How green we need?

I was reading the article in WSJ on Friday 2008 about Wal-Mart and GE’s opinions and comments about environmental issues at the ECO;nomics conference. They are trying to develop and use clean technology in their business, to reduce the damage to the environment. They pointed out the impetus for the company in doing all this isn’t just to please environmentalists, but to save money. I think this is good way of thinking about the pollution issues in business world. Previously, people always blamed the industry for only striving for money and productivity, but ignoring the environment. On the industry side, they have their cost-cutting and competition concerns, which are also understandable for them and for we customers. Now if technology innovation, environmental concerns can be driven by money, the situation may be easier.

However, I was also thinking about how green we want from companies, to which extent everyone would be satisfied, who should be involved to decide that and how? According to the stakeholder theory, companies should take everyone into account when making decisions about the business. It’s definitely not easy.

CO2 quota plan for companies and countries is a great start. Actually, there is a new business arising about trading the CO2 quota between companies which don’t use all and the ones need more. However, still countries and companies argue about how much they should get, and what should be based on when deciding the quota, for examples, developing countries vs developed countries, high populated vs low populated.