Setting corporate carbon goals and meaning it
There can be a fine line between leadership and greenwash. Some companies are crossing it. Read More

Every day, it feels as if the companies willing to step up and do their part to fight global warming are more numerous, while the diminishing number seeking to block progress slink further into the shadows. Yet the “Recalcitrants,” as I call them, continue to impede progress at a time when the drumbeat of climate catastrophe grows ever louder — the hottest year on record by far; consider a deluge in Louisiana triggering flooding of biblical proportions.
Yet their recalcitrance is being presented in an entirely different manner, making it difficult for us in the corporate world to distinguish with certainty climate friend from climate foe.
These Recalcitrants — or poseurs, as I referred to them in my last column — pretend to be our allies in the fight to save the planet but are actually indifferent to whether their actions are having a meaningful impact. Their goal seems to be not only to conceal their opposition, but even to reap the public relations benefit of being on the right side of this epochal challenge to humankind.
This is insidious to our cause. Left unchecked, they will undermine whatever public faith there is that big business will do what is right for the planet.
I recognize that I may be in a minority in that I believe there is a role for morality and social good in big business acting within the context of our free-market capitalist system. More specifically, I believe that the private sector can and must be the driving force in the transition to a clean-energy economy, if only because our public-policy makers have proven over the last 10 years that they cannot overcome the entrenched opposition to climate action that exists in the political sphere.
We know the transition to a clean-energy economy will not be easy for society as a whole. Nor will it be easy for energy-intensive companies — producers or consumers — acting within our midst to make that transition. But If we make the mistake of allowing the faint of heart to fake it — to talk the talk, but not walk the walk — then true carbon transformation will become the path not taken for the lion’s share of companies. And that is a risk that the planet cannot afford to take.
As such, we need to continue to encourage and celebrate our corporate brethren who are setting and actively pursuing carbon-reduction goals and leading on the climate issue. But equally, we need to be vigilant and call out those just going through the motions.
That is why I am so concerned that we are facing over the months and years to come an outbreak across corporate America of the Greenwashing 2.0 virus. This GINO (“green name only”) strain is characterized by resources expended on publicizing green initiatives which are disproportionate relative to amounts spent actually pursuing them.
Since the dawn of the renewables age, it has not been uncommon for conventional utilities to commission a modest-sized wind farm or solar array so that they could splash a big picture of it in the CSR section of their annual reports. In the big picture, these showcase projects meant nothing; they led to nothing.
What makes the 2.0 strain so much more potent is that now there are so many more outlets for corporations to engage in public greenwashing — dedicated sustainability reports, social media and even old-fashioned advertising campaigns such as Exxon’s — and so many more people are paying attention because the stakes are so high. Net-net, token green initiatives engaged in by big companies principally for PR purposes have the same end result: nothing.
The goal of good goals
To be taken seriously, corporate clean-energy initiatives need to be framed in the same methodology that big companies use to launch and pursue their most important business objectives. They need to start with a goal, usually a carbon-reduction goal, and — most important — that goal needs to have real impact embedded within its achievement.
Let me explain because, again, I am concerned that Greenwashing 2.0 elements may be washing into corporate goal-setting. Consider the announcements made over the past few years by several major financial institutions that, henceforth, they will not lend to the coal industry.
These announcements are laudatory and could have a huge potential climate impact by denying the biggest carbon-emitting industry the oxygen its needs to survive. But as far as I can tell, there has been no discernible impact on the coal industry, which to be sure is under severe financial pressure, but from low gas prices, not from lack of access to capital.
Why the disconnect? The financial institutions have tended to focus their new anti-coal policy narrowly on coal projects, not coal companies, and certainly not, at the corporate level, on the power companies that actual buy and consume coal and emit carbon from it in enormous quantities. Some of the financial institutions limit their ban on coal plant lending to North America, where no new coal plants are being built anyway because of cheap natural gas.
So these announcements, while undoubtedly well-intentioned, mean nothing unless they actually contribute to a major greenhouse gas-emitting coal plant not being built which would have been built otherwise. I haven’t heard of that happening yet.
Hear David Crane in person at VERGE 16, Sept. 19-22 in Santa Clara, California.
Corporate carbon goal-setting is happening. Already, more than 1,000 sustainability commitments undertaken by more than 400 companies have been registered with the We Mean Business coalition. If achieved, the impact will be significant. Even more so, as the movement grows across the corporate world. But, once again, we need to be wary of the risk that insincere companies will articulate ambitious carbon or other sustainability goals, and then take no or patently insufficient steps to adapt their corporate strategy or their capital spending to actually achieving those goals.
Corporate insincerity is a tough one to diagnose because a company’s actions in pursuit of very long-term carbon goals justifiably may be barely discernible now. And we want to be generous, to a point, in our interpretation of their actions and their good-faith because, if we hold a company’s feet to to the fire prematurely, it may inhibit other corporates to make long-term carbon reduction goals, or may result in too-easy-to-attain goal setting.
Make no mistake. We need corporations to adopt big, hairy, audacious carbon goals. We want them to think disruptively, not depending on clear-line-of-sight incremental improvement as the limit to the goals they establish. We want them to commit, at least morally, future generations of leaders of their company to carry on in pursuit of their long-term objectives. And we want them to set those goals now before it becomes too late for the planet.
Defined, quantified milestones
Goals are powerful and enduring. I saw that for myself at NRG. In 2014, we committed to 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050. None of the independent directors at that time openly spoke up in favor of setting those goals; they acquiesced only as I insisted upon the board’s endorsement. Once I was fired, I would have bet that the company’s carbon goals would have walked out the door with me and the senior officers who were responsible for the formulation and implementation of the goals in the first place.
But I would have lost that bet. NRG, to its credit, recently reaffirmed its long-term carbon-reduction goals, proving that such goals, once announced, are hard to undo.
For us in the climate community to take a corporation seriously when it comes to climate objectives, their carbon goals need to be clearly articulated, with defined measurement parameters, in a quantified way, with a specified end-date and intermediate milestones at decent intervals that are reported on and can be adequately monitored externally. This is not hard to understand for big corporations as this is how they manage their primary lines of business.
And that is what we need now, if we are to win this fight against global warming: for all corporations to elevate going “zero carbon” to being a primary line of business, effectuated by all of the same time-tested corporate practices and animated by a singularity of purpose.
