Business, Wisconsin, Sustainability . A Comment.

I am at the annual conference of the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Conference. This year it is in Neenah. Very good conference. Learned alot, etc.
But what i want to write about was a question put to a panel this a.m., and the interesting response. I do not mean to get political, and i do not think i am doing so, actually. This is about reality, and business, not politics.
The panel was on identifying and using metrics. The panel was comprised of three of Wisconsin's premier businesses; Johnson Controls, MillerCoors and SC Johnson.

One of the questions went something like this.
In the recent Wisconsin elections, a couple of the folks elected do not accept that climate change is happening or, that the primary cause is human activity. How do political views like that affect your sustainability & climate change strategies?

All three said that those particular political opinions were irrelevant to their businesses. They all said the views of a few politicians do not change the reality of climate change and the human cause. They said they had stockholders, thousands of employees, and millions of customers depending on them. All of them then explained why adapting to climate change and how their sustainability plans were key to their businesses. The women from MillerCoors spoke at the greater length, about how being their business being totally dependent of water and agricuture affected them. Johnson Controls of course has new revenue streams related to the climate problem. SC Johnson discussed how they were working on compliance with the Walmart Sustainability Index. He added that Walmart is doing it to drive down cost now and in the future.

Because of the dollars spent during elections and such (primarily by the fossil energy sector and those entities supporting them), we often forget that business is now probably the biggest sustainability driver and how sustainability is the key innovation driver, in most sectors.

One panelist on another subject was the owner of a 150 year old small business (Kranz, Inc.). He flat out said that he did not know if his historic company would have weathered the recession if they had not implemented an aggressive and creative sustainability plan before it hit, and his customers could still afford them.