The world’s largest companies said that cleaning up the environment is good for business. If they live up to the promises they’ve made to slow climate change, together they could reduce emissions equal to that of Germany.
Together, businesses are stepping up to clean up the mess that it helped create. Compared to before, the best interests of many businesses and those of the planet are aligned.
“We’ve gone from saying ‘it would be nice to do, but it would cost us,’ to saying ‘if we don’t do it, we won’t be able to grow, we won’t be able to have tomorrow’s economy,’
To prevent catastrophic climate change will require creating entire new industries to remove carbon from the air as well as the overhaul of the vast energy infrastructure that has been built over more than a century.
Corporations that have historically been complicit in the world’s climate problem, but, more recently, there has been a change in the way business leaders talk about climate change.
What companies are doing
With trillions of dollars at stake, corporations are forging ahead to create sustainable businesses. They are lowering their carbon footprints and overhaul their supply chains in a race against rising seas and temperatures. Others, like Climeworks is working to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and use or store it.
From Apple to Walmart, from IKEA to Google, dozens of firms have embraced renewable energy. UPS is shifting towards electric vehicles. Costco has installed solar systems on top of 100 of its warehouses, and some locations use solar power in parking lots. Google offsets all of its office and data center electricity by adding renewable energy to the grid.
Consumer demand and employee expectations are driving the investments. In many cases, companies are finding that their own customers and employees prefer to buy and work at firms that are responsible to climate issues. And thanks to the falling prices of renewable energy, it can be cheaper to be climate-friendly than not.
[via Anchorage Daily News]
