By Don Skinner

When Earth Day 1970 jolted the American public into awareness that we face serious environmental problems, not everyone was convinced. Indeed, some were so un-persuaded that they went on the offensive, sometimes heavy-handedly.

I recall (vividly) being threatened with bodily harm in the hall of the Minnesota Capital by two representatives of a beverage-can manufacturer. They were angry because students enrolled in a class I taught at Hamline University had given documented testimony that the flooding of the market with non-returnable beverage containers by giant beer producers had forced closure of half-a-dozen family-owned breweries and killed hundreds of jobs.

Corporations spent huge sums trying to persuade the public that acceding to environmental demands would destroy the economy. To a large degree, their campaign failed; but it convinced a lot of people that American business was the enemy.

That’s decreasingly so. It’s too early to declare the conversion complete. But recent corporate actions suggest a seismic shift, an awakening among progressive business people that harks back to Franklin Roosevelt’s cautionary advice that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Increasingly, corporate leaders believe that dread of committing to green technology because it will cause us to fall behind the rest of the world economically is precisely what will cause us to fall behind the rest of the world economically.

To the contrary, there is growing awareness in executive offices and board rooms — including some in the developing world — that confronting global climate change is less drawback than opportunity. Industrial planners increasingly are factoring in the realization that improving energy efficiency in ways that reduce global-warming emissions will generate serious economic growth and millions of new jobs.

The question is no longer whether it can happen, but who’s aboard a train that’s already leaving the station. Denmark is illustrative. Hit badly by the 1973 Arab oil boycott, Denmark recognized that economic stability in an age of petro-politics is a contradiction. So they invested heavily in wind generation, in consequence of which tiny Denmark now produces more than 40 percent of the world’s wind turbines, generates 30 percent of its own electricity from wind power, and garners capital by exporting its excess power, primarily to Germany and Norway.

Yet just as such developments are blooming around the world, U.S. political leaders seem to have lost faith in America’s historic technological genius. Rather than embrace the opportunity to contribute solutions, our government has busied itself setting up roadblocks to international cooperation — on which the Obama administration’s record is only marginally better than that of George Bush.

Ironically, into that vacuum, “the enemy” (in the persons of some of America’s largest corporations) are riding. To be sure, they are motivated more by old-fashioned capitalist avarice that by moral outrage at the devastating potential of climate change. So be it. Dave Roncolato, friend and colleague during our years together in Allegheny Campus Ministry, tempers such laments with sound theology: “God accepts mixed motives.” By their fruits (not the rhetoric of their annual stockholder reports) ye shall know them. If their fruits contribute to solutions, I for one will eat them.

So (even as it gags me) three cheers for Wal-Mart, America’s largest corporation which, perceiving that cutting waste enhances profit, saved $26 million last year by equipping its truck cabs with small, independent power units. Now, instead of running the truck’s engine to heat or cool the cabs during mandatory 10-hour layovers, the small units do the job. Care to guess how much unburned diesel fuel that $26 million represents? More than nine million gallons, by my estimate. The company also is working to double the fuel efficiency of its fleet by 2015, which will save a whopping $200 million at the pump.

Coca-Cola, recognizing that global water supplies are threatened as global climate change shifts rainfall patterns, advances desertification, and hampers agriculture (to name but a few) is working to make its bottling plants water-neutral — that is, to return as much water to the environment as it consumes in its products. Since all Coke is produced locally — that is, in the countries where it is consumed — the company’s actions affect water supplies on a global scale.

And one financial corporation, moving its headquarters onto the 30th floor of Manhattan’s Empire State Building, remodeled the entire floor with the result that its energy costs — and therefore its environmental impact — were cut 30 percent from their former, stand-alone headquarters. Proving again that nothing succeeds like success, the Empire State Building’s owners were so impressed that plans are being drawn to apply those techniques to the entire building.

It’s unwise to cheer these movements more loudly than they merit. On the other hand, as developments go, these are more than a little encouraging — and a sizable jump ahead of where we were just a decade ago.

Skinner, a native of Meadville, is chaplain emeritus of Allegheny College and a longtime environmentalist.