October 20, 2022
In the field of corporate sustainability, Q3 of 2022 will be remembered for the shocking success of ambitious climate legislation in the U.S. – the world’s largest economy and greatest historic emitter. Multiple top analysts expect the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to help drive an approximate 40% reduction in U.S. emissions by 2030, even before the emission impact is scored of the hundreds of billions of Department of Energy loans it authorizes, or the impact of the EPA’s new “Green Bank” it funds, or the state level legislation the IRA enables. Consequently, the IRA is the U.S. legislative change climate advocates have been fighting for – otherwise unsuccessfully – for thirty years.
What made it possible is the obviousness of the manifesting global climate emergency, the demonstrated commercial success of utility scale wind, solar and batteries in the U.S. and around the world and a changing politics in the U.S. that holds as much peril as it does promise. It has only been two months since the IRA became law and the related announcement of new multi-billion dollar clean energy manufacturing plants in the U.S. are becoming a multiple time a week occurrence as a clean energy led re-shoring of manufacturing and deployment leadership comes to the U.S.
As I explore in a new Sustainable Leadership Blog post: “Towards Sustainable Global Leadership; How the IRA Catalyzes 21st Century U.S. Global Leadership,” changes in the politics of the Democratic Party, the GOP and climate policy helped create the decades delayed success of the IRA. The IRA is radically different from the Markey/Waxman bill that passed the House in 2009 but failed to reach the floor of the Senate. It is a bill that was smartly overfunded, primarily through a new minimum 15% tax on corporates with more than a billion in booked annual revenue and a 1% tax on stock buyback transactions. It therefore derives the capital it supplies to corporations, local authorities and citizens willing to invest the clean energy revolution through taxing the global corporations benefiting most impressively from globalization.
This is an entirely different approach than assessing a broad based tax on carbon recommended by many economists. Who fail to appreciate the politically shaping – and therefore economic – blowback coming from those who feel disadvantaged by an always more globalized economy. Fortunately, the IRA did not do that and instead, outside of the new taxes on the largest corporations, is overwhelmingly “all carrots and no sticks” for all voters and most all businesses. Those carrots come in the form of tax credits, incentives and loans for investing in clean energy that have proved non-bureaucratic, effective and politically sustainable as similar incentives, regularly for two year terms, have been repeatedly renewed. The IRA now provides uncapped incentives for a market shaping 10+ years (i.e. the later of 10 years or a 75% reduction in U.S. emissions). Which are protected from reversal by the same political dynamics that made passing the IRA and all substantive U.S. legislation extremely difficult. Those opposed to clean energy would have to capture and control all branches of the U.S. government to reverse the IRA.
Consequently, even as a significant minority of voters in the U.S. reject the validity of our system of elections and some even reject the rule of law, America now has a model in the IRA that supports growing business and jobs on the always more urgent, broader and deeper challenge of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown.
SR Inc is pleased to welcome Hologic as a Charter Member of the Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable
Hologic, headquartered in Marlborough, MA, is an innovative medical technology company whose purpose is to enable healthier lives everywhere, every day. While they discover and develop groundbreaking products and services that benefit everyone, they are especially passionate about those that advance women’s health and well-being. This allows Hologic to be a company that prospers, grows and empowers women to experience healthier lives.
SR Inc is pleased to welcome Juniper Networks as a Charter Member of the Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable
Juniper Networks, headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, and software-defined networking technology. Juniper Networks employs over 9,000 employees in 50 countries and their customers include the top 100 global service providers and 30,000 enterprises, including the Global Fortune 100 as well as hundreds of federal, state and local government agencies and higher educational organizations.
SR Inc is pleased to welcome AmerisourceBergen as a Charter Member of the Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable
AmerisourceBergen, headquartered in Conshohocken, PA, is a leading global healthcare company with a foundation in pharmaceutical distribution and solutions for manufacturers, pharmacies and providers creating unparalleled access, efficiency and reliability for human and animal health. Their 41,000 global team members power their purpose: “We are united in our responsibility to create healthier futures”.
October 4, 2022. Our Third Quarter Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) Symposium was held both in person in New York City and virtually on Thursday, September 22nd as an Official Climate Week event. A special thanks to our Member-Client presenters: Amy Wendel, Director and Head of Corporate Responsibility at GoTo and Jacqueline Drumheller, Global Sustainability Program Manager at Bio-Rad Laboratories.
October 4, 2022. Our Third Quarter Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) Symposium was held both in person in New York City and virtually on Thursday, September 22nd as an Official Climate Week event. The second half of the symposium focused on on “Getting Net Zero Done.” During this session, we discussed emerging best practices in global decarbonization and heard from Member Executive Jacqueline Drumheller, Global Sustainability Program Manager at Bio-Rad Laboratories about her efforts to lead the company’s emission reduction efforts.
As an Analyst at SR Inc, Casey supports Member-Clients with outsourced program assistance and creates original research to help clients drive industry best practice in areas ranging from ESG governance structures, ESG reporting, and innovative renewable energy procurements.
Prior to working at SR Inc, Casey served as an AmeriCorps VISTA with Hawai’i Green Growth Local2030 Hub, convening and collaborating with over 70 diverse partners across the Ala Wai watershed on sustainability and resiliency initiatives. This work involved cultivating individual relationships with community, government, and business partners, and driving forward the creation of a comprehensive project assessment tool rooted in indigenous knowledge systems and design economics. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from Boston College, during which time she also interned with Brookline-based organization Boyer Sudduth Environmental Consultants, providing small business clients with sustainability best practice research, as well as exposure through a number of published blog articles. Casey has also held certification as a LEED Green Associate through the US Green Building Council since 2019.
This Member Briefing describes the mechanics of SBTs, how to gain internal support to set them, how to submit targets to SBTi, and how to develop a roadmap to achieve the goals. This Briefing will be most valuable for companies that have already calculated a preliminary emissions baseline and are either: (a) considering setting SBTs, or (b) need to advance or update existing SBT commitments and strategies in light of the new SBTi Net Zero Standard. For companies who haven’t yet calculated an emissions baseline, SR Inc has developed guidance and tools to assist with the measurement and tracking of emissions. For more in depth strategies on how to reduce emissions across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, we recommend reviewing our separate Member Briefings released at the 2021 Summit for Sustainable Business.
The Member Briefing begins by describing the astounding growth in renewable energy in the last decade and the RECs that have underpinned this growth. The report then details the mechanisms of the Utility-Scale Direct PPA, the VPPA, and the Buyer Organized Aggregated VPPA and includes an in-depth discussion of the risks inherent in the VPPA and how to best mitigate them. This guidance is driven by the experience of SR Inc’s Member-Clients and the report includes case studies of executed Buyer Organized Aggregated VPPAs by Member-Clients Akamai, Bloomberg, Cisco, and Intuit. The report concludes with tips and stepwise guidance for developing a strategy and executing a Buyer Organized Aggregated VPPA.
October 19, 2022. In October of 2022, we are in month two of what amounts to a clean energy revolution, increasingly catalyzed by the unprecedentedly ambitious and smartly overfunded Inflation Reduction Act (P.L. 117-169). The wholly partisan “IRA” extends and strengthens two other bi-partisan Acts of the 117th Congress and reflects a changed politics, as both the Democratic and Republican parties are now active supporters of a strategic national industrial policy for the U.S., which was previously (i.e. 1990-2010) championed only by the aging “labor wing” of the Democratic Party.
March 30, 2022. On March 21st, 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a landmark proposal for new climate-related disclosure rules for all public companies. The proposed rule passed 3-1 along a party-line vote, with the one Republican commissioner voting against it. Advocates say the rule would hold companies accountable for their role in climate change and give investors more leverage in forcing changes to business practices that contribute to rising global temperatures. Opponents argue that the proposed rules would increase compliance costs and go far beyond the SEC’s mandate to protect investors by requiring disclosure of information relevant to companies’ financial performance.
Q4 Executive Symposium
December 8, 2022
12-3:30 PM ET
Member-Clients meet in Washington D.C. & remotely
Host: Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business, Business of Sustainability Initiative
