Word: hsbc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tatas, the Ambanis, the Godrejs--all began in Bombay. The city's stock exchanges account for 92% of the country's total share turnover, and the nation's central bank and hundreds of brokerages and investors have set up their Indian headquarters there, including such global powerhouses as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. Bombay's port handles half of India's trade, and its southern business district is one of the centers of the global outsourcing boom. India's music industry and much of its media are based in Bombay, as is India's Hindi film industry, Bollywood...
...nose for where votes and profits lie. State and local lawmakers have started taking action to curb emissions, and major corporations are doing the same. Wal-Mart has begun installing wind turbines on its stores to generate electricity and is talking about putting solar reflectors over its parking lots. HSBC, the world's second largest bank, has pledged to neutralize its carbon output by investing in wind farms and other green projects. Even President Bush, hardly a favorite of greens, now acknowledges climate change and boasts of the steps he is taking to fight it. Most of those steps, however...
...certain the reductions being offered are real. "You could end up spending a lot of money on something that didn't exist, or had been sold to somebody else already," Sullivan says. Besides, carbon neutrality in itself is not going to head off global warming. The steps HSBC has taken are a good start, says Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth in London. "But what are they going to do to minimize the impact of their operations...
...Sullivan has an answer for that. Under the Carbon Management Task Force he set up in 2004, HSBC plans to boost investment in energy efficiency to cut emissions by 5% by 2007, using measures like automatically switching off staff PCs after hours. The bank will also be buying more of its electricity from green sources-the kind not generated from fossil fuels. Once it has come to grips with its own direct impacts, Sullivan suggests, HSBC may start offering advice to other firms interesting in offsetting their own emissions...
...Meanwhile, HSBC has already set its sights even higher. "There's nothing to stop us being carbon negative," says Sullivan, comparing HSBC's CO2 emissions to a monthly paycheck and offset credits to monthly expenses. "We could make purchases from time to time that will either take us back down to zero, or will take us negative for a bit and then we would come up again," he says. "Sometimes you're in credit, and sometimes you're in deficit." Now that's a bank talking...