Good morning.
Walmart and GM are the two companies I most often mention when asked to name those that are taking climate change seriously. Both are heartland U.S. companies; neither can fairly be characterized as “woke.” Yet the first has adopted an ambitious program called Project Gigaton to push its suppliers to adopt Net Zero emissions-reduction plans, and the second has pledged to eliminate all tailpipe emissions from new cars by 2035.
So I was pleased to see the executives responsible for ESG policies at the two companies—Walmart’s Kathleen McLaughlin and GM’s Kristen Siemen—join us for our first Fortune Impact Initiative, held in partnership with EVERFI. I asked McLaughlin if suppliers were required to participate in Project Gigaton. Her response:
“So this has always been a debate at Walmart—do we require? Or do we just make it an invitation?…We decided to make it voluntary and see how far we got. Well you mentioned we had 4,500 suppliers in the program as of a year ago. We’ll be disclosing our new number and it's even bigger. And those suppliers represent over 70% of our business.”
Walmart, of course, is notorious for forcing suppliers to cut costs, so I asked McLaughlin whether some of them are saying to her: “I can cut costs or I can save the planet, but I can’t do both.”
“What we found is a couple of things. First of all, in the early days, especially, most of the interventions save suppliers money. That's one of the reasons we have such high participation. Energy efficiency, these days even transitioning to renewables—that’s accretive. Eliminating packaging—that’s accretive. Shifting to better packaging material—that’s good. So there are a lot of accretive steps companies can take. And the second thing is just innovation. How do we do it differently.”
I asked Siemen whether GM’s bold 2035 goal was actually achievable, given the relatively modest rate of adoption of EVs today.
“We talk a lot about the need to have ‘everybody in’ during the transition. We cannot do it alone. It's going to take public and private, it's going to take our suppliers, our employees—all working together to come up with solutions to make this transition. But it’s a reality. It's happening fast.”
The Impact Initiative was held in Atlanta, and former mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young joined us, along with John Hope Bryant, to talk about the role the business community can play in creating opportunity for the disadvantaged. Young recounted the story of how Coca-Cola threatened to leave the city if the business community refused to honor Martin Luther King after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. You can watch the full interview here.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
