it and defending it—and that beyond obedience to the letter of the law companies owed nothing to society. Corporate immorality was no longer restrained; it was rebranded as lawful, justifiable and expected. Injury to the many was permitted so long as it generated company profits and wasn’t illegal.

From that moment forward, corporations operated without conscience. They were endowed with great power but without the moral obligations necessary to balance it. Concern for the environment, human rights, public health and safety, the dignity of employees, and the wellbeing of communities where they operated was no longer required.

What began in America did not remain there. Other nations followed, and the consequence was global. Business, whose guiding star was now the pursuit of private gain, was set on a permanent collision course with government, whose job was to protect the public interest.

This conflict was inevitable.  Sooner or later, business was bound to challenge government for supremacy. Many have now come to believe businessmen should run government. Others, that business is invulnerable. Yet, neither is true. 

Business leaders are unelected and not responsible to the voters.  Most have no experience serving the public interest. They can’t govern.  Further, the law our ancestors changed 150 years ago, can be changed back to respond to current circumstances.

The world of the nineteenth century was small compared to our own. Corporations were smaller, their reach limited, their tools modest. Today they are multinational, their technologies powerful, and in many cases they are capable of extraordinary destruction. Worse still, they have learned how to delay, dilute, or defeat laws that would restrain them. The fox is not just in the henhouse. It writes the rules under which they are guarded.

It was entirely predictable that corporations freed of the obligations of citizenship would, in time, seek supremacy. Beginning in the late 20^th century, they began to capture politics by persuading the public that the economy’s growth could solve every problem; that the pie need only grow large enough and all would be satisfied. Regulation was portrayed as an obstacle to this result, and government cautioned to stand aside.

We have now reached the end of that road. When businessmen govern in the interest of business, government becomes its servant. Greed flourishes where conscience is absent, and a system built to reward self-interest will inevitably promote those least troubled by the harm they cause.

The consequences of our ancestors’ miscalculation are now apparent. The decision to relieve corporations of responsibility to the public has produced dangers so great that they threaten life on Earth. The climate crisis has taken over from nuclear war as the gravest threat human beings have ever faced. The warming of the Earth, driven overwhelmingly by corporate emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), is destabilising the systems that sustain life itself. Over the last 30 years the threat has become more and more dire.

The corporations most responsible for the crisis refuse to alter their behaviour because it would cost them money. Common sense tells them such action would violate their duty to act in the company’s “best interests.” Thus severe, known, and irreversible harm continues—not by accident, but by design. The roots of this disaster lie in the fateful decision made generations ago to value individual company profit above the common good.

When business rules government, it rules the people as well. This condition is neither just nor sustainable. The error that freed corporations from responsibility to society must now be undone. No reform is more urgent.

For thirty years the world has gathered at U.N. Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to address climate change, and for three decades emissions and global temperatures have risen. The failure of the COPs is no mystery. Their response has been all tactics and no strategy.  Delegates from every country brought their separate tactics to end the emissions, but couldn’t meld them into an effective strategy.  In the words of Sun Tzu in the Art of War, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest road to victory. Tactics without strategy is noise before defeat.” 

The First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels is our next best chance to come up with an effective strategy or, as the call for the conference suggests, a roadmap. It should learn from the mistakes of the previous COPs without condemning the participants. The fundamental flaw in the corporate system was not obvious and understandably went unnoticed and unaddressed.

Any strategy to escape the climate crisis, must first correct the mistake that made it possible. Only then can a just and lasting solution be achieved.  The duty of directors to “act in the best interests of their company” must be amended to add the words “WITHOUT CAUSING SEVERE HARM TO THE ENVIRONMENT.”