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The stench of hypocrisy is wafting around social networking giant Facebook over its approach to climate change.
Despite consistent requests by NGO Carbon Disclosure Project, the social media giant year after year refuses requests to disclose information that will allow the benchmarking of its greenhouse gas emissions and the action it is taking to mitigate climate change.
Facebook recently became a partner in creating the global digital platform Collectively.org, which has the aim of encouraging young people to take action against climate change.
Facebook, along with the other 28 brands that created the venture, said that “the pace and scale of what’s required now demands new business models, based on radical collaboration with each other, with NGOs and with consumers.”
So how does this rhetoric stack up against Facebook’s actions? When CDP, which acts on behalf of investors holding more than a third of the world’s invested capital, came knocking on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s door to request the data that more than 5,000 other major companies see the value in disclosing, Facebook did not respond.
While Facebook may feel it has its finger on the pulse of the millennials, surely it must recognise that young people hate nothing more than those in authority telling them to do things, which they are failing to act on themselves.
Paul Simpson, CEO of CDP, told Guardian Sustainable Business: “I am pleased to see Facebook increasingly joining coalitions for change such as Collectively.org. I would hope that this is part of a journey they are on that will lead them to get their own house in order, develop an ambitious climate change strategy and be able to communicate it to their investors through CDP and more widely to their users.”
Facebook was unable to comment ahead of publication but last year said the reason it refused to disclose information to CDP is that it “already publicly shares data on our emissions, energy use, and energy sources on an annual basis.”
Its latest report shows its energy use increased in 2013, that coal accounted for 34% of its total energy mix and the percentage of clean and renewable energy had declined over the past two years.
Simpson says there is absolutely no excuse for non-disclosure and the real reason many companies fail to provide information is that they like to tell their own sanitised story rather than stand up to the rigour of independent evaluation and benchmarking.
He also points out the information CDP collects sits on all Bloomberg financial terminals and is being used by investors to benchmark company performance and make investment decisions based on it.
Apple was in a similar position to Facebook last year and I wrote at the time that “it’s clearly time for Apple’s new environmental boss Lisa Jackson, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to get a grip, join the CDP and help the technology giant to rid itself of its aura of arrogance.”
Jackson has done exactly that and in the space of a year has started to address its environmental impacts. “It is great to see Apple accelerating action on climate change this year by investing in renewable energy and disclosing to their shareholders through CDP,” Simpson said.
Facebook is not the only company to refuse to be transparent about its operations. Other major businesses which fail to disclose information to CDP include Amazon, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Caterpillar, General Dynamics, Berkshire Hathaway, Hermes, Prada, Costco, Hutchison Whampoa and Rosneft.
The two most commonly reported reasons for not disclosing through CDP are that the companies already publish CSR information or that they don’t have the resource to complete the questionnaire. This essentially means not having the resource to find the answers to the questions.
A spokesman for Comcast refused to say why the company does not disclose but said it is “dedicated to exploring new opportunities for reducing our environmental footprint. We strive to avoid adverse impact to the environment and to the communities in which we conduct business, though we do not publicly disclose the data CDP has requested.”
Other companies approached failed to respond to Guardian Sustainable Business, including Berkshire Hathaway, Gilead and Amazon.
By contrast, CDP reports that 187 businesses from around the world, including BMW, Centrica, Samsung Electronics, H&M, Unilever, Apple, Google, Microsoft and SAB Miller are demonstrating “a superior approach to climate change mitigation.”
CDP has awarded the companies an A grade in the first global ranking of corporate efforts to mitigate climate change. Collectively the leaders reduced their total absolute emissions by 33m metric tons in the past reporting year, equivalent to turning all London’s car owners into cyclists for two and a half years.
The new global index shows that those companies that exhibit leadership outperform the Bloomberg World Index by 9.6%.
While the 187 companies represent just 9% of the 1,971 companies scored this year, they account for just under half the $50bn of the annual investment by all the companies to reduce carbon emissions.
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