Ceres

After years of pressure from investors, environmental organizations and public interest groups, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to require publicly traded companies to disclose information regarding business risks and opportunities related to climate change.

Some companies already take climate issues into account and disclose their findings to investors, but the "interpretative guidance" issued by the SEC will require all public firms to do so.

This is the first economy-wide requirement that companies disclose their exposure to climate-related risks, according to Ceres, an NGO that has been leading the effort to pressure the SEC to adopt such requirements.

On the day after the standards were released, opinion was divided over the impact the new standards would have, with some critics complaining that they were unnecessary. Others saw it as the start of a broader transformation that would put new pressure on major polluting industries.

As the U.S. energy industry faces down what promises to be a critical decade in determining the shape of its future, the opinions of industry representatives seem as diverse as the energy sources they represent.

"What we do this decade will shape the electricity future of 2050," Michael Howard, senior vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute, told the U.S. Energy Association’s Sixth Annual State of the Energy Industry forum in Washington.

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A large percentage of major asset managers still don’t consider climate risks in their investments decision-making and don’t believe climate change is financially material to investing, a new survey from the institutional investor group Ceres found.

"These findings make clear that the investment community is overly focused on short-term performance and ignoring longer-term business trends such as climate-related risks and opportunities," Ceres President Mindy Lubber told reporters Wednesday in releasing the survey results.

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Tom Benson, owner of the World's Largest Laundromat in Berwyn, Ill., is tired of listening to conservative industry groups' bluster that climate change legislation is bad for business.

That's because clean energy saved his.

When Benson bought his business a decade ago, all that hot water helping scrub everything from Speedos to sheets ate up a staggering 25 percent of total monthly revenues. With 153 washers using thousands of gallons of hot water daily, you can only imagine the energy costs. And that's before factoring in the 148 dryers.

So to cut his natural gas costs, Benson installed a solar hot water system on his roof. Three dozen 10-by-4-foot solar panels now produce more than 2,400 gallons of hot water daily, saving him some $25,000 a year.

"Our energy bills could have sunk this business," says Benson. "Now, they're a source of pride."

That's why Benson joined 10,000 small business leaders – hundreds of them U.S. Chamber of Commerce members – in signing Moveon.org's petition last week asking the chamber to stop lobbying against the Waxman-Markey clean energy bill. The small biz shout-out echoes the dozens of major U.S. companies already calling for strong policies to build a 21st century clean energy economy.

Why would a new Ceres report give low scores to Whole Foods, one of the nation's largest purchasers of renewable energy, for the way it is responding to the challenge of climate change?

Precisely for the word that Whole Foods uses to describe itself: "whole."

Many of the company's actions on climate change are laudable, but it still lacks a holistic strategy for
dealing with this colossal challenge that will ripple across all industry sectors. While it is encouraging that Whole Foods is buying wind-based renewable energy certificates to power all of its stores, it is discouraging that the company has not measured its overall greenhouse gas emissions or set targets to reduce those emissions. The company has also done relatively little to improve energy efficiency or promote products with lower carbon footprints.

Apple received a low score in our climate governance report for many of the same reasons. Yes, the company deserves kudos for its first-in-the-industry report in October disclosing the energy and carbon footprint for each of its main product lines. (Apple lovers take heart: the Mac mini uses less than half the energy of a typical light bulb, making it one of the world's most energy efficient desktop computers.)