Apple's CEO to anti-green investors: Don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya

[thatcrazycajun]

This past Friday, Apple Inc. held its annual stockholders' meeting at its Cupertino, CA HQ...where head honcho Tim Cook delivered, as Matt Smith's now-departed 11th Doctor might have put it, "one whacking great kick up the backside" to polluter-backed deniers of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and its effects on Earth's climate.

Now, Mr. Cook, successor to (and protegé of) the late former chief exec and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, is not, unlike the latter, known for outbursts of temper. But when one Justin Danhof, a stooge for the right-wing noise machine representative from the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think-tank and major Apple institutional investor, put forth a proposal for voting that Apple discontinue its environmental sustainability programs, fearing that they would hurt the firm's return on investment (ROI), and disclose the costs of said programs to investors...well, our boy Timmy was (quite rightly, in Your Humble's view) appalled at the demand of Danhof and his ilk that Apple put profits ahead of people and the planet.

And so he did what just about no corporate bigwig worth his stock options would ever even dream of doing: he totally lost it, told the guy off and said if he didn't like the programs, he should "not be in this stock." No, you're not hallucinating, nor is that a typo, nor am I making this up. You can read all about it here. Or here. And even here. A reporter for MacObserver described the incident as "the only time I can recall ever seeing Tim Cook angry."

I'll grant you Apple is in a much better position to pick and choose its stockholders than most publicly-traded companies, sitting as it is on what Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed once referred to as "gobs of liquid cash." But to tell anyone to sell off or not buy your company's shares, for any reason, is a thought guaranteed to curdle the blood of the denizens of most blue-chip concerns' C-suites...and set the bean-counters, industry analysts and business press harrumphing about fiduciary responsibility and "shareholder value," herp derp. And indeed, the Center immediately put out a press release denouncing the tech giant for its insistence on aligning itself with "organizations that don't appear to have the best interests of Apple's investors in mind."

I would submit that Apple has even more of an obligation than most companies to remediate its environmental negative effects, given that (a) many of its products contain metals and chemicals toxic not only to users but to the workers who make them, and hence cannot be disposed of the same way you'd toss a used tissue in the landfill; and (b) it has repeatedly been cited by enviro groups such as Greenpeace for doing a poor job of same. So major kudos to Mr. Cook for honoring his mentor's memory and showing some spine...and a rap (or two) across the knuckles with a heavy metal ruler to Mr. Danhof and his fellow minions of the 0.01% for continuing to promulgate the utterly baseless notion that corporate social responsibility and profitability must be mutually exclusive—a canard companies such as Apple and the ones on this list have been disproving for years, and in some cases decades.

"I am thinking of liquidating, in advance, the next character who says to me, 'Well, what difference does it make if we are atom-bombed — you gotta die sometime!' I shall shoot him dead, blow through the barrel, and say, 'You asked for it, chum.' Conceding that we will all die some day, is that a reason why I should let this grinning ape drag me along toward disaster just because he will take no thought of tomorrow?"
—Robert A. Heinlein, "Pie from the Sky," Expanded Universe, 1980
(Substitute "if pollution makes Earth uninhabitable" for "if we are atom-bombed" in that quote and you'll see why I chose it.)

Comments

[emiofbrie.livejournal.com]

...and so far this has had no negative impact on Apple's stock price :)

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

yeah, that was truly magnificent. more power to him!