Business Insight Zone

Just a quick-and-dirty review of some interesting developments:

West goes wild in battle over greenhouse gas emissions

Following California’s lead in efforts to fight global warming, six Western states and two Canadian provinces pledged Wednesday to work together to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The coalition formed six months ago when the governors of Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington created the Western Climate Initiative partnership to reduce carbon emissions. Since then, Utah and Canadian provinces Manitoba and British Columbia have joined the effort.

The governments agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The goal is similar to California’s standard set by last year’s landmark legislation AB32, which requires the state to cut its emissions 25 percent by 2020. [...]

“Today’s action sends another strong message to the federal government … (that) at the absence of federal action, states and provinces are not waiting and will be taking action,” [California environmental secretary Linda] Adams said.

As the article says, the initiative “could affect every business sector.” Many state laws or regional compacts don’t have the clout to move markets — but the combination of this many states and provinces could have a significant impact. More evidence of the growing prevalence — if not yet the efficacy — of state policies:

More states harness power of renewable energy.

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The world’s top maker of wind turbines, Vestas Wind Systems, posted strong profits this week. The Danish company is well situated to take advantage of Denmark’s strong wind market (the country derives more than 20% of its energy from wind), but also strong demand in other European countries and growing markets elsewhere — including in US states like Texas.

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IBM already had a jumbo IT consulting arm before it bought PwC Consulting from PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2002; now the unit is so big that you can pretty much just assume that, if it exists in the business world, IBM can probably offer specialized consulting for it. Case in point: carbon consulting.

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Finally, I wanted to link to this Newsweek cover story from a couple of weeks back.

The Truth about Denial

There’s a direct business connection because the article addresses — among many other topics — Exxon Mobil’s sponsorship of institutions that deny the threats, or the severity of the threats, of global warming. (The oil giant has now abated that support, apparently.) But setting aside the direct statements in the article, it’s worth noting that . . . Newsweek ran a cover story rebutting climate-change deniers.

Say what you like about the supposed bias of the mainstream media, but magazines with circulations as high as Newsweek’s must appeal to very broad swaths of the population — across a spectrum of political views — if they are to be successful. The Newsweek cover story is one of many signals indicating that, if we haven’t reached it already, we are reaching the point where acknowledgement of climate change and the immediacy of its threats becomes the widely-held mainstream position. Denial, it seems, will likely become the fringe view of the future. The ramifications of this for companies — whether oil producers, consumer goods makers, or anything in between — are immense.

Category: Green & Clean