Behind the beautiful image of a green company that Apple projects with a lot of communication and marketing, the other Apple is hiding near its money for whom the environment is very good, but it is the others who have to pay. The site Popular.info denounces the hypocrisy of Apple and its leaders, Tim Cook in the lead, who on the one hand support the efforts of the American legislator to reduce carbon emissions, while torpedoing them on the other.
Lisa Jackson, vice president of environmental and social initiatives at Apple, called a few days ago with the adoption of the Clean Energy Standard (CES) which aims to decarbonise the electricity sector in the United States by 2035. This provision, which represents a gigantic effort of 150 billion dollars, is part of a larger legislative package currently under discussion in the US Congress.
The principle is simple: the idea is to strongly encourage companies producing electricity to use cleaner sources of energy. You can buy all the electric cars you want, if the energy to drive them comes from coal-fired power stations, the environmental benefit is nil. The Biden administration’s goal is to reduce emissions from the energy sector by 80% by 2030, and by 100% by 2035.
This effort is also supported by a group of companies calling for the establishment of CES, including Apple, which published an open letter to this effect in August. The financing of this huge project involves an increase in the corporate tax rate: it will go from 21% to 26.5%. This is less than the 35% of the previous rate, which had fallen sharply with Donald Trump in 2017.
Obviously, some companies are not happy to have to pay a little more tax. Several of them have joined together in Business Roundtable, which actively campaigns against the legislative package. This lobbying group is paying for Facebook ad campaigns to call on citizens to ask their congressional representative to oppose the bill. The main argument is that the increase in corporate taxation risks having a negative impact on activity and employment …
Surprisingly, this lobbying group has on its board of directors… a certain Tim Cook. The boss of Apple shares this hypocrisy with Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, who is also campaigning for (and against, suddenly) CES. Mary Barra, the boss of General Motors, is in the same case. A double discourse on the part of these leaders, whose real desire to do their part in the fight against global warming can be questioned.
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