The IPCC report on climate change published last month told us — in no uncertain terms — that ‘under 1.5 to stay alive’ should be the new world mantra. The disastrous effects of going even 0.5 degrees above this, as previously agreed at the Paris Climate Summit, would be to lose all the world’s coral, to see a third of the planet experience extreme heat waves and, crucially, sea levels to rise causing mass migration from affected areas. So what are the implications of trying to stay under the 1.5 limit? Seemingly nothing less than an out and out challenge to global growth as we understand it.

A healthy economy is currently understood as one which provides 3 per cent gross domestic product growth year on year. Global industries are geared toward creating more and more things which we buy to sustain this growth. But given that we live on a finite planet, it seems that sustaining an infinite cycle of growth just doesn’t add up.

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s slogan for his consumerist society was ‘ending is better than mending’, a mantra that we internalised in a constant quest to stimulate growth and raise living standards. So what are our options? Is there an environmental ‘third way’ between anarcho-primitivism and the sixth global mass extinction? Many companies have made steps towards ‘greening’ themselves, but whether this is to fit with the zeitgeist or is a genuine attempt to make an effort toward climate change is contestable.

To get a sense, I looked at three of the UK’s largest companies and whether their environmental policy could work within the 1.5-degree restriction.

The UK’s largest company is British Petroleum. In terms of greenwashing, it’s a hard sell when ‘petroleum’ is literally in the name. BP has done an admirable job, though. Its proud little letters emerge from a cluster of leaves to create a logo that resembles a corporate cabbage patch kid. BP aims to have zero net growth emissions by 2025 — what a radical, selfless change from a company whose very lifeblood is oil! A little look into how the company plans to make itself obsolete shows that this noble aim will be achieved through carbon offsetting, or calculating emissions costs and investing the same amount of money in planting trees, financing ecological infrastructure, or buying carbon emissions credits from other countries. This practice has been compared to the sale of indulgences in the Catholic church; you can assuage your guilt by buying your own redemption. Fundamentally, you are still creating more carbon, buying the ability to do so doesn’t change this fact.

BAE Systems, which is responsible for 0.6 per cent of UK GDP and 0.9 per cent of UK exports, has a ‘Corporate and Environmental Responsibility’ section of its website, with images of solar panels, greenery and a promise of “improving energy efficiency and decarbonising our energy supply to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” But if you read the fine print, there’s a pretty major caveat: “The nature of our business, with large-scale projects and fluctuations in orders, makes it challenging to set a global emissions reduction goal.” Without the ability to set a target to stick to, very little can be achieved in terms of actual ecological improvement. This seems to be a case of out and out ‘greenwashing’.

What then of one of the UK’s largest food suppliers; McDonald’s? The company’s recent move toward green marketing has made its brand in the UK almost unrecognisable to its US counterpart. Gone are the yellow and scarlet in place of bucolic, dawn-lit scenes of happy ‘British bred beef,’ rainforest alliance coffee and a twee, whistling soundtrack. McDonald’s has made changes, according to its website; its “entire UK delivery fleet runs on biodiesel” with “almost half of that biodiesel coming from used cooking oil.” Moreover, the company aims to be “zero waste sent to landfill by 2020” and to have all the energy needed to run restaurants come from renewable wind and solar power. When you consider how many restaurants there are in the UK, these measures add up to making a significant difference. But a business model based around selling meat will never be a sustainable one. According to the UN’s food and agriculture organisation report, animal agriculture is responsible for 18 per cent of emissions of carbon dioxide — more than the combined exhausts from all transportation. Feeding animals food that we could eat ourselves is never going to be sustainable. So unless McDonald’s turns into a vegan restaurant in the near future, or starts pioneering electric food production, there is no sustainable model. That said, the implementation of policy changes from this shibboleth of mass consumption does show a shift in customer demand for more environmentally-minded business.

Some of the measures implemented by these companies are a step in a better direction. But as BAE systems show the ‘nature’ of their business is still inextricably linked to the idea of growth, meaning any limits on carbon production are impossible. The idea of growth has seeped so far into our society that to be anti-growth feels like being anti-progress or anti-good, and indeed there are major economic consequences to shifting away from this model. These exercises in ecological doublethink, which require complicated manipulations of our current system for minor ecological gains, show how hard it is to divorce ourselves from the concept. To truly reconsider growth will take more than tinkering with carbon emissions through offsetting, switching to British beef or maintaining vague targets. It requires changing every aspect of our lives and a solid narrative of what this alternative might look like.

Large company’s movement towards greener policy is an exciting prospect, but given the short timeframe we have to enact such radical change, it is hard to see how we might get there without clear government policy that limits company’s emissions. Such restriction is currently seen as politically unpopular, however, there is a growing awareness of climate issues in the UK. A recent Opinion poll found that 57% of citizens think ‘Britain should set an example for the world by adopting challenging carbon emissions’. With public opinion changing, support for greener policy may mean we needn’t depend on companies reforming themselves, instead, we can work together on creating sustainable stabilization.