Apple Inc.’s 2015 Environmental Responsibility Report doesn’t beat around the bush.
“We don’t want to debate climate change. We want to stop it,” the report says, before spelling out the company’s efforts for reducing its carbon footprint and taking the environment into account in its facilities and products.
“Our environmental commitment starts in the places where we work—from our corporate campuses to our data centers,” the report continued. “Although our facilities now represent only 1 percent of our carbon footprint, they reflect our values, and we want them to act as models for others to follow. This is why we are constantly making our facilities more energy efficient and aggressively investing in renewable energy.”
The report is yet another example of a business speaking out on climate change. As TPM has noted in the past, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has publicly feuded with former members on its stance on climate change.
In leaving the conservative ALEC, groups like Google and Microsoft have loudly griped about the organization’s policies on the environment and climate change.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has even accused ALEC of “literally lying about climate change.”
More recently, ALEC began sending cease and desist letters to liberal advocacy groups focused on green energy and climate change who criticized it. Common Cause got a cease and desist letter but said it wouldn’t comply. The League of Conservation voters got one as well, according to The Washington Post.
While ALEC has said that climate change is a “historical phenomenon” it’s also signaled opposition to moves to fight climate charge.
“Unilateral efforts by the United States or regions within the United States, will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally, and international efforts to decrease emissions have proven politically infeasible and unenforceable,” ALEC said in a cease and desist letter.
By contrast, Apple’s new report says the company is taking carbon emissions into designing and processing products and its facilities.
“We’re always trying to improve the way we conduct our greenhouse gas life cycle analysis,” the report said. “And when our assessments reveal a material, process, or system that’s making a significant negative impact on our carbon footprint, we reexamine how we design that product, process, or facility.”
(H/t: The Verge)
It would help if the big dogs like Apple take the word ‘debate’ out of the climate change equation. There is no longer any debate.
Spell check fail
This is really the right way to deal with issues like this. You don’t have to include the toddler’s opinion on anything when making decisions. Sadly, the GOP, said toddlers, are actually part of the governing process in this country. So sad.
Isn’t that exactly what they did, even in the line TPM pulled as the headline quote?
If there is a legitimate debate about if something exists or not you can’t skip ahead to “stopping” it.
I thin, first, Apple has been very environmentally conscious for the past several years. Al Gore taking a position on its Board of Directors both reflected and spurred that movement towards a lower environmental (not just carbon, but several other rare metals and toxic compounds).
That said, Apple is really not unique here. As the article mentioned, other technology companies in the US have spoken up in similar terms. Generally speaking, large corporations are largely not the problem with regards to climate change. They want to sell products that customers will buy. What does impact those large corporations is an uneven playing field - if Apple spends more to come up with processes and plants which have a lower resource footprint, but they are competing in the marketplace with another company which just takes the cheaper route, and the two products are just as good so far as the consumer can tell, that does damage Apple’s bottom line. The solution for this is not less regulation, but more. Regulations requiring products sold in the US (hoping the rest of the world follows suit) have a certain level of environmental accuities makes for a level playing field - and actually adds a barrier to entry which helps the larger corporations anyway.
The large corporations which are “the enemy” here are those which are inexorably tied to a horrendous resource footprint - those who dig or pump those resources from the ground and have large processing apparatus investments and distribution apparatus investments. They HATE regulation of any sort.
All that said, the place where Apple is immediately relevant here is that it is the only company in the 21st century to have more market capital than any of the dead-dinosaur-mining companies. There’s something to a really big corporation actively standing up counter to those other mega-corps who have long been standing in the way of progress.