Businesses Support the Carbon Disclosure Project

Big businesses don’t always need to be beaten up to do the right thing. The confrontations of Copenhagen were grand to watch, except that little was accomplished. That project’s been in development for how many years at what cost to the world’s citizens?

While accusations fly fast and furious among global warming advocates, sceptics, poor countries and rich ones, many large corporations take global warming seriously. Companies like Boing are voluntarily tracking carbon emissions, then submitting them to The Carbon Disclosure Project.

Paul Dickinson, the founder and chief executive of the Carbon Disclosure Project, acknowledges that his group is no substitute for muscular government regulation, which exists in most of European Union and Japan. Critics argue that the statistics submitted to the CDP aren’t verified by outside agencies and don’t rein in the “bad guys” or polluting rogue countries.

Dickinson argues that the voluntary project offers a frictionless path toward reining in emissions, even in relatively unregulated markets like China’s and India’s. Emissions are expected to soar in those fast-growing economies in coming years as new coal-fired plants go online.

With so little coming out of Copenhagen — except an understanding that the process didn’t work — the assessments of big business that carbon emissions is a major priority for the environment, cost savings and risk management may be one of the strongest motivations for helping the environment in today’s volatile world. Turning Emissions Disclosure Into a Virtue NYTimes

More reading: India Inc keen to cut carbon emissions Ahmedabad Mirror