Apple takes a stand on climate change

The Apple store in New York City (Apple photo)

I’ve occasionally dissed Apple on these Web pages for its practices -- breaking the iTunes sync on Palm’s Pre and kicking Google Voice out of its app store -- but I have to give the Cupertino company a solid today on its decision to withdraw from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the chamber’s wrong-headed opposition to federal legislation to limit greenhouse gases.

Apple, according to today’s San Jose Mercury News, withdrew from the chamber in the wake of the chamber’s stated opposition to a new initiative of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the federal Clean Air Act.

The George W. Bush administration EPA argued the Clean Air Act did not give it authority to impose such regulation, but a federal court ruled otherwise. Still, the administration sat on its hands. The Barack Obama administration EPA, however, is exercising the agency’s regulatory muscle.

“By using the power and authority of the Clean Air Act, we can begin reducing emissions from the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitting facilities without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy,” said EPA administrator Lisa Jackson in an address Sept. 30 in Los Angeles.

Devotees of Apple’s various gadgets – the iPhone, iPod, iMac and others – may not think of it all the time, but each of those products has a “carbon footprint,” a measured impact on the environment of their manufacturing, packaging, distribution and operation. Each time you plug in your iPhone to recharge it, a little poof of carbon dioxide is expelled into the air. Not to lay a guilt trip on you about that; it’s just that there are ways to offset creation of carbon dioxide to power your iPhone by reducing the creation of it elsewhere. There’s probably an app for that.

Apple delineates the ways in which it seeks to reduce its corporate carbon footprint on a separate environmental section of its Web site. In the past, Apple has faced shareholder resolutions calling on it to reform its manufacturing processes that environmental groups said were hazardous. Today, Apple notes on its Web site that it has eliminated arsenic, brominated flame retardants (BFRs), mercury, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and other hazardous substances from its products. The environmental site also details reforms in the way Apple runs its offices and other parts of its operations.

Apple is not the only gadget maker displaying its environmental consciousness – which obviously also delivers a public relations benefit -- but it is the first tech company to take the stand of withdrawing from the Chamber of Commerce over the climate change issue. Other chamber members that have quit are three electrical utilities – Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which serves the Bay Area, Exelon Corp. and PNM Resources Inc. – and shoe maker Nike Inc., according to the New York Times.

The chamber, which reflexively opposes any business regulation as a “jobs killer,” opposes EPA regulation of greenhouse gases as well as a bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in June to seek to reduce greenhouse gases. A Senate bill with similar provisions was introduced last week by Sens. John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California.

The business resignations from the chamber started with remarks this summer by William Kovacs, the chamber's vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs, who, according to the Times, said the science of global warming should be put on trial and compared it to the Scopes Monkey Trial. The science of evolution was out on trial in that famous 1925 Tennessee court case. A teacher was tried for teaching scientific evolution instead of the biblical version; the case was a turning point in the debate about evolution versus creationism. For many, the Scopes Monkey Trial seems silly in retrospect. Companies like Apple think questioning the science of global climate change is silly today, too.