Corporations Take Different Approaches to Climate Change

The reality of climate change caused by human activity has represented a continuing source of disagreement in US politics, for some time, and it is a factor in the November 2016 elections. But the disagreement hasn't been confined to politicians--major American corporations have taken notably different attitudes to the issue. Much of the media's coverage of the issue has focused on climate change denial by corporate fossil fuel interests, which have joined with political allies to make their cases, but several large companies in a number of fields, most notably the high-tech world, have taken the opposite tack. Not only do they admit the reality of the phenomenon; they also seek to develop and support technologies to mitigate its effects. International organizations have made clear their belief in the reality of human-caused climate change. Two years ago, the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserted that warming of Earth's atmosphere and ocean system is unequivocally happening and that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the warming observed since 1950. Scientists have largely agreed. Within the past two years, assessments by the US Global Change Research Program and the National Academy of Sciences, for example, have agreed with the UN panel. And in late June, a brief statement to Congress by 31 American scientific societies reaffirmed that consensus. To reduce the risk of the most severe impacts of climate change, greenhouse gas emissions must be substantially reduced, the statement notes. addition, adaptation is necessary to address unavoidable consequences for human health and safety, food security, water availability, and national security, among others. We in the scientific community are prepared to work with you [Congress] on the scientific issues important to your deliberations as you seek to address the challenges of our changing climate. Signing organizations include the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the Geological Society of America. At the political level, the governments of the United States, Mexico, and Canada agreed in June to aim at reaching a goal of generating 50 percent of North American electricity from non-carbon sources by 2025. Fossil fuel interests have facilitated some efforts to mitigate climate change by participating in new technological developments. However, one major initiative hit a roadblock in midsummer 2016. A clean coal plan in Kemper, Mississippi, touted by the Obama administration as a futuristic means of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, came under attack for a series of missteps. The plant, designed to capture, compress, and sell off the carbon dioxide it produced, was already more than two years behind schedule and $2.4 billion over its original $4 billion budget. Then, Southern Company, the plant's owner, became the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and of lawsuits by local ratepayers, who have alleged fraud. Documents that a whistleblower provided to the New York Times indicate that the company drastically understated the costs and schedule of the project and concealed problems that emerged during the project. More commonly, corporate interests have relied on climate change deniers to delay action on the issue by legal means. In 2010, for example, the commonwealth of Virginia's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli issued a civil investigative demand to the University of Virginia seeking all e-mails and other documents related to research by former faculty member Michael Mann, a climatologist whose work has formed the basis for much of the current understanding of climate change. Cuccinelli's argument: Mann, now at Pennsylvania State University, had misspent state grants on unscientific research. …

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