Some executives believe the myth that going green is expensive—and I don’t blame them. When Conservative MP John Baird was Environment Minister, he told a 2007 Canadian Senate hearing that meeting our Kyoto goals would manufacture a recession. I ran into John in Toronto shortly thereafter and asked if he’d seen the just-released McKinsey & Company study showing that 40 per cent of the CO2 we have to cut in North America to meet our Kyoto goals would be highly profitable, and if society invested those profits in the next lowest-cost solutions, we’d get all the way to achieving the Kyoto targets at no cost to society.
He hadn’t seen the study and wasn’t interested when I offered to send it to him.