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Corporations Clean Up
Businesses that once resisted environmental rules now generally comply. When companies started losing lawsuits regarding their chemical emissions, the idea of toxic reduction became rather popular in corporate boardrooms. But many corporations today seem to have genuinely come to believe that environmental protection is good for the country, good for the economy and, therefore, good for business. Getting a head start on the future, several big manufacturers, such as Alcoa, Boeing and Whirlpool, have already taken steps to reduce their companies' greenhouse gas emissions.
Alcoa, for example, has initiated a plan to use improved technology to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2010. The company also has extensive tree-planting programs near many of its operations and service areas, and Alcoa helps fund environmental nonprofits. Boeing and Whirlpool, meanwhile, are working to meet emissions reduction targets even though no federal law yet requires this.
Business leaders, environmentalists, regulators and inventors working toward the same goal? That's certainly an odd mix -- not clearly Republican or Democratic, not clearly left-wing or right-wing. And maybe that's the biggest reason you rarely hear about environmental progress: Current trends do not fit any preconceived ideological notions. The political left wants to believe that industry is destroying the planet, and refuses to consider the evidence that business and the environment are making peace. The political right wants to believe that regulations are destroying the country, and refuses to consider the evidence that the longest period of economic expansion in American history occurred during the very period when pollution was in the midst of its big decline. However, today's reality -- an improving environment without economic harm -- does not fit with anyone's scare-tactic fund-raising or cheap-shot political campaigns.
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