So Vanity Fair has profiled General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and his new "green is green" plan for GE.
It's actually a really interesting piece - Immelt has come under fire for taking a gamble on new energy technologies that will hopefully put GE at the forefront of the post-fossil-fuel-dependence world.
This is classic - look at how differently the left and right are responding to his plan:
He frames these goals in the words of Thomas Edison, who said, "I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give to others. I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent." In fact, the only way a supersize company can be successful in the long term, says Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental think tank, is if it foresees major historical changes ahead of time and capitalizes on those trends. "Immelt anticipates that he is going to operate in a world with increasingly limited access to oil and increasingly rigid constraints on greenhouse gasses," Lash says. "He's developing precisely the solutions that those conditions will demand."
But, asks Patrick Michaels, an environmental fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute, what if Immelt is wrong about those conditions—or even the time frame during which they play out? What if concerns about climate change subside in the next few years, or, more plausibly, new oil resources are freed up? "Mr. Immelt is overestimating the urgency of these threats in my opinion," says Michaels.
Immelt is, as the article makes clear, in this for the money, not the happy little trees. The guy's a Dartmouth alum and was president of Phi Delt while there. Y'all Dartmouth people know what that means. But hey - if a non-environmentalist who heads one of the largest corporations in the world thinks moving on to clean energy is a good idea, maybe we're starting to get somewhere.
Apparently GE has also collaborated on a report that claims the US could meet its electrical demand from wind power alone - wow (via Gristmill).
