The global business community is rapidly coming to grips with the dire threat a changing climate poses to their own bottom lines. A CDP report showed that 215 of the world's largest corporations were estimating a total of $1 trillion in new potential climate-related expenses, ranging from floods that disrupt factory supply lines to increasingly severe regional droughts that could result in widespread loan defaults.
The next obvious question: What are any of the U.S.-based companies planning to do about that? A Deloitte survey suggests that a slight majority of those companies are both aware of recent dire climate reports and have taken at least some responsive action, such as purchasing more solar and wind power as prices for that power becomes equal to or cheaper than fossil fuel-produced versions.
Whether you consider this good news or evidence of an alarmingly sluggish pace is entirely up to you.
Half of the business decision-makers surveyed by Deloitte said that cutting costs was their top priority, but 39 percent said they made some decisions because they were just the “right thing to do,” an increase of 11 percentage points over the previous Deloitte survey.
Oh, good; we're up to almost four in ten corporate executives willing to at least make the broad general assertion that they did something at some point not based on goosing profits but because it was the "right thing to do." It's a banner year for non-sociopaths in high management; not since the begrudging corporate acceptance of rules limiting the raw proportion of severed human thumbs in factory-processed lunchmeat has the future looked so cheery.
Sorry—professional cynic. Went a bit off-track there.
Back on track: Yes, companies are beginning to take notice of both customer demands to reduce carbon emissions and the extremely likely scenario that non-reduced carbon emissions will come back to bite corporate profits in the behind a decade or two from now. From making contributions to offset carbon use to the direct purchase of clean energy, corporations are beginning to take action to go greener. If solar costs the same as fossil fuel sources, why not use solar? If reforestation efforts encourage consumers to support your company over a competitor, isn't it an increasing risk to not have such programs? And so on. (The trick will be separating out the greenwashing from the honest efforts.)
But the bottom line is still profit. Renewable energy is now reaching parity with carbon-based energy: That, more than anything else, will be driving future corporate policy. It's not the best news, but it's not the worst news either.