Ten years ago, sustainability was a blip on the radar, a notion only familiar to those within environmental circles. Today, it stands at the forefront of public consciousness, as evidenced by December's climate change pact among industrialized nations in Copenhagen.
As countries around the world begin taking steps to address global warming, some of the largest corporations in the United States are already springing into action. Sensing new regulations not too far behind, many have begun mobilizing for what they believe has long been looming on the horizon -- a day when all of industry will be required to make dramatic cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.
That day seemed to inch a bit closer when the White House presented in Copenhagen a provisional target to reduce greenhouse gases from 2005 levels 17% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.
While President Obama and Congress wrestle with the fine print, some in U.S. industry have already begun assembling a management system to address emissions regulations, conceding that such limits were not only likely but perhaps even inevitable.
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American Electric Power's Mountaineer Plant in New Haven, W. Va., is the world's first-ever coal-fired power plant to capture and store some CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. |
"We know it's coming," says Mary Armstrong, vice president of environment, health and safety at Boeing. "Whatever vehicle it ends up being -- whether as a cap-and-trade mechanism or a tax -- it all boils down to the fact that there will be a cost to emitting carbon."
Gathering Data
One of the first significant steps toward emissions regulations arrived on Jan. 1, when the Environmental Protection Agency began a national registry that requires large emitters of heat-trapping gases to collect their greenhouse-gas data.
The information from those reports will be released in 2011 publicly. Businesses that emit at least 25,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases per year would have to participate, which is expected to encompass about 10,000 facilities.
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