“C” is for “carbon,” “climate,” and “conundrum.” The environmental vernacular at the millennium is shifted forever— “carbon footprint,” “offsets,” “carbon credits,” “RECs,” and “carbon neutral.” Global warming has enveloped the corporate and collective consciousness. It is, and will remain, a metaenvironmental metric, crowding out a host of other environmental issues and affecting how corporations will assess their business, their plans, and how they will be measured. According to David Crane, CEO of NGR Energy Corporation, “this is the defining business issue of our generation.”
How far have we come in just a few years? I can bear witness to the quantum leap of the carbon issue into corporate consciousness. In 2004, I was asked to participate in a symposium at William and Mary Law School on the similar topic of the greening of American corporate environmental responsibility. This was an excellent assembly of wonderful speakers from around the United States, yet only one speaker dealt with energy, let alone carbon.
In 2004, “global warming” was not much in the nomenclature of energy policy: the European Union Emission Trading System (“EU ETS”) for carbon control—the first carbon control in the world—had not yet launched, the Kyoto Protocol had not yet been ratified by the necessary majority of countries to make it effective, and no one had won a Nobel Peace Prize or Academy Award for highlighting carbon imperatives.
In less than seven years, the dialogue in which corporate America—really America as a whole—is engaged has been significantly transformed. The global warming issue is an appropriate focus in the 21st century; it is appropriate because of both the immediacy of the possibly irreversible damage that is inflicted by greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions and a warming planet, as well as the collective nature of our dilemma. On the issue of the immediacy, James Hansen, head of the NASA climate office, and one of a group of prominently regarded world climatologists, has announced that we have less than four years left to either radically diminish annual carbon emissions or face a very different planet.
The new carbon universe evolves rapidly, and the carbon footprint changes in size. In 1950, the United States and Western Europe contributed 71% of GHG emissions, but in 1998 they were found to have contributed only 38% of the total. Trends have changed and the balance of GHG emissions is globalized.
The globalization of commerce is manifest. The modern mission statement of many U.S. corporations is to compete in global markets. Global warming impacts are the side effect of our use of finite resources and of this globalization of commerce. Global carbon is becoming a metaenvironmental metric, extending beyond the media specifics of conventional environmental regulation. A 2010 report for Ceres, a leading NGO on climate change, forecasts three key energy-related goals for the future: (1) reducing GHG emissions by up to 80%; (2) reducing emphasis on fossil fuel generation of electricity; and (3) increasing implementation of smart grid and energy-efficiency technologies.
