GE and the Greening of Corporate America.
A byproduct of the Bush administration's repudiation of the Kyoto treaty on global warming has been that many big American corporations are approaching the greenhouse-gas problem and a host of other environmental issues more aggressively than the government. Today, General Electric does so in a big way.
GE's chairman and chief executive, Jeff Immelt, plans to lay out his vision for what the company calls "ecomagination" in a speech at George Washington University. The Wall Street Journal says he will roll out a "comprehensive investment, marketing and policy initiative" that includes a doubling of the conglomerate's investment in technologies that include cleaner coal-fired power plants, a diesel-and-electric hybrid locomotive and agricultural silicon that cuts the amount of water and pesticide used in spraying fields.
For General Electric, which once opposed the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to dredge the Hudson River of PCBs produced by GE plants, the program marks a change in philosophy, Bloomberg notes. . . . And an increasing number of big American companies are calling for a federal global-warming emissions cap and announcing their own reductions. Ford Motor, DuPont, Motorola and International Business Machines are among companies that have pledged to make reductions. Meanwhile, banks that include J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have quickly adopted their own environmental standards, unwilling to finance projects that could bring environmentalists' protests.
The act of going green seems to be turning into one of necessity more than choice. General Motors, currently facing its worst crisis in more than a decade, is talking to Japanese rival Toyota about a possible technology-sharing deal that could enable the two companies to offer a wider range of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles sooner than if they worked alone . . . .
(5-9-05, The Wall Street Journal online.)
GE's chairman and chief executive, Jeff Immelt, plans to lay out his vision for what the company calls "ecomagination" in a speech at George Washington University. The Wall Street Journal says he will roll out a "comprehensive investment, marketing and policy initiative" that includes a doubling of the conglomerate's investment in technologies that include cleaner coal-fired power plants, a diesel-and-electric hybrid locomotive and agricultural silicon that cuts the amount of water and pesticide used in spraying fields.
For General Electric, which once opposed the Environmental Protection Agency's plans to dredge the Hudson River of PCBs produced by GE plants, the program marks a change in philosophy, Bloomberg notes. . . . And an increasing number of big American companies are calling for a federal global-warming emissions cap and announcing their own reductions. Ford Motor, DuPont, Motorola and International Business Machines are among companies that have pledged to make reductions. Meanwhile, banks that include J.P. Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have quickly adopted their own environmental standards, unwilling to finance projects that could bring environmentalists' protests.
The act of going green seems to be turning into one of necessity more than choice. General Motors, currently facing its worst crisis in more than a decade, is talking to Japanese rival Toyota about a possible technology-sharing deal that could enable the two companies to offer a wider range of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles sooner than if they worked alone . . . .
(5-9-05, The Wall Street Journal online.)
posted by Sid Cottingham | 5:15 AM
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