Apple 'ripping off taxpayers' with green technology
Man blasted by CEO: 'He attacked
his own investors. I was embarrassed for him'
Apple CEO Tim Cook made worldwide headlines last
week by blasting a questioner at a company shareholder meeting and insisting
that his company will continue investing huge sums of money in green
technologies whether it improves the bottom line or not.
“If you want me to do things only
for (return-on-investment) reasons, you should get out of this stock,” said an
angry Cook.
Now the man who asked the
questions says Cook lashed out at him because it’s obvious the company would be
losing hundreds of millions of dollars with their green projects if
taxpayer-funded subsidies weren’t defraying much of the cost and because Cook
knows the projects are not going to create profits for Apple or its
shareholders.
The confrontation took place
Friday at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting. In the question and answer
session, Justin Danhof of the National
Center for Public Policy
Research confronted Cook about the huge amount of money spent in the company’s
quest to derive 100 percent of its energy from renewable sources.
“I asked him a very basic business
question that any investor or any shareholder of Apple would want to know. When
you engage in environmentalism … is there a reasonable return on investment?
Are you spending more than you’re saving? Cook first answered by saying, ‘I
think that it makes economic sense, but even if it didn’t, we would still spend
to our heart’s content all of your shareholder money on battling this terrible
concept of CO2 emissions,’” Danhof said.
Danhof then asked Cook what the
company policy would be if the federal government were not footing the bill for
much of its green-energy programs through taxpayer-funded subsidies. That’s
when Cook made headlines.
“That’s where he went off the
rails. Cook refused to answer the question, and he looked directly at me and
said, ‘I don’t care what you think. We’re going to continue to cure blindness.’
What does one have to do with the other? Obviously, Cook was deflecting the
issue because, while the company may be engaging in a lot of environmental
efforts, the answer is they’re engaging so they can make a profit off the
American taxpayer. We’re the ones, John and Jane Q. Taxpayer, that are
subsidizing all these solar plants that Apple is putting up in North Carolina and Arizona
and California
and elsewhere. That’s the real heart of it,” he said.
Listen to the WND/Radio America
interview with Justin Danhof: (Click on link above to view)
That’s when Cook loudly scolded
Danhof and suggested that he and anyone else not supportive of Apple’s green
energy efforts were free to sell their shares.
“I’ve been attending shareholder
meetings for the last five or six years, dozens of them, and I’ve never had a
CEO react and act the way that Tim Cook did at Friday’s Apple shareholder
meeting,” Danhof said.
Cook is widely known for his calm
demeanor, so what triggered his passionate response rather than offering a
simple explanation that Apple’s priorities were not the same as Danhof’s?
“The company wants to tell its
progressive investors who care about this chimera battle of reducing CO2
emissions that they’re the leading company in the world to do so. In reality,
they’re only doing so because they’re ripping off taxpayers. So I caught him in
this dualism, this hypocrisy, and he was really stuck at that point,” Danhof
said.
“So he attacked his own investors.
He really came untoward. I was embarrassed for him,” he said.
While Danoff said he can
sympathize with Cook being exposed in front of shareholders, he has fewer warm
words for former Vice President Al Gore and his response to the exchange.
“I would have been embarrassed for
Al Gore if Al Gore could still be
embarrassed at this point, because he stood up like a three-year-old child and
loudly clapped and cheered in my face when Cook gave that reaction. Al Gore is
beyond contempt at this point, so I won’t even be embarrassed for him,” he
said.
Danhof said the hypocrisy of Apple
is evident in multiple ways, both in its activities at these green-energy
facilities and in its everyday products.
He cited a massive geothermal
plant in Maiden, N.C., built largely
through taxpayer funds. It will eventually power Apple’s local
operations, but while those facilities are built, Apple is selling its excess
energy back to the taxpayers of North
Carolina who helped pay for the construction through
their tax dollars in the first place. He says the cost of Apple’s green energy
projects is easily in the hundreds of millions and possibly even billions of
dollars.
In addition, Danhof says Apple’s
own conduct shows it’s not nearly as environmentally
conscious as it would have us believe.
“You may want to actually take a
deeper look into what Cook’s response really means. If Apple was sustainable,
they wouldn’t glue their batteries into their iPhones so when your battery dies
you need a new iPhone. If your battery dies on any other phone, you just get a
new battery. On an iPhone, you’ve got to chuck it away and buy a whole brand
new one. What’s sustainable about that? Absolutely nothing,” he said.
In addition to asserting Cook got
caught in his hypocrisy, Danhof believes another factor is at play as climate-change advocates find it harder
and harder to convince Americans that the planet’s future is in peril unless
major, costly steps are taken.
He notes that over the past few
election cycles, concern over climate change has dropped from being one of the
five biggest issues for voters to barely cracking the top 20 issues that
motivate people at the polls.
“For 17 years, we’ve been told the
world is going to warm, and for 17 years they’ve cried wolf. We have a world
(temperature) that’s staying flat, if not cooling,” he said. “I think that
those who are really devotees of the climate-change line are starting to run
scared. They’re starting to become more emotional and less rational because the
science is no longer backing up their wild claims.”
Apple
Apple CEO Tim Cook: Global
Warming Skeptics Should Dump Company's Stock (Past Research on Apple CEO Tim
Cook)
Monday,
March 3, 2014
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