Google showed us
again on Tuesday why it tops our ranking
of IT companies’ political policy efforts
on the Cool IT Leaderboard. At an event
hosted at Google’s headquarters, the company’s
Green Energy Czar, Bill Weihl, expressed
how critical the preservation of California’s
climate bill — AB32 — is to innovation and
the state’s economy. Proposition 23, a ballot
initiative backed by oil companies, threatens
to kill the existing climate legislation
if it passes in November.
Google’s Weihl and venture
capitalist Vinod Khosla spoke expansively
about how AB32 supports the growth of California’s
green tech industry and how the law’s suspension
would crush the state’s competitive edge
over other, particularly foreign, tech markets.
Given those consequences, you would think
that all of the tech companies would be
ready to jump in the ring for the law’s
protection. But they haven’t taken to the
airwaves to convince California voters that
voting yes for Prop 23 would kill the clean
tech economy yet.
In the other corner,
two Texas oil companies, Valero and Tesoro,
are the top backers of the ballot initiative
to crush AB32. This pair has four facilities
on the list of the top 15 worst polluters
in California, according to a study by the
Ella Baker Center also released Tuesday.
Fossil fuel companies
obviously stand to lose the most from laws
that aim to reduce global warming pollution,
and they are demonstrating how they will
spend tens of millions of dollars so that
they may continue profiting from dirty energy
production. Meanwhile, the public incurs
the costs of their air pollution, extraction,
spills, and global warming emissions.
Tuesday’s event at the
Googleplex was co-sponsored by the Silicon
Valley Leadership Group, of which all of
the U.S. companies on the Cool IT Leaderboard
are members, but only Google gets leadership
points for putting its brand directly into
the fight. And while the discussion showed
that Google, at least, is on message, it’s
not enough to preach to the choir in Silicon
Valley. We hope to see CEO Eric Schmidt
reengage directly in the broader energy
debate after a prolonged silence this year.
Given that the oil companies
are spending millions to scare voters into
voting for Prop 23, it is no longer an option
for IT companies to isolate themselves from
climate and energy politics. Google seems
to get it. And it’s high time for Google’s
IT peers, such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, and
Dell, to speak out in favor of AB32, as
well as advocate for local, national, and
international policies that will protect
their business pathways and the planet.
