In public, Apple claims it supports legislation to combat climate change.
Jackson, now Apple’s VP for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, released a statement asserting that “the urgent threat of climate change is a key priority” for the company. Jackson called on Congress and the Biden administration to take “urgent action” to pass “climate policies that quickly decarbonize our electric grid.” Specifically, Jackson said Apple supports “the enactment of a Clean Energy Standard (CES) that would decarbonize the power sector by 2035.”
However, now that said standard is actually on the verge of being implemented, Apple, behind closed doors, is changing its tune.
The goal of the Clean Energy Standard in the reconciliation package would be to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector by 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. It’s the precise policy that Jackson said Apple supported in her statement.
[…]Given this stance, you might be surprised that Apple is part of a “massive lobbying blitz” to kill the reconciliation package and its Clean Energy Standard.
Why, then, is Apple now suddenly fighting the very standard it was championing?
The ads focus on the funding mechanism for the package, which includes increasing the corporate tax rate by a few percentage points — from 21% to 26.5%. The rate would still be far lower than the 35% corporate tax rate in place prior to the 2017 tax cuts. In 2020, Apple had $67 billion in profits and an effective tax rate of 14.4%.
Ah, of course. Apple wants to be regarded as an environmentally responsible company, but only if it’s free and doesn’t cost them anything. Apple’s hypocrisy knows no bounds.
I am loathe to defend Apple here, but the logic being suggested we follow here is:
– Reconciliation act contains many provisions, including some portions related to climate change, but also some with major increases in the corporate tax rate.
– Apple has previously made public statements in favor of climate change legislation.
– Apple’s CEO is part of a lobbying group that opposes the passage of the reconciliation act (and even though the lobbying group specifically talks about corporate tax rates, they must be against the bill because it contains climate change provisions because reasons).
– Apple must be secretly be standing in opposition to climate change legislation.
It seems clear to me that there are large leaps in logic being suggested here. It seems much more likely t that the lobbying group opposes the bill because of the increase in corporate taxes, rather than it’s climate change provisions specifically. Also, tying Apple to the actions of this lobbying group makes little sense. There are so many relationships within the corporate world that it’s inevitable that companies are sometimes tied to groups that might work against their stated interests.
This was bad journalism all the way around. It’s assigning motives to a company’s actions with little to no evidence to support those conclusions.
Now, congress is largely to blame for the problems we have in this regard, since they insist on tying together non-related changes to law into large, unreadable bills, so that when someone opposes “humongous bill A” because they don’t like tax increases, they can point at that opposition and say “THIS PERSON HATES THE ENVIRONMENT!!!”
Legislation in this country is just too damn big. Bills should be short and cover a specific issue; they should be short enough that a person with an average reading speed can read the thing in 15 minutes or less. But then it would be more difficult to manipulate the people.
jasutton,
I think most people, including the politicians involved would agree with you in principal. But in practice, the bipartisan bickering doesn’t allow small reasonable bills to pass unless there’s a sense of political urgency. And for better or worse earmarks that have little to do with the bill are an effective way to get the bill passed.
It’s a lousy process, but politics have evolved this way because often a yay or nay vote is the only power a representative holds. And so it becomes a bargaining chip in quid pro quo arrangements that make zero sense for the bill, but make sense for the representatives tasked with voting.
Of course Apple is fighting this bill because it raises their taxes. My post makes that 100% clear.
The headline: “… Apple lobbies against climate change legislation”
But the actual content of the article only finds enough information to show that a lobbying group (not Apple) is lobbing against higher corporate taxes, not lobbying against climate change legislation. The rest of the argument is “if you’re against A, then you must also be against B”, plus a little guilt by association. The context of my comment above makes this distinction, and the reason it’s important, clear: the legislative branch seems unable to construct laws that constituents want passed, so they combine things that would otherwise be unwinnable in with things that you would be mocked for opposing (similar to how Apple was using the “what about the children” argument to attempt to excuse their new privacy invasions a few weeks ago).
Alfman seems to have caught the larger point of my comment. His response boils down to “well, we’d never be able to pass anything at all if they didn’t do things that way.” That may be so, but where legislation is concerned, I’m inclined to have less action altogether (as we do have a good number of laws and regulations at this point) than to have all sorts of awful mixed in with a few palatable dinner scraps.
Maybe you made that point in your post, but your actual words in your post (i.e. excluding those you quote) are:
and then
and then
and finally
Basically, you have latched onto Apple not wanting to pay more tax, and decided it means they are fighting against climate change legislation. It is, at the very least, intellectually incoherent (and that is the best thing I could say about it).
@mkone
It’s not a stretch by Thom at all to require due diligence and sanitising your relationships. Apple are not short of access to lawyers and investment analysts. There is no “Apple didn’t know” defence. With regard to governance I also don’t buy the “this is how it works around these parts” argument. It’s more of the same cowardly blowhards hiding behind each other. Weak.
I think Tim Cook is too desperate to be seen as part of the establishment and “one of the boys”. Almost all of his noticeable big decisions have been odd in one way or another. He’s also an American and they’re all institutionalised into needing bigger piles of $$$ because that is how their game is rigged. If you don’t you’re a looooooser. Or dead.
In the UK after the extremist Tory coup and Brexit we’ve had children going hungry and avoidable fuel price rises while home insulation grants have been abolished. Some sewerage plants have been pumping raw sewerage into rivers again. That’s what happens when you have nutters swallowing a pick and mix neo-American philosophy. As for climate change the “Prime Minister” embarassed himself and the nation at the UN with a cringing attempt at being “funny” while talking big on the environment yet on the decisions where it matters are chasing the easy money and leaving everyone else to do the work and pay the bill not unlike what Apple are trying to pull.
Know thy enemy. Evil wears many faces.
HollyB,
Well, you need to understand that nobody here is trying to justify it, we know it’s lousy. I literally said this already. We’re only observing this is how it works in practice.
@Alfman
I suggest you consider the “how it works in practice” and devil’s advocate whataboutery is itself a form of not paying attention and letting through the evilness on the nod. You need your stratigic views and analysis up front which is what many in you here don’t do which trundles onto the topic of technical people are not necessarily good at management or marketing and not too hot about politics.
A large part of how the far right in recent years have got away with it is by taking advantage of the model I have just described. Some journalists have clicked to this. The first big problem is the phrasing of headlines which the dubious position is given primacy. The second is a fundamental lack of integrity i.e. cut and paste journalism or client journalism or yellow journalism. Only this week a former NYT journalist put out a big explainer on social media detailing all the failures of journalistic practice.
I thinka lot of people do care about standards and integrity and critical thinking which is where politics as a process needs to be understood as well as things like control and censorship. All three elements go together and again it’s something the far right make a song and dance about like they are the victims.
Bitrot is a bit of a myth but a problem as people take their eye off the ball and standards and ecosystem drift. Similar might be said of corruption. This is why things like mood and emphasis and timing matter in politics. As with coding there is no such thing as a simple one line code change. The devil is in the detail. This is why you need to look at the big picture, details, form, tone, and through something all at the same time.
As an example I hand you a knife and ask you “What is this”. You may treat it as a deep philosophical exercise or you may treat it as a test of lateral thinking. Now take another look and notice an almost invisible fracture running throughout the entire blade and ask again “What is it’s purpose”? The same could be true of a rock or anything else. To be useful or create loss of function and twisting to become damage at an awkward moment? Perhaps it is the baddy who slips and breaks their neck? Sometimes these things are difficult to discern.
So you re-read from the top of this post and the words take on a different meaning as you read though again. Layers unpeel like an onion until the truth or at least a goodly illusion of it is revealed, hah, like magic.
There have been times when I’ve had to read reports or guidelines and similar a minimum of 3-6 times to actually discover what is being said and it’s not always obvious on the first reading. Sometimes the way something is written can nudge perception so you interpret text one way but when you actually check what is actually being said it says something a bit different. It’s a sneaky way,perhaps concious or unconcious, deliberate or perhaps second guessing a remote boss for career preservation reasons or they consulted off the record with the wrong person, some people can push their interpretation and have people misread a document. Sometimes documents come in sets for different audiences and you have to read all of them to find out what is being said and what is important is not always in the document a particular target audience woudl choose. This is another reason to be careful and examine everything closely first and read around the subject. You may also need to check what came before and supplementary material. Again, how this extra material is treated or referenced can give an indication as to what is going on and why but not directly provable if you relied on the primary document.
Whether it’s coding or art or lawyering or politcs most people only ever see the point of the spear. They don’t see everything behind it or what came before or ripple effects. To be fair most people lack expertise and time. Lawyers are not coders are not politcians so we are all somebody else’s idiot.
HollyB,
I criticize the process all of the time, but we can’t be ignorant of the political factors that are responsible for the system we have. Understanding the “evil” is not the same as letting it off the hook. It is important to be informed.
I agree with this. The ex-president dominated headlines with outragiousness, and the media gobbled it up. Had they not given him so much free airtime over others, he would have likley lost in the primary election, much less the general election. The media collectively gave him nearly all their airtime. They allowed this to happen because they too benefit from click bait and outrageous headlines. The normal, less absurd politicians just couldn’t generate clicks.
Politicians are good at getting elected, that’s their primary skill, but often times they’re not very qualified at running things. IMHO it’s good for a politician to rely on the expertise of others, but in reality some of them make the whole job about image & politics and aren’t terribly concerned or knowledgeable about how to actually make things better.
Strong disagree. I think that makes perfect sense. You should also be dubious about why any person or entity says they oppose legislation. Its happened through out our countries history, ” Oh I would support civil rights, but I also support state rights and this goes against state rights” , “Or I would I agree we should have good health care for everyone, but not this because I don’t like government control”
Any sane entity that wants to maintain public respectability will find a way to dislike a bill that promotes the common good without disavowing that goal.
It is not a major tax increase. It is a modest tax increase, and still lower than the already quite low corporate tax rate three years ago.
“21% to 26.5%”
Going from 21% tax rate to 26.5% an increase of about 26%. If your taxes went up that much year-over-year, I doubt you’d use the term “modest.”
jasutton,
Yeah, but that’s also out of context because the federal government is loosing billings/trillions of dollars annually due to the corporate tax cuts not so long ago. Corporations made out like bandits with their hefty tax cuts and over the course of a couple years they’ve more than doubled their net worth.
http://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-worth
http://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-worth
http://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net-worth
http://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-worth
etc.
Of course, when republicans pass the cuts, they tend not to do the harder work of actually finding ways to pay for them, so the government invariably turns to more debt.
When the economy is good, you want to see the debt go down. That was the case under Clinton,
https://zfacts.com/national-debt/
A healthy government is better prepared to handle a crisis without going into debt. However the republicans got it in their heads that we need tax cuts in good years, and the national debt has never recovered. A bad economic year is the worst time to raise taxes, yet people are most dependent on government services when they’re down. Regardless, the government is down by trillions due to corporate tax cuts of the prior administration. The choice is to cut services, raise taxes, or increase the deficit. We’re presently facing the prospects of a US government shutdown (as in this week), meaning government employees will stop coming to work, contractors will not get paid, etc. This is not healthy at all. I think we can objectively say that the corporate tax cuts were never going to be economically sound, but they happened due to greed. And now corporations are bickering about paying taxes that are still lower than what they were before.
Given lower corporate taxes, we can project these companies will be worth many more trillions in a few years – money that would have funded the government just a couple years back. Ultimately the public at large is going to have to pay more to cover the share not being paid by corporations. It’s naive to just raise the debt, the amount of Interest we pay on the national debt is staggering,
I think you’re missing the point Thom is making here. Apple talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. If they were truly as committed to climate change action as they publicly state, they would follow up on that statement by being willing to pay more taxes to support their position. By lobbying against this bill, Apple is saying that they don’t really mean it when they say they support climate change action, or they would, as the saying goes, “put their money where their mouth is”. I think Thom made it abundantly clear in both his headline and body that this is exactly what is happening.
That is a non-sequitur. This is not a climate change bill. This is a general bill that increases tax rates but happens to have some provisions on climate change.
If this had been a bill reducing taxes, but containing the same climate provisions, would you still think it was a good bill?
The problem is with politicians. Why don’t politicians straight up bring the climate provisions in a separate bill and get that passed?
I completely agree with you that pork is a problem in all US legislation, even bills I personally would benefit from. I feel as you do that bills should be laser-focused, and any riders should be directly related to the main subject of the bill.
With that said, I still believe that Apple should stand behind their stated principles and either stop lobbying against the bill, or else tell the truth and say out loud and in public the reason they are lobbying it: Money means more to them than their so-called principles. I mean, they are a business and it makes sense that money is the most important thing, but they should at least be honest about it.
@Morgan
A follow on is a lot of different and even smaller businesses may support the idea in principle but are simply outgunned by these massive companies with big warchests. Their own employees and advisors may even disagree with the companies behind closed doors lobbying. I’ve heard a few UK business people say from tiem to time they would like to do better in terms of quality or fairness but the fact is there are too many sharks about and they would risk their own profitability which whould put them at risk of going under. Whether this is true or not is another thing but they certainly believe it, or say they believe it. And this is where good regulations can budge the needle and why it is important for democratic discussion to have stories like this out in the open.
codewrangler,
It sounds like you’re trolling, but global warming is only looking at averages for the whole planet. Portions of the planet will still get colder even as the planet warms. For example you can have melting ice caps create colder currents despite a net rise in temperature. Take a glass of ice water, the entire glass is constantly heating up even as the water you drink is cooling down. These types of phenomenon are why they started emphasizing climate change instead of global warming.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
“Legislation in this country is just too damn big. Bills should be short and cover a specific issue; they should be short enough that a person with an average reading speed can read the thing in 15 minutes or less. But then it would be more difficult to manipulate the people.”
I think part of the problem is compromise. I’ll vote for X if you vote for Y. That’s not a bad thing in general thats just how deals are often made. its kind of like restricting trades in American baseball to only involve two players or two teams. Sometimes you just need these massive complicated trades to get things done, and no one is 100%b satisfied but in the end the deal itself makes sense to everyone for different reasons.
And if we’re solving huge problems just by saying they should be solved, then I think we need to solve the representation crisis due to Gerrymandering as well as the unequal population of the states, we don’t have a government that represents the will of the people. So lets solve that first, then get back to how they are voting on things.
I have no interest in the nonsense passing for governance in the US, or the UK for that matter and I live there. It’s just so bad now someobody needs to put the UK out of its misery. But the fact is the major policy areas need firm and clear lines drawn, and abuses of power and stochastic terror in all its forms needs to be dealt with and this includes three steps removed indirect lobbying collectives.
So Apple are the new Koch Industries? This wouldn’t surprise me if true. They all got big on momentum from the post WWII settlements and are now canabalising their own society while trying to drag the rest of the world down the plughole.
I don’t get some of this outrage, or the shock, that Apple doesn’t really believe in climate change despite what it’s “sales marketing” claims!
Should we be shocked that a company that sells you an unnecessary new gadget year after year, drip feeding you with segmented and piecemeal upgrades, and was caught deliberately degrading the performance of old hardware, might be gaming the system at the environments expense!
Next thing will be a company like Tesla inventing a disposable electric personal transit device!
But what am I supposed to do, I want to be the next Kanye, and I need a smart thermostat in everyone of my fifty-two rooms!
cpcf
You nailed it. It’s 100% marketing and is innate to the concept of a public company. There is a control loop connected to share price that ejects any CEO or board with persistent principles of any kind, other than profit. Founders can be different. Apple does not have those any more.
…. and the public are the root cause of us trashing the planet. We all want nice things.
Having said all that, social media backlashes against bad behaviour have to continue. It is all we have so we have to use it, until the system evolves. Marx had a view that capitalism had stalled history. Apple, Google, Volkswagen are all Standard Oil.
lapx432,
Yeah there are even some who would go as far as to suggestion that if it’s not illegal, nothing is off the table in the interest of profits. I don’t like that opinion and think greed is harmful, but there isn’t much I can do about those who hold that belief.
Yes, consumers definitely deserve blame for creating waste. But I wouldn’t necessarily say they are the “root cause”, at least not in every case. There are factors like planned obsolescence, devices that are unreasonably difficult to upgrade, repair and update. These usually go against owner interests. Corporations deserve most if not all of the blame for that. Some consumers have been fighting for changes for a long time, it’s hard to convince corporations to stop waste when waste == profits.
Alfman
I agree. Consumers have an innate behaviour that has been exploited to make matters worse by corporations. It could be the opposite but is probably going to need regulation. That has worked for safety, chemicals and other things in the past. It would be better if there was no need but that is probably naive. Or that is some kind of post capitalism.