While the United States administration looks for ways to unwind that country’s commitments under the Paris agreement, its biggest, richest, indeed its ‘yuugest’ corporations are moving in the other direction and setting their own clean energy and climate goals, according to public data publicly on the Fortune 500 and its even more elite subset, the Fortune 100.
The Power Forward 3.0 report, sponsored and conducted by the World Wildlife Fund, Ceres, CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), and Calvert Research and Management, found that 60% of Fortune 100 companies now have some sort of climate or clean energy target. So do nearly half—44%—of the smallest 100 on the full list of 500. Twenty-three companies on that longer list—including major brands like Wal-Mart, General Motors, Google, and Bank of America—have set goals of sourcing 100% of their energy needs from renewables.
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“Through their investments,” notes GreenBiz in a report, “these same iconic American companies are cutting annual climate pollution [by] the equivalent of taking 45 coal-fired power plants offline.”
A different finding may be more persuasive in the C-suite, though. The WWF highlights that “80,000 emission-reducing projects by 190 Fortune 500 companies showed nearly US$3.7 billion in savings in 2016 alone.”
“American businesses are leading the transition to a clean economy because it’s smart business and it’s what their customers want,” WWF’s senior director of climate and renewable energy, Marty Spitzer, said in a statement accompanying the report.
“Washington policies may slow this boom, but these companies are making it clear that a transition to a low-carbon economy is inevitable.”
