Environment, Politics, Science, Uncategorized

Not Just for Profit: Apple CEO Suggests That Climate Change Deniers Should Take Their Money Out of Apple Stock

apple-logoSubmitted by Elaine Magliaro, Weekend Contributor

The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a “self-described” conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., happens to be a shareholder in Apple. NCPPR has not been happy with Apple’s environmental initiatives. According to Chris Taylor (Mashable), Apple has made great improvements “in its use of renewable energy” since Tim Cook took over as CEO. Taylor said, “More than three-quarters of the company’s facilities worldwide, including all of its data centers and its Cupertino HQ, now run on solar, wind, geothermal or hydro power, up from about a quarter under Jobs.” Just last year, Cook hired former EPA head Lisa Jackson “to lead the company’s sustainability efforts.”

In a written statement prior to Apple’s recent annual shareholder meeting, NCPPR’s general counsel Justin Danhof said, “We object to increased government control over company products and operations, and likewise mandatory environmental standards. This is something [Apple] should be actively fighting, not preparing surrender.” According to Fortune, NCPPR “was pushing a shareholder proposal that would have required Apple to disclose the costs of its sustainability programs and to be more transparent about its participation in ‘certain trade associations and business organizations promoting the amorphous concept of environmental sustainability’…” Bryan Chaffin (The Mac Observer) said that the NCPPR proposal was “rooted in the premise that humanity plays no role in climate change.” He also noted that there was language in the proposal that “advanced the idea that profits should be the only thing corporations consider.” During the shareholder meeting, NCPPR urged Apple CEO Tim Cook and the board “to pledge that Apple wouldn’t pursue any more environmental initiatives that didn’t improve its bottom line.”

According to Chris Taylor, Cook’s response to NCPPR was “blistering.” Bryan Chaffin said it was the only time he could recall that Cook appeared angry. Chaffin said Cook “categorically rejected the worldview behind the NCPPR’s advocacy.” The Apple CEO insisted that the company’s environmental efforts make “economic sense.” He added that Apple does “a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive.” Cook said that there were many things the company does “because they are right and just, and that a return on investment (ROI) was not the primary consideration on such issues.” Cook said that when the company works on “making devices accessible by the blind,” he doesn’t “consider the bloody ROI.”

Cook continued, “We want to leave the world better than we found it.” But Cook didn’t stop there. He suggested that anyone who had a problem with what the company was doing should sell their shares in Apple. “Get out of the stock,” he said.

Evidently, NCPPR was not too pleased with Cook’s response to its objections, advice, and shareholder proposal. Following the meeting, the think tank released a statement saying, “After today’s meeting, investors can be certain that Apple is wasting untold amounts of shareholder money to combat so-called climate change. The only remaining question is: how much?”

Good question. How much should companies/corporations invest in looking for ways to combat climate change?

And imagine this: The CEO of a big company who is concerned not only about the “bottom line”—but who also cares about doing things that are “right” and “just and that will leave the world a better place. If only his condition was infectious.

NOTE: NCPPR’s proposal was rejected by Apple’s shareholders. It received just 2.95 percent of the vote.

~ Submitted by Elaine Magliaro

The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.

SOURCES

Apple CEO: Climate Change Deniers Should Take Their Money Out Of Apple Stock (ThinkProgress)

 Tim Cook to Climate Change Deniers: Get Out of Apple Stock (Mashable)

Apple’s Tim Cook picks a fight with climate change deniers: Tells shareholders who oppose Apple’s sustainability efforts to “get out of the stock.” (Fortune)

Right Wing Think Tank Wants Apple to Disclose Sustainability Costs (The Mac Observer)

Tim Cook Soundly Rejects Politics of the NCPPR, Suggests Group Sell Apple’s Stock (The Mac Observer)

106 thoughts on “Not Just for Profit: Apple CEO Suggests That Climate Change Deniers Should Take Their Money Out of Apple Stock”

  1. IGotBupkis,
    That nuclear issue… Look up Atoms For Peace.
    The Chickens are home roosting… Duck and cover!

  5. }}} Approving Keystone XL will turn off young voters
    http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obama-needs-anti-keystone-climate

    Yeah, max, cite something from MSNBC as though it was based in reality, and had no agenda behind it…

    There’s a reason MSNBC is the lowest-rated news outlet.

    You live in Colorado or Oregon, don’t you? Toke up some more, man.

  6. }}} My motto: I have yet to see a wind farm, a solar array or geothermal plant poison the land sea or air like we witness, and many deny, from coal, oil/gas and nuclear every day.

    My motto, the fact that you are abysmally ignorant of something does not change the facts about it.

    Solar cell production is an offshoot of computer chip production. Computer chip production is one of THE most toxic-chemical producing processes humans are involved in. And, unlike computer chips, which get smaller and smaller, we’re talking about making larger and large surface areas using these processes.

    The production of wind turbines requires massive amounts of certain chemicals which are not ridiculously present in the earth’s soil (aluminum, iron, etc.) but less common ones, which must be mined and refined, producing both extensive mine tailings and doing various nasties to the earth itself as a part of the mining process. And the turbines themselves? Well they don’t actually do squat to production of AGW gases (if you buy into that scam, which I don’t — but this is BESIDE the point), because, being unreliable sources of energy, do nothing to cut back on the amount of power that must be kept on standby generators, meaning that even when it’s producing energy, there are needful turbines wasting energy just spinning idle.

    Geothermal is wonderful, but, as an energy source, it’s pretty much tapped out. We already have all the Geothermal energy sources of the USA under load.

    So you advocate in favor of solar and wind, both of which are extensively manufactured in… China. You know, that place where the air pollution was so bad that people at the last Olympics could not miss it?

    No, “moving it back to the USA” will not change that, because the mining for the turbines will still need to be done in China, where the stuff used to MAKE the turbines is, and thence the main polluting activity will still occur outside the USA’s control in every manner. And moving the solar production back here won’t help, because you’ll still have to DO something with all those toxic byproducts of the process, which there is no ready, effective storage or disposal technology for dealing with… Sorta like nuclear byproducts, BUT WITH NO “half-life” AT ALL.

    The nuclear power industry is more than amply capable of making relatively fail-safe reactor designs, and anyone who understands technology at all would know this. Every significant single issue with nuclear power over the last 40 years has devolved on either very low, very small dangers (generally vastly blown out of proportion by the media) which resulted from extensive abuse and/or triple-failure points of 60s-70s reactor designs (we’ve learned A LOT about design since then) or, in the case of Chernobyl, a rejected design from the 1950s that has virtually never been used in commercial Western power production.

    It is simple truth that nuclear power is the ONLY known system of commercial-level power production which can even BEGIN to contain ALL its waste products. IF you’re going to take AGW seriously, it is the ONLY system which can be justified in the coming decades without impoverishing the world. And I have news for you: The world is not about to be impoverished. Having seen how it CAN live, it is going to DEMAND that it be allowed to live that way. If The West insists on impoverishing itself, it will succeed in doing that, but this will not change the course of humanity.

  8. Approving Keystone XL will turn off young voters
    http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/obama-needs-anti-keystone-climate

    The conventional wisdom on the political impact of a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline is this: President Obama should approve the project to provide cover for oil industry-friendly, middle-of-the-road Democrats who are in tight races in 2014.

    Here’s the reality: a Keystone XL approval isn’t going to help these candidates any more than the administration’s past handouts to the fossil fuel industry. Big Oil and its allies are planning another round of major spending against Democrats this election cycle, and a thumbs up on Keystone wouldn’t slow them down a bit.

    […] In a recent poll, 70% of young voters said that support for action on climate change will affect who they vote for, and 73% said they’d vote against a politician who wasn’t addressing the problem.
    (continued)

    The future is speaking to their father’s… But do their father’s listen?
    Ahhh… Their wallets speak louder, it appears. At who’s peril?

  10. Comment… er tweet, in moderation.
    398 young people arrested at WH today!
    Bill McKibben

  11. First off, I’m with Bron — Apple is dunderheaded, and depends entirely on a measure of well-meaning fools to keep it afloat. This was not true with Jobs around, because Jobs understood that, in order to be that way, you also had to produce the best damned stuff there was to get people to buy it.

    This is not going to happen — Apple is already dead in the water, it is making the exact same mistakes it made in the 1980s, after it ousted Jobs and stopped making things “insanely great”. It was already on its last legs in the late 1990s before Jobs came back and saved the company by producing the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

    The iPod market is no longer a major profit center. The iPhone market is now roughly 1/3rd of the market. And late last year Apple’s iPads became less than one half of the market. This is in a market where MARKET share is EVERYTHING.

    Wired Issue 5.11 | Nov 1997
    They Coulda Been A Contender
    Jim Carlton, on the full, inside story of Apple’s biggest, most strategic blunder.
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.11/es_apple_pr.html

    At one point, Apple’s Macintosh was THE computer to buy and own. EVERYONE wanted one. But they ignored market share for the bottom line — company stock did well year after year — but they lost market share year after year … and eventually, profits started to fall, the true Death Knell came when the premiere product for the Macintosh, Adobe’s Photoshop, was released for Microsoft & IBM clones before it was released for the Mac, indicating that, even among the artistic types that were the Mac’s bread and butter, core loyalists, the IBM clones had taken over.

    And it’s going to go the same way again — Apple products now represent less than half the market, and Apple is doing nothing to stop that hemorrhaging of its market share — after all, the bottom line on the company is still ok, right?

    Yeah, “just like it was in 1990”.

    I have news for you — Apple is now a walking zombie, and anyone who has money in it should GTFO now. They might have another 3-8 years before the problems start to show — less if there is another downturn, more if there is not. I really give them 5 years before “smart” investors really twig to what is happening.

    The main difference between now and 1997? It’ll be pretty damned impressive if Jobs manages to come back and save the company THIS time.

    1. ” It’ll be pretty damned impressive if Jobs manages to come back and save the company THIS time.”

      If they can arrange for Jobs to come back I am definitely buying their stock – I might even toss the pc-compatible.

  17. @annieofwi at 6:41. What are the Chinese style work conditions that Americans would not tolerate? Details, please. I worked in medium-industry and electronics factories in China from early 2004 through summer 2011. I have worked as a laborer in US factories and am able to compare my US experience with my China experience. The propensity for Chinese workers to routinely achieve 99% attendance rates amazed me. The much ballyhooed suicide rate at the Foxconn site was about a quarter of the China national suicide rate, and about half the US suicide rate.

  18. For the sake of balance…
    … Dinosaur farts on Noah’s Arch.

    Caused the great flood or not…
    … Debate.

    Like that?

  19. I sat and listened to a Native American elder and sacred Shaman through a two hour lecture a few years back during Occupy Seattle, discuss how modern man has lost touch with the future generations. She spoke how elder tribesmen, when considering social change, HOW that social change affects the next TEN GENERATIONS before settling on a final decision. If the outcome made sense for the immediate yet jeopardized any of the progeny of the next TEN GENERATIONS, then the deal would be over, so to speak.

    Today, our society is one where profits over people rules.

    Sad

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