The Profiteer

As the CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt is interested in global warming for only one reason: the bottom line. "Rest assured, I am not tackling climate concerns because it's moral or trendy or good for PR," he says. "The biggest driver for me is business potential: It will accelerate economic growth." In May, Immelt announced that GE is doubling its annual R&D spending on clean technology to $1.5 billion -- developing a dizzying array of wind turbines, hybrid-engine trains, state-of-the-art jet engines, zero-emission coal plants and superefficient home appliances. In return, the forty-nine-year-old chairman expects to double revenues from those same inventions, taking in $20 billion a year by 2010. "Immelt is the tipping point," says Joel Makower of Clean Edge, a leading green-business consulting firm. "Where he goes on climate, industry will follow."

Immelt, whose company is one of the world's biggest polluters, is part of a growing push by industry to cash in on the business opportunities presented by global warming. In October, Wal-Mart unveiled a plan to invest $500 million annually to make its stores and trucks more energy-efficient. Whether such corporate giants follow through on their commitments remains to be seen -- but as companies and consumers search for replacements for fossil fuels, Immelt is banking on GE's ability to supply them with cleaner machines. "We now live in a carbon-constrained world where the amount of CO2 must be reduced," he says. "GE has built a history on solving the world's toughest problems, and this one is no exception."

Immelt majored in math at Dartmouth, where he was an active frat member and Animal House fan, before getting an M.B.A. at Harvard and going to work for GE at age twenty-seven. As CEO, he has ordered the company to boost its own energy efficiency by thirty percent over the next seven years, and to reduce its projected pollution by forty percent. To the shock of environmental advocates and industry colleagues, he has also called for a federal policy to reduce global warming.

"Industry cannot solve the problems of the world alone," he says. "We need to work in concert with government."

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