Whole Foods CEO: From Health Care to Climate Change
Nicolas Loris /
John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, really made a name for himself when his op-ed, “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare“, ran in the Wall Street Journal last summer. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten profiles Mackey and his ideas of “conscious capitalism.” When asked what Mackey was reading,
One of the books on the list was “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming—the Missing Science,” a skeptical take on climate change. Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow “hysteria about global warming” to cause us “to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.” One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, “Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”