Increased Accountability

An exploration of the Environmental Commitment section of the Corporate Responsibility web pages at the www.gm.com website would lead the casual investigator to conclude that the General Motors Corporation is duly concerned with preserving the environment. GM has outlined six different environmental principles they follow towards their being a responsible corporate citizen including commitments to: restore and preserve the environment, reduce waste, education the public on conservation, develop less polluting technologies, work with the government to develop environmental laws, and to also continually assess and improve the environmental impact of their processes and products, (GM Environmental Principles, n.d.). GM maintains on their web site a commitment to producing environmentally friendlier vehicles by increasing the fuel economy of vehicles and developing vehicles that use alternative fuel sources, utilizing recycled materials in the manufacture of vehicles, and decreasing emissions from manufacturing facilities.

Although GM introduced the catalytic converter in 1975 that is used on most automobiles, which allows them to fun cleaner on less fuel, since this development the company had been relatively resistant to government imposed emission standards. This changed in 2007 when GM became the first automobile manufacturer to join the U.S Climate Action Partnership, an advocacy group that is seeking legislation to cap total emissions from burning fuel in vehicles, additionally they voluntarily agreed to an increase in fuel economy of 40% by 2020, (an action that was expected thwart a more stringent requirement mandated by Congress), (Stoffer, 2008).

In March of 2010 General Motors was ranked 22nd by the Political Economy Research Institute, PERI, on their list of the top 100 air polluters in the United States with 6.9 million pounds of toxic air releases, (PERI, 2010). When PERI first published their list in 2004, using 2002 data, General Motors was ranked...