(4 of 5)
Despite Immelt's pledge that it's a new green day at GE, it would be a mistake to think the company has quit protecting its less eco-friendly interests. GE has a history of opposing environmental regulations that don't suit the firm. In 2000, superstar lawyer Laurence Tribe asked the U.S. Supreme Court, on GE's behalf, to throw out EPA standards for smog and soot (the court declined). In 2003, GE was part of an industry coalition that lobbied for revised EPA regulations allowing utilities and refineries to modernize their oldest and dirtiest facilities, in some cases without adding new pollution controls (a federal appeals court last month upheld the revised regulations). GE is currently challenging enforcement provisions of the Superfund law, also via Tribe. The company bears at least partial responsibility for 87 Superfund sites around the country--a stretch of the Hudson River being the most famous--a legacy of its industrial past. If GE wins its case, the Superfund law would be gutted, contends Kit Kennedy, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. GE, she says, would have "infinite opportunities for legal tangles and delays before a cleanup order could be issued."
On the most incendiary environmental issue, dredging the Hudson of PCBs, GE lobbyists have been unrelenting. One of them, Roger France, is the former chief of staff to Representative Charles Taylor, who received $8,250 from GE for his 2004 re-election. At the company's request, the North Carolina Republican inserted language in a spending bill calling for the National Academy of Sciences to study PCB-contaminated sites and produce a new cost-benefit analysis of dredging, which critics say GE could use to curtail the Hudson cleanup. GE has long insisted that the prudent course of action on the Hudson is to let sleeping PCBs lie. After complaints from environmentalists and New York politicians, including Senator Hillary Clinton (who has received $45,800 from GE since 1999), the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to call off the study. The issue will be decided later this year.
Told of the Taylor amendment, Immelt remarked, "I wasn't even aware that's the case ... We are who we are." GE would continue to defend its interests, he added. GE has reserved the cash for the Hudson cleanup, estimated to cost $500 million, and is cooperating with the EPA on a project design, he says. Nonetheless, the dredging operation, ordered in 2002 and scheduled to start in 2006, was recently delayed by a year. And GE may still legally challenge an EPA order to perform the cleanup or sue the agency to recoup costs.