In fairness, I’ve got friends in my Big Evil Oil Company’s Environmental Sustainability and Health department, and a lot of what they do is researching real useful methods for improving the local ecology (after we’ve wrecked it with construction and extraction).

The caveat, of course, is that they do the work with an eye towards profitability.

As a case in point, a recent project involved cutting the light pollution at remote facilities by upgrading all the lighting fixtures on site. This drastically reduced the ambient light that the site produced. And, as a consequence, it reduced the cost of lighting the facility (because ambient light is an expensive waste product) while also reducing the accident rate (drivers entering and exiting the site didn’t have their night vision wrecked as they came and went).

They also ran a project to detect methane leaks along the pipeline arteries. This reduced the ambient methane that the pipelines released, which was good for the environment as a whole and also good because we’re in the business of selling methane rather than leaking it. The cost of the surveillance and repairs was superseded several times over by the value of the methane we retained.

The flip side of this is how anything seen as cost-positive (or labor intensive and cost-neutral) tends to be ignored.

Not even that, I googled it it’s the “Ethics and Compliance” department. It’s just a legal fig leaf. There isn’t even the pretense. Or it’s just a honeypot to fire everyone who has moral qualms.