The Power Player

You wouldn't expect the cutthroat CEO of one of the country's largest utilities to propose a tax on his own pollution -- but that's exactly what Paul Anderson of Duke Energy is doing. Anderson wants to slow global warming by giving industry an incentive to go green -- levying a "carbon tax" on their emissions of climate-warming gases. Since Duke burns 17 million tons of coal each year, the tax would encourage the North Carolina power company to replace its aging generators with newer, cleaner facilities that run on wind or natural gas. "It gives you the flexibility to make intelligent investment choices," says Anderson.

Many of Anderson's colleagues in the energy industry consider the carbon tax "a high-cost proposal for something that we're not even sure is real." But Anderson has no doubt that global warming is real: He witnessed the damage himself in 1999, when he was CEO of what is now the world's largest mining company, in a chopper flying over one of his operations in New Guinea. "I saw that the glaciers had shrunk to practically nothing," he says. "It was a heck of a dramatic way of understanding that something is actually happening here."

In the normally staid utility industry, Anderson is something of a maverick -- an energy czar who has been invited to captain Greenpeace's ship, the Rainbow Warrior. The son of a nuclear-plant worker, he jokingly refers to himself as Bart Simpson. But Anderson, 60, doesn't kid around about global warming: The beauty of a carbon tax, he says, is that it's a "no regrets" policy: "If somebody tomorrow were to discover that global climate change isn't real, the carbon tax still would have resulted in higher-performance machinery, more conscientious executives and healthy debate in the industry. Better yet, it would have reduced our dependence on foreign oil. At the end of the day you'd say, 'Well, that wasn't a bad deal anyway.' "

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