Left to right: Rajendra Pachauri, Lisa Jackson, and Greg Dalton

Businesses and governments work together on climate issues. Excerpted from “Lisa Jackson and Rajendra Pachauri,” January 14, 2015.

RAJENDRA PACHAURI; Ph.D., Former Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
LISA JACKSON; Vice President, Environmental Initiatives, Apple; Former Administrator, EPA
GREG DALTON; Vice President of Special Projects & Director, Climate One - Moderator

GREG DALTON: Dr. Pachauri, give us some good news about where progress is being made in the war on climate change. What’s going well?

RAJENDRA PACHAURI: I think progress is being made right here in California. This is a state which is doing remarkable things. This is not only a model for the United States, it could be a model for the world. What really makes this state unique is the people and the leadership working together on the basis of knowledge and information that tells you what will happen if you don’t take action and how attractive it is to take action.

Lots of other cities, towns, companies, businesses [and] individuals are doing a lot. Of course, we need to scale up all these efforts because we don’t have the luxury of time. We really have to move rapidly and adequately to deal with the challenge of climate change, because if we don’t do that, then the costs and the feasibility of getting on a pathway that gives you less than two degrees Celsius increase in temperature by the end of this century may go beyond our reach.

DALTON: Dr. Pachauri, a lot of the policy world is focused on what governments can do or should do. What do you see as the role of business – Apple and other companies – in tackling climate change given the constraints they have?

PACHAURI: You really need to look at it first as a long-term challenge. Even if you look at the history of businesses in the world, it’s those businesses that had a vision and that were able to foresee the future that actually turned out to be far more successful than others that only worried about the profits in the next quarter. I personally think that you need all stakeholders to be on board. You certainly need government. Government has to set policies in place that enable action in this area. You need businesses with vision, with leadership that focuses not on immediate and short-term benefits, but looks at what its standing in society would be. I have a feeling that today, reputational value is really important for a company. When the public demands companies be more responsible in terms of protecting this planet, I’m sure that will also translate into value in the stock market.

DALTON: Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, created quite a stir last year when he responded to someone criticizing Apple’s expenditures on clean energy. He basically said, If you’re [just] interested in bean counting, get out of the stocks. So how does Apple balance long-term investments in clean energy and the quarterly demands of Wall Street?

LISA JACKSON: First off, it’s probably good to get a sense of just how invested in clean energy we are. We run data centers. We actually run four of them and all four of those data centers run on 100-percent clean energy today. Whereas a lot of people are setting goals for how we want to move our data and the cloud to be clean, Apple’s section of the cloud is clean today. That didn’t happen by accident. Though I’d love to take credit for it, we were well on our way to doing that before I got to Apple a year and a half ago.

You start with the kind of innovations that are required to take a challenge, and certainly that is a challenge, and say that we’re not going to be held to what’s been done in the past. We’re going to just go ahead and prove that it can be done. That takes innovation. Then you have to really believe that there’s no need to choose between a thriving economy, growth, and doing right by the planet and its people; our customers, our employees. When you believe those two things, it moves business to innovate. As important as government is, it’s so much easier to make policy when business has shown a way forward. When somebody has said, Hey, you know what, we actually can figure out a way to deal with automobile emissions with this thing called the catalytic converter, all of a sudden the head of the EPA can then say, Let’s cut down on the amount of pollution that you can put out, because we now know how to do it. So what business can do is innovate and find the “hows” that allow policymakers and regulators to then set the floor.

DALTON: One thing that other tech companies do, Google and others, is make direct investments in clean energy. Apple has a very healthy balance sheet. Have you thought about using Apple’s economic muscle to either directly invest in clean energy or to divest from fossil fuel?

JACKSON: What we’ve said is, first and foremost, Apple has done a pretty good job – I think the best in the industry – of really looking at what our entire life cycle carbon footprint is. There are a couple of things that we do there that I think lend themselves to real innovation. The first is that we take responsibility for the carbon emissions of our entire supply chain. Of the 33.8 million tons of greenhouse gases emitted in our carbon
footprint last year, about 70 percent of that is not at a facility that has our name on it. It’s someone in our supply chain, all the way back to the ore that’s in our products. So we have tons of work to do if we say this is our responsibility to help move our supply chain along. In fact, that’s what Tim [Cook] said recently when he was at Climate Week in New York City. He said to watch the supply chain space. That’s where we know we can take our leadership and transfer [policies] along to companies that do work for lots of people, not just Apple. That’s important.

DALTON: And your new headquarters in Cupertino – is it going to be as green as possible?

JACKSON: Yeah. Tim Cook has said that it’s going to be the greenest corporate campus in the world. We have some pretty ambitious goals. It is a carbon-neutral project. It’s designed from the ground up. It’s got innovative air-handling capabilities, so the hope is that the majority of the time down in the Valley we won’t need any conditioning of the air. There will just be a lot of movement.

DALTON: Dr. Pachauri, recently 300 Stanford professors wrote a letter asking that Stanford divest. It’s happening among churches and universities. You used to serve on the board of an oil company in India. How do you view divesting from fossil fuels? Is that meaningful or is that just a symbol?

PACHAURI: I was on the board of Indian Oil Corporation. At the very first meeting that I attended as a member of the board, I said, “You guys have to convert yourselves from an oil company to an energy company.” There was a lot of discussion as [to] how to do that. We spent an entire day, and some actions were put in place to get into renewable energy, to bring about improvements in energy efficiency and so on. Soon after that I left the board and I’m afraid things are back to where they were.

But that’s often what happens. It takes an individual; it takes just somebody’s motivation to get things going. What you see in Apple is a case of enlightened leadership. If we had more of this, this would also enable government policy to be put in place, because often what happens is that governments are worried about what businesses might do, and often they have reasons to worry because businesses can be very resistant.
I had a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany just before the Copenhagen Conference, and she asked me how to get the Americans on board. I said that one way to do it would be for President Obama to have a dialogue with business leaders in the country. She said, “Yes, I think you’re right.” I said, “Madam Chancellor, why don’t you get your business leaders to talk to some of their counterparts over there?” She shook her head and she said, “No, I’m afraid if the American giant wakes up, we’ll have competition.” I think she was saying that tongue in cheek.