Supporting Statement: Companies are engaging in environmental activism by publicly pledging to reduce carbon emissions and by aligning company policy with international climate change goals. More than 300 companies and organizations have signed onto The Climate Pledge, a 2019 initiative co-founded by Amazon that aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across businesses by 2040.1 Nearly 100 companies and organizations have also pledged to reduce their carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 through the Department of Energy’s Better Climate Challenge.2

There can be little doubt that such decarbonization plans, made according to political and activist timelines rather than considerations of technological feasibility, financial rationality, or national and free-country security, will cause significant hardships to the broader citizenry. Already we see disaster in Sri Lanka, and energy and geopolitical insecurity and skyrocketing energy prices in Europe as a result of similar decarbonization goals on activist rather than fully considered schedules.3

Despite American companies engaging in public commitments to risky and costly political-schedule decarbonization, recent reports indicate that the very directors and executives who lead these engagements are not aligning their executive or personal practices with their public commitments. According to data from ISS Corporate Solutions, spending by U.S. companies on private jets for personal use by chief executives and chairs hit the highest level for a decade in 2021.4 The ISS study revealed that spending increased by 35 percent to nearly $34 million among S&P 500 companies in 2021, the highest since 2012.5 It estimates that on average, companies spent about $170,000 on private jets in 2021.6

At half a million dollars in 2021, PepsiCo’s spending on private air travel far exceeded the average amount.7 In fact, according to ISS, PepsiCo’s spending landed it within the top 15 of U.S. companies.8

This significant cost undermines the Company’s public statements on addressing the issue of climate change that it deems so critical.9 The “rules for thee, but not for me” mentality has become pervasive throughout corporate c-suites. It has become vital that companies address and remove the inconsistencies between corporate positioning and executive behavior, and report to shareholders and to the public the workplace footprints of executives and directors at PepsiCo.

Reputational and financial risk to companies abound when consumers cannot trust the commitments made by Company leaders, especially those who fail to follow their own policies. A congruency report that examines the extent to which PepsiCo’s 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.