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Updated Dec. 8, 2016 3:26 p.m. ET
Many big corporations continue to support efforts to reduce carbon emissions, vowing to stay the course despite the election of Donald Trump, who has promised to dismantle the Obama administration’s climate agenda and this week chose a global-warming skeptic to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
From Houston to Silicon Valley, executives in the oil, power, retail, transportation and technology industries said their companies were locked into a lower-emissions trajectory driven in part by market forces, such as cheaper prices for natural gas and wind power.
Expectations from investors, activists and customers are also factors, along with pressure from regulators in states and other countries, they added.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump called climate change a “hoax” and promised to abandon an international pact reached last year in Paris to reduce carbon emissions. He also pledged to repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration rule which aims to cut carbon emissions from power plants 32% by 2030.
On Wednesday, the president-elect selected Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, an ardent critic of Obama administration regulations, as his EPA head.
Mr. Trump had promised in an interview since his election to “keep an open mind” on the climate issue and met Monday in New York with former Vice President Al Gore, a leading climate activist.
While many companies shared their positions with The Wall Street Journal on climate regulations before Mr. Pruitt’s selection, several reached again afterward, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc., said their stance remained unchanged.
“Part of our plan to invest in renewables is to diversify our generation portfolio,” saidMelissa McHenry, a spokeswoman for utility American Electric Power Co. “All of those investments don’t change with a change in administration, it’s a long-term strategy.”
While the question of how and whether to respond to warming global temperatures continues to be debated in politics, especially among Republicans, many big corporations appear to see the transition to less carbon-intensive energy as a foregone conclusion—and ultimately good for business. Companies world-wide committed a record $285 billion to clean energy projects in 2015, according to a study by the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
Days after the Nov. 8 U.S. election, Exxon MobilCorp. signaled its continued support for the Paris climate deal. Suzanne McCarron, Exxon’s vice president of public and government affairs, said on Twitter that the agreement was “an important step forward by governments in addressing the serious risks of #ClimateChange.”
Exxon this year lobbied other energy companies to support a carbon tax and to avoid a posture of opposing all regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. Large European oil companies have also pushed for a global price on carbon.
Big utilities that burn coal such as AEP say they will continue their transition to cleaner energy sources, even if Mr. Trump makes good on his pledge to reverse the Clean Power Plan.
“With Donald Trump being elected, I think you’ll continue with that movement” regardless of whether the clean-power regulation takes effect, said AEP Chief ExecutiveNick Akins. He cited cheap natural gas and falling prices for wind and solar power as factors also driving the utility’s decisions.
Wal-Mart, General Motors Co., Google and Gap Inc. also said their goals for renewable-energy use or emissions reductions remained intact.
GM set a goal last September to get all its power from renewable sources world-wide by 2050. It estimates it is now saving about $5 million a year as a result of that shift and conservation measures. Wal-Mart plans by 2025 to power half its operations with renewable energy and cut its greenhouse gases 18%.
Google said Tuesday it would reach its goal of buying enough renewable energy to match 100% of the amount of power that it uses, about 2.6 gigawatts, in 2017, earlier than it initially expected. It attributed that in part to cheap wind power in Oklahoma, where Google operates a data center.
“We do believe climate change is real and that businesses should do what they can to address it, but we’re doing this because it’s good for business,” said Gary Demasi, Google’s director of global infrastructure.
After Mr. Trump’s victory, more than 350 companies, including Intel Corp., DuPont Co.and Monsanto Co. signed a pledge expressing support for the Paris climate agreement and U.S. efforts to cut carbon emissions. That sentiment extends to international companies based outside the U.S.
Andrew Mackenzie, chief executive of BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s largest miner by market value, told shareholders last month that he hoped Mr. Trump would stand by the U.S. commitment to the Paris accord.
“More needs to be done” to achieve the agreement’s goal of limiting global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius, said BHP sustainability and climate change vice president Fiona Wild.
If Mr. Trump makes good on earlier promises to cancel regulations limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, it would benefit a number of smaller energy companies, who are more supportive of such actions.
Smaller refinery companies, for example, have also been pushing hard for an overhaul of the renewable fuel standard, a federal mandate enforced by the EPA that requires refineries to blend an increasingly large amount of ethanol into U.S. gasoline.
Big oil companies including Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, and BP PLC have been reaping millions by selling renewable fuel credits associated with the ethanol program, while smaller refiners have been forced to spend hundreds of millions to buy the credits to comply with the rules.
But environmental rules established by the Obama administration that have already taken effect can’t be canceled as easily as some industry executives expect, said Larry Nettles, the head of the environmental and natural resources practice at law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP.
That would require new legislation or a lengthy executive branch process that could be challenged in court by environmentalists, he said.
“The concept that there’s going to be a significant change in environmental regulatory policy and enforcement is a little naive,” Mr. Nettles said.
—Sara Germano, Amy Harder and Rhiannon Hoyle contributed to this article.
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