Big Business Gears Up for Global Warming

[LEROY KNEVIL]

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis backs carbon trading, a plan to regulate
carbon emissions worldwide.
ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva — an early proponent of tough U.S. action on
climate change — is in.
The list goes on: Merrill Lynch, AIG Investments, Barclays, Banco do Brazil,
Mitsubishi UFJ, RBS Group, AXA, ANZ and HSBC.
U.S. and global corporations are joining the global warming fight in record
numbers.
Part of the reason, of course, is anticipation of a political switch in
Washington. Getting ahead of potential regulation is Business School 101.
But the bigger part may well be because that’s what investors want them to
do.
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) — a collaboration of 385 institutional
investors with assets under management of $57 trillion — reports that 60
percent of the investors it queried readily identified those companies in
their portfolios that failed to provide emissions data.
The investors then used this information to take the delinquent companies to
task about taking measures to prevent further climate change.
"The momentum behind CDP represents the start of a unified global business
response to climate change,” CDP CEO Paul Dickinson says.
"We have entered an era when climate change has become a mainstream issue
for both investors and corporations,” he says.
[
Low-carbon-footprint companies is a win-win idea, according to Merrill Lynch
managing director Abyd Karmali.
"Those companies will likely have a higher quality of business management
and will limit impact on earnings, and investors also have the opportunity
to lower their own carbon footprint by investing in those companies,” he
says.
But private investors alone can't spur an environmentally friendly "green
economy," contends Bank of America’s Lewis.
Rather, Congress should create a cap-and-trade system that would allow
businesses to buy and sell emissions credits with help from business, he
says.
"We favor a market based mechanism to set a value for carbon allowances, and
a clear, federal standard that would give investors the certainty they need
to plan for the future," Lewis said in a speech at the Institute for
Emerging Issues forum.
"Like any large, important, transformative project, this one is going to
require a lot of money," Lewis told his listeners. "I'm guessing that's why
you invited me."
The forum focused on developing alternative fuels and other conservation
measures to create jobs and reduce the pollution blamed for global warming.
U.S. federal legislation may be just a year or two away, cautions
ConocoPhillips’ Mulva.
If the carbon train leaves the station without industry onboard, success
will be hard to come by, he says.
"We can offer technical insight and economic realism to the policies that
come from government,” Mulva says.
"Climate change and energy security are complex global issues — and we
operate in the global economy every day, which gives us real-world
expertise,” he says.
For the first time in its six-year history, the CDP has included China’s
100-largest companies by market capitalization in its requests to 3,000 of
the world's largest corporations.
The CDP asks them to measure and disclose their greenhouse gas emissions,
for instance.
The group also wants companies to report clearly defined strategies for
managing the risks and opportunities associated with climate change.

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By Andrew D. Todd
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