Dell and News Corp: 21st Century Environmental Leaders

By Eric Carlson

Today's Wall Street Journal ran a piece entitled, "Green Goal of 'Carbon Neutrality' Hits Limit" about companies that reduce and responsibly offset their emissions. It singled out Dell, Timberland, News Corp. (which owns the WSJ), Google and Yahoo!.

The piece also questions whether some of the projects being supported would have happened with or without corporate financing, not taking into account that the more profitable a project or investment the more likely project developers are to build more wind farms, for example. A 5 percent return on investment may be cost-effective, but a 15 percent ROI will lead to more investment and a 25 percent ROI will cause a sea change in investment and the market forever away from coal. This is exactly what is needed to transition to a low-carbon economy.

Overall, the piece adds to the greater discussion about corporations taking responsibility for their carbon footprints and the lengths they can go up and down stream to their suppliers and customers. Here are some comments I made on the WSJ site:

Dell should be commended as one of the leading IT companies regarding the environment and fighting climate change. From reducing the energy use of their computers, reducing their corporate footprint, enabling their customers to offset the emissions of their computers and requiring their suppliers to report their emissions, Dell is taking charge on this issue, when they are under absolutely no requirement to do so. That's leadership.

Dell's RECs and carbon credits represent the real, verified environmental attributes of carbon reductions and green power, meeting the highest industry standards, both for verification and regulatory additionality, upon which every major trading system rests, for their wind energy, forest conservation and other projects.

Dell's investments are also leading to new investments in clean energy and carbon reducing projects. ECON 101 tells us the more money wind energy makes its investors vs., say, coal, the more investment we will see in wind energy. That's the market transformation Dell (and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which includes the Wall Street Journal) is leading.

By driving demand for clean energy, they are driving investment (and profits) up and costs down so one day wind, with or without federal subsidies, will cost less than coal. The federal government is only now taking up the issue of a cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions because leaders like Dell, News Corp. and others have shown there is a market and a market price for CO2 that can be translated into profits, jobs and environmental protection.