Giving Us the Business

World's biggest firms give lip service to cutting CO2 but lag on results

More than 70 percent of the world's 500 largest companies by market capitalization volunteered information on how climate change is affecting their businesses for a survey this year, but the info they released is not exactly heartening. According to a new report by the Carbon Disclosure Project, a London-based initiative backed by institutional investors that control more than $21 trillion of assets, 51 percent of the companies participating in the survey had put in place an emissions-reduction program, but fewer than one in seven had actually cut their carbon-dioxide emissions in the past year. In fact, at more than one in six of the companies, emissions had gone up. Companies that refused to participate in the survey are catching some flak, including Apple, Boeing, Morgan Stanley, News Corp., Time Warner, and Wal-Mart. Said a spokesperson for News Corp., parent company of Fox News, "I think it's pretty obvious that a media company does not have a carbon issue."