92% Of Top 100 S&P Companies Have Climate "Plans"; 75% Are Also Members Of The US Chamber
Corporate America has made a slew of pledges to reduce its emissions over the past few years. Today, 92 percent of the companies on the S&P 100, an index of leading U.S. stocks, have announced intentions to reduce at least some of their carbon emissions, according to the corporate sustainability advocacy nonprofit Ceres. But do these companies actually plan to change their business practices, and in some cases their entire business models, to meet the scale of the challenge? Or are these pledges just greenwashing?
A telling way to assess how serious companies are about meeting their own goals is to look at whether they are lobbying in statehouses and in Washington for the policy changes that would make reducing emissions easier and cheaper. But a new report from Ceres published on Tuesday finds that over the past five years, only 40 percent of those S&P 100 companies have engaged with lawmakers at the state or federal level to advocate for science-based climate policy. “Those companies that are not actively lobbying for science-based climate policies are effectively working against themselves,” said Steven Rothstein, managing director of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, in a statement. Rothstein said they were “risking both their reputations and their financial performance.”
The report also looked at companies’ memberships in trade groups that have actively fought climate policy, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Nearly three-quarters of the companies were members of that group, and only 7 percent of companies disclosed that they have pushed the Chamber to change its position on climate change. Apple is the only company that left the group over its climate positions.
Many of the companies on the list are oil and gas companies and utilities, whose lack of enthusiasm for climate policy is unsurprising. But companies’ low engagement across the board is significant. Earlier this year, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told Grist that the absence of corporate lobbying in favor of climate policies on Capitol Hill makes passing them much more difficult because there’s no counterbalance to the aggressive and deep-pocketed campaigns against such policies by the fossil fuel industry.
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https://grist.org/article/report-companies-have-been-lobbying-against-their-own-emissions-targets/
