The Battle For Planet Earth

That success began to redirect some green activism. Environmental Defense (it recently dropped the "Fund") has worked with UPS to use more recycled paper and plastic in its packaging. (Recycling was a nonstarter as long as there was no market for the newspapers we all dutifully bundled and the plastic bottles we put outside.) Conservation International has advised Starbucks on growing organic coffee plants in Mexico, and the Gap uses organic cotton. Environmental Defense is back with McDonald's, finding ways to cut energy consumption by at least 10 percent at every Mickey D's.

Whether such moves are driven by a company's desire to be a good corporate citizen or to gain economic advantage by draping itself in green bunting is hard to say. There is no question that some "greenwashing" is going on. Bayernwerk, a Bavarian utility, began selling "Aqua Power" last year when Germany began to let customers choose their electricity supplier. Bayernwerk markets Aqua Power as 100 percent green, renewable, hydroelectric energy. But any consumer who signs up gets power from the same mix of sources as before: hydro, gas, coal and nuclear. Nothing changes except some accounting, and there's no net benefit to the environment. There is a benefit, though, to Bayernwerk, which charges more for Aqua Power and has been swamped with orders for it.

Greenwashing takes many forms. "Companies often advertise themselves as environmentally friendly even though they might have some pretty hideous environmental records," says Jill Johnson of the group Earth Day 2000. California's PG&E, the utility that settled out of court after the real Erin Brockovich accused it of polluting groundwater, runs pro-environment ads. But PG&E is due in court in November on charges of polluting wells in a second California town. "PG&E has a very good environmental track record," says spokesman Greg Pruett, citing recycling and waste reduction. Weyerhaeuser, the timber company, cuts old-growth trees in Canada but trumpets the 100 million tree seedlings it will plant this year.

Overall, the greening of corporate America is real and hasn't been as hard to achieve as some activists imagined. That is especially true for greenhouse gases and climate change, the focus of Earth Day 2000. "Now there's more recognition by companies that there may be an economic advantage to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases," says Paul Portney, president of the think tank Resources for the Future. More and more companies are changing the way they heat and light their buildings and design their factories to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as well as their energy bills. (Energy-efficiency upgrades can save a company roughly $1 per square foot of office or factory space every year.) The reductions often exceed those called for in the 1997 international agreement on greenhouse warming called the Kyoto Treaty, whose goal of reducing greenhouse emissions 7 percent from their 2000 levels is deemed so threatening to the economy by many oil, coal and chemicals companies that the White House does not dare to submit it to the Senate for ratification.

Corporations from Xerox and Compaq to Du Pont, 3M and Toyota have realized that green behavior can mean black ink, says Joseph Romm, director of the nonprofit Center for Energy and Climate Solutions. Royal Dutch/Shell is reducing emissions of greenhouse gases at its plants by 2002 to a projected 25 percent below the levels of 1990, to 100 million tons. For an equivalent annual cut, every car in New England would have to be taken off the road for five years. Du Pont is cutting its greenhouse emissions 40 percent from their 1991 levels by this year, to 58 million tons. Anyone who dutifully unscrewed the old incandescent light bulbs and subbed in compact fluorescents, scowling every time the &%# things dim, can ponder this: Boeing's lighting upgrade reduced its use of electricity for lighting 90 percent and saves 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year. Some 500,000 people would have had to change a light bulb to achieve that. Companies that can't squeeze out another single kilowatt hour of energy savings in their own facilities can bankroll someone else's. Shaklee, the consumer-products company, and Interface Inc., a $1.3 billion floor-covering manufacturer, are paying to upgrade school boilers from coal to natural gas, which produces fewer greenhouse emissions. "There has been tremendous change in the corporate world," says Gaylord Nelson, who as a senator from Wisconsin conceived the first Earth Day.

None of this is to say that individual decisions do not matter. They do: the lemming-like movement from cars to SUVs has resulted in some 200 million more tons of carbon-dioxide emissions every year than if everyone had stayed with his nice little Taurus. But individuals can exert a greater force for environmental good by pressuring corporations and governments than by lecturing their Navigator-driving friends. Or by spending two years in a tree.

THOMAS HAYDEN AND ERIKA CHECK IN NEW YORK, MARY HAGER IN WASHINGTON AND STEFAN THEIL IN BERLIN

© 2000