Profit Over Pristine Air

According to a recent entry in the undefined, virtually neglected their environmental pledges over the past few years.

Many companies, disheartened, claim that it is simply too implausible and costly to attempt to substantially reduce greenhouse emissions. After all, immediate profit matters. Distant goals, not so much.

Whereas under President Biden there was enormous pressure for business to address climate change, the Trump administration is claiming that it is a mere distraction to interfere with economic growth.

Most of the companies either changed the way they measured progress, postponed the notion, or stated that their customers “didn’t care” anymore.

In 2020, Walmart announced that from a 2015 baseline, it would slash its greenhouse gas emissions by over a third within five years and by almost two-thirds within ten years. But in 2024, the company admitted that this would not be the case:

“Although we anticipate missing our 2025 emissions target, our absolute emissions and emissions intensity are down meaningfully from our 2015 baseline.”

JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, also declared similar goals, that it would eliminate or offset all its emissions in twenty years, because “anything less was not an option.”

However, recently interjected that, “It was never a promise that JBS was going to make this happen.”

Other companies shifted their goals so that their recent rise in emissions meant less work to meet the goal. For growing companies, more sales lead to a lower “emissions intensity”, or emissions per million dollars of revenue.

Despite the distinction in the methods the companies used to evade confrontation, the results remain the same: our planet is continuing on its path towards severe heat.