U.S. Corporations Have Been Cleaning Up And Seeking New Technologies For Decades
To hear most environmentalists and their pals in the mainstream media tell it, America’s largest corporations only recently abandoned their “public be damned” ways and embraced the green revolution.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius is a prime example. Normally an astute observer, Ignatius recently began a column with this lead: “The chief executive of America’s biggest corporation did something astonishing this week: He staked his company’s future on its ability to, in his words, ‘define the cutting edge in cleaner power and environmental technology.’” Ignatius was paying tribute to General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who earlier this month, announced his company would double its research spending on cleaner technologies as part of its “Ecoimagination” campaign. Nothing wrong with Ignatius applauding GE’s campaign to become eco-friendly, of course, but one has to wonder where he’s been for the past four decades.
U.S. corporations have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on cleaner technologies and detoxifying hazardous waste sites since the early 1960s. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts enacted by Congress in the 1970s accelerated the spending of course, and within a few years virtually every Fortune 500 company was including an environmental impact statement in its annual reports.
Suggesting that American corporations haven’t been ecologically responsible—as Ignatius seems to—is itself the height of irresponsibility. One can only suppose that the Ignatius salute to GE’s Immelt was focused more on his announcement that GE will reduce its emission of greenhouse gasses by 1 percent by 2012 rather than continue on a path that would lead to a projected 40 percent increase. Whether man-made greenhouse gasses actually cause global warming is a subject of intense debate within the scientific community, and the jury is still out.
Many scientists have faith in the UN computer models which project a worst-case scenario warning that the Earth’s temperatures could increase by 8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. Activist foundations like the Pew Center on Global Climate Change headed by former Clinton Administration official Eileen Claussen are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on campaigns to convince the public and press to accept the UN’s “sky-is-falling” thesis. Their ultimate goal is to persuade Congress to enact dramatic reductions in U.S. energy use—in some cases, up to 35 percent—to voluntarily meet the mandates dictated by the Kyoto treaty on climate change.
But a growing number of realists—including world-class scientists at such leading institutions as MIT, Harvard, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan and UCLA say such draconian actions are premature. They contend that the slight global warming now taking place—about one degree in the last 120 years—is more likely the result of an age-old cycle of warming and cooling on this planet that is linked to the ebb and flow of activity on the sun’s surface.
Even now, the federal government is spending $5-billion a year to study climate change and individual corporations and foundations have funneled additional millions into private/public research partnerships like Stanford University’s Global Climate and Energy Project.
Given the lack of definitive proof on the real causes of global warming and the utter ignorance of how much is occurring, these are prudent, although expensive steps. For companies to spend additional millions to slash greenhouse gas emissions, however, may well be premature.
In GE’s case, however, it may well enhance the bottom line. The giant conglomerate is one of the largest manufacturers of wind turbines so any policy that promotes alternative energy would benefit it. True, wind power is vastly more expensive than conventional energy, but once mandated the cost will be passed on to the public in the form of higher energy bills. The same goes for another GE product—natural gas turbines. As with so many situations where the government initially pays to slip a new technology into the mainstream, the final tab quickly ends up in the hand of taxpayers and consumers.
Pursuing environmental will-o-the-wisps—no matter how much applause it generates from the green community and the press—probably isn’t sensible for most business, who unlike GE, may not be able to nobly profit from a noble pursuit. Before dealing with climate change or any other environmental problem of such magnitude, corporations should adopt a go-slow approach and wait until genuine scientific results are in. They owe that to their employees and their shareholders, and given the likely negative impact of Kyoto-like solutions on the national economy—to every other American as well.
As the great Baltimore iconoclast H. L. Mencken once noted so pungently: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” At this point global warming is a potential problem, but hardly a pressing one. America, despite its pace-setting affluence, has limited resources. We should direct them wisely.
