GM Receives CDP Top Rating for Climate Disclosure and Performance

by RP Siegel
Oct 2, 2014 9:00 AM ET
Campaign: CSR Blogs

Justmeans

There is a now-famous quote attributed to Charles Wilson, who, in 1953 was the CEO of General Motors. What Wilson supposedly said was, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

While that was never entirely true, GM has recently been doing some things that have been good for America, and the rest of the world, which has also been good for themselves as well.

What GM has been doing is taking action to minimize their carbon emissions and being highly transparent in their reporting of those actions. Enough so that CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, gave them a perfect score of 100 in their 2014 assessment of all the companies in the S&P 500 based and disclosure and performance.

The CDP report, entitled “Climate Action and Profitability,” was undertaken to provide a massive group of investors representing some $92 trillion in assets with information on the climate actions and disclosure practices of all the companies in the S&P 500. Surveys were sent out to all 500 companies. A total of 348 responded. The report found strong correlation between climate action and profitability, specifically, return on equity (ROE).

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Image courtesy of General Motors under Creative Commons license

RP Siegel, author and inventor, shines a powerful light on numerous environmental and technological topics. He has been published in business and technical journals and has written three books. His third, co-authored with Roger Saillant, is Vapor Trails, an eco-thriller that is being adapted for the big screen. RP is a professional engineer – and a prolific inventor, with 50 patents, numerous awards, and several commercial products. He is president of Rain Mountain LLC and is an active environmental advocate in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y. In addition to Justmeans, he writes for Triple Pundit, ThomasNet News, and Energy Viewpoints, occasionally contributing to Mechanical Engineering, Strategy + Business, and Huffington Post. You can follow RP on Twitter, @RPSiegel.