Starbucks Offers Lip Service to Climate Commitments While CEO Commutes in Private Jet

Washington, D.C. — At today’s Starbucks annual shareholder meeting, a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) will present Proposal 8, requesting an annual emissions congruency report. FEP’s proposal is timely, as Starbucks stakeholders wonder about the apparent discrepancy between the company’s public virtue signaling and its own CEO’s carbon emissions.

Stefan Padfield

“Starbucks touts its commitment to mitigating the impacts of climate change. However, the company has allowed its new CEO to commute weekly from his Newport Beach, California home to its Seattle headquarters — more than 2,000 miles — via private jet,” FEP Executive Director Stefan Padfield will say today as he presents Proposal 8. “It has been reported that these commutes release nearly nine tons of carbon dioxide each round trip. This is roughly the annual energy-consumption footprint of the typical American household.”

Padfield will add:

While the emissions generated by executive travel may make up a small part of the company’s overall emissions, the recent attention paid to the company’s CEO travel serves as a warning that heightened scrutiny is just one news cycle away. In fact, in recent years Starbucks has faced greenwashing allegations… Perhaps the problem is not the related business practices, but rather the ill-conceived decision to wrap the company in unrealistic climate goals.

In light of this, a congruency report is essential to identify anything plausibly framed as corporate hypocrisy that could negatively impact the company. Such a report can help identify decision-making defects, including unrealistic climate commitments, which can lead to gaps between the company’s commitments and practices.

FEP’s supporting statement quotes two commentators in the Wall Street Journal who poignantly noted how Starbucks’ apparent double-talk hurts the company’s reputation with everyday Americans:

We’d like to see [Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol] explain to California’s dairy farmers … why they should have to install cumbersome and costly ‘anaerobic digesters’ to manage emissions from cow manure while the new Starbucks CEO jets up and down the West Coast to keep his Newport Beach lifestyle.

“A congruency report that examines the extent to which Starbucks’ rules for executives, and the results achieved by those rules, align with its outward facing promises is essential to ferreting out corporate hypocrisy that could negatively impact the Company,” FEP writes in its supporting statement. “Such a report can help identify decision-making defects that led to gaps between the Company’s commitments and practices including, possibly, the extent to which such gaps are the result of the Company’s environmental commitments being driven, at least in part, by ideologically-rooted activism rather than realistic cost-benefit analysis.”

FEP encourages Starbucks shareholders to not only support Proposal 8 (Shareholder Proposal Requesting an Annual Emissions Congruency Report), but also two proposals set forward by its allies: Proposal 4 (Shareholder Proposal Requesting an Annual Report on Discrimination Risk Related to Charitable Giving), from Bowyer Research; and Proposal 6 (Shareholder Proposal Requesting a Report on Human Rights Risks Related to Labor Organizing), from the National Legal & Policy Center.