Band 6+: Many people say that globalisation and the growing number of multinational companies have a negative effect on the environment. To what extent do you agree or disagree? Use specific reasons and examples to support your position.

In the world of today, mass production and endless capitalistic ventures connected to it have shifted the focus of companies towards enlarging their network internationally, rather than prioritizing product quality. This specific trend in business, In turn, has massively affected global ecology. This essay argues that an increasing number of international companies does in fact affect the environment negatively, mostly due to the large CO2 emissions from flights and less-sustainable power production used in large companies.

The sheer volume of CO2 emissions, which come from private company owned jet flights seem to be the first issue. Large multinational companies require the employees to travel to summits, presentations, business meetings quite often, and while the private jets used for such purposes might be more convenient than flying commercial, they surely aren’t as sustainable. An example of such policy is Google, which has recently faced allegations for using corporate airplanes for the shorter trips, resulting in the CO2 emissions equal to that of a local airline.

While flying commercial might technically solve the issues mentioned before, there’s a more prominent challenge arising and that is toxicity of power-production required to sustain corporate networks. Most of the corporate data is kept on servers, and with such rapid globalization, it is worth considering that these data volumes will constantly grow larger, especially considering the rising trend to incorporate AI in data bases. The power centers used to sustain such technology, are producing heat at a rate which alters natural environment in the area. For instance, the state of Texas, a home to one of the largest power stations in the state, has been experiencing a continuous increase in temperature as well as soil quality decrees due to such massive energy production.

From all points listed above it is quite evident that rapid growth of international companies is tightly connected to the state of global ecology – carbon emissions from repeated flights contribute to air pollution, while data servers rely on massive energy centers, which tend to alter the local climate. While this position does not take into account the advantages of international business networks, it is still important to understand how does expenditure of technology influence world’s ego-systems.