The 'sleeping giant' starts to wake up...

It was another big week for business and sustainability. This interesting commentary from MarketWatch.com following the Time cover story, discusses how climate change is finally a serious business concern, and how companies are tripping over themselves trying to figure out how to address it.

The article points out that “Over the past week alone, Wells Fargo (WFC), UPS (UPS), BP (BP), Nike (NKE), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL), and GM (GM) have put out press releases about their environmental initiatives.”

Maryland became the 8^th state to join RGGI (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative), California introduced legislation that would set a cap on GHG emissions, and utilities and energy intensive industry at a US Senate hearing Tuesday gave broad approval for a federal cap and trade system.

It’s great to see the US finally addressing the issue (unfortunately almost 10 years behind the rest of the world), as it certainly is a prerequisite for the kind of sea-change necessary to tackle the problem.

The late response will make the problem more expensive to deal with – as every long term capital investment in fossil fuel power plants and urban / sub-urban infrastructure that reinforces the need for car travel is essentially throwing money down the drain, hurting our competitive advantage.

But my hope is that there is a silver lining to this – and that would be that because the slow and stubborn response will cost us collectively a lot of money, we will be less likely to continue to push off problems as long as possible, particularly when they are problems we know little about.

In other words, hopefully all of us in the US – our businesses and governments included – will start taking a more holistic approach to assessing the impacts of how we go about meeting our needs. We can start taking a pro-active, upstream, strategic approach to Sustainable Development at home – and I think only in that way can the US hope to hang on to its position as a global leader, and regain its reputation as a respected one.