Nothing But Green Skies
These days, any company involved with automobiles and fossil fuels is vulnerable. Several states, including New York and Vermont, have imposed tough new emission regulations, sparking lawsuits by automakers; California recently sought billions of dollars in compensation for environmental damages already sustained. Consumers, meanwhile, are increasingly concerned about global warming. According to a January study by the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of Americans believe there's solid evidence that the earth is warming, up seven percentage points from June 2006. The share that believes human activity--like burning fossil fuels--is to blame increased to 47 percent from 41 percent over the same period.
The rental car industry has not had its moment in the great green glare of shame, but it's hard not to notice that Enterprise, as the owner of the world's largest fleet, would make a nice juicy target. The company, Taylor believes, needs to get out in front of the issue. So over the past two years, Enterprise has been piecing together an ambitious, multipronged environmental strategy. Under the offset program, as many as 20 million customers will have the option to purchase an offset when they make reservations online or over the phone. (The offer also will be available to National and Alamo customers.) Enterprise also has pledged to plant a million trees a year, purchase more cars that run on ethanol and other alternative fuels, and print its corporate magazine on recycled paper. If such programs are embraced by consumers, the company intends to add more. "I don't want to give you the impression that we're just about doing really good things," says Taylor. "We are not a not-for-profit. What we're doing, we're doing for the long-term sustainability of our business."
Enterprise's green efforts have their origins in a pair of events that were unrelated to each other and only tangentially related to the environment. In 2000, Enterprise was served with a class action discrimination lawsuit, brought by a group of African American employees. Two years later, the company settled for $2.3 million, admitting no wrongdoing. Still, Taylor decided that it was time to institute a new era of corporate responsibility at the company. He created a new executive position, vice president of corporate responsibility, and asked a longtime employee named Mark Miller to figure out what approach Enterprise should take. He asked Pat Farrell to work with Miller, and all three agreed that no initiative would be complete without a focus on the environment.
As it happens, Taylor's father had recently taken a serious interest in the environment. In 2002, Jack Taylor gave $30 million to the Missouri Botanical Garden to catalog and preserve plants all over the world and was looking for other ways to have an impact. "My father is 85, and although he is in good health, he is always thinking about his legacy," says Andy Taylor, who speaks with his father every day. So when the senior staff met with the younger Taylor to discuss plans for marking the company's 50th anniversary in 2007, a focus on the environment seemed to be in the air.
Farrell and Miller had been researching the subject and soon came across the idea of carbon offsets. Offsets had grown increasingly popular among individual eco-conscious consumers, but aside from explicitly socially conscious companies like Stonyfield Farm and Whole Foods, few corporations had embraced them. But to Farrell and Miller, the appeal was obvious. With offsets, Enterprise could let customers mitigate the emissions created by their rentals--without requiring them to change their behavior in any other way. (See "Going Carbon Neutral") Of course, that very fact has drawn intense criticism from some in the environmental movement, who argue that offsets are a guilt-relief mechanism for polluters, rather like an indulgence sold at one time by the Catholic Church to absolve someone of sin. Offsets, critics say, do nothing to actually change polluting behavior.
But dealing with prickly environmentalists wasn't the only problem. For one thing, offsets could be a tough sell. When Farrell broached the subject with people he'd run into casually in the hallway, he got a lot of blank looks. Would consumers even get it? And speaking of customers, was it really such a great idea to remind customers that they were engaging in a carbon emitting, global warming act when they rented a car? Who would administer the program? The offset market was fairly new, with few established players. But the biggest issue was this: An offset would be something additional that customers could purchase and add on to their rental, like a ski rack or a GPS. It wouldn't be something that Enterprise would pay for directly. Farrell worried that this would look like Enterprise was asking its customers to pay for the company's environmental impact. "I didn't want it to look like we were waiting for our consumers to simply write a check for us," Farrell says. Enterprise wanted to do something about its gas-guzzling, polluting fleet of vehicles. Figuring out what, however, was proving more difficult than anticipated.
