Cut and Thrive: New WWF Report Hails GE for Turning Carbon into Capital

Over the last decade, thousands of GE employees have repeatedly fanned out across hundreds of offices and factories to track down leaky windows, dripping faucets, lights burning on weekends and other energy waste. These “energy treasure hunts” have yielded over $275 million in energy savings so far, cut GE’s carbon footprint, and earned the company praise from leading environmental groups.

A new report from The World Wildlife Fund and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) released this month hails GE for acting to cut greenhouse emissions, exceeding “ambitious” carbon reduction goals and delivering higher financial returns than companies without such targets.

GE “set out to improve the energy efficiency of its own operations and dramatically exceeded its initial target of 1 percent emissions reduction per year,” the report’s authors write. “Realizing the opportunities in front of them, GE reset the goal in 2010 to a 25 percent absolute reduction [by 2015] against the same 2004 emissions baseline.”

Marcia Marsh, WWF’s U.S. chief operations officer, writes in the report that “life [was] full of difficult choices, particularly for corporate CFOs and COOs. But choosing between increasing profits and protecting the planet doesn’t have to be one of them,” she said.

WWF’s President Carter Roberts told Bloomberg that chief financial officers were the target audience for this report, even though the fund has been traditionally addressing the general public and policy makers. “The profound frustration we feel is that government is not taking the kind of decisions necessary to address one of the greatest risks of our time, and so all eyes turn to the private sector,” Roberts told Bloomberg.

The report, called “The 3% Solution: Driving Profits Through Carbon Reductions,” is the result of a six-year effort to “explore” ways for American corporations to profitably reduce their emissions by 3 percent below 2010 levels and prevent increasing the global average temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2020. The report warns that climate change “is expected to have long-term, dangerous and irreversible effects” beyond that threshold.

“The 3 percent solution turns the current climate debate on its head,” says WWF’s Marsh. “Perceived climate problems become major business opportunities.”

The report, which drew on data and analysis from McKinsey & Co., Deloitte, and other firms and experts, found that U.S. companies alone could realize net savings of up to $190 billion in 2020 by making targeted changes to their business models. Between 2010 and 2020, that value could be as high as $780 billion. Experts cited by the report say that changes, like those identified by GE’s energy treasure hunts, include upping energy efficiency through behavioral, management and technology improvements, and deploying low-carbon footprint energy systems like rooftop solar power.

“The opportunity is here to be taken,” writes CDP’s CEO Paul Simpson. He says that “in a rapidly changing world it is the early movers who will aid the future success of their corporations and their national economies.”