Fmr. GE CEO: I've always viewed that climate change was real

In an interview with Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman, former GE CEO Jeff Immelt discusses climate change and the deals made towards the end of his tenure as chief executive of General Electric.

Video transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Well, on that front and on the climate change front, the UN was just out with a report today, saying, we're looking at 2.7 degrees Celsius in temperature increase by 2100 if things don't change on the country policy front. And climate change is something that you definitely focused on, on GE, focusing on things like the wind turbine business, also on the water business.

But at the same time, you made some big deals toward the end of your tenure that were focused on the more traditional fossil fuel driven business. I'm talking, of course, about Alstom, which had sort of aspects of both, I guess, you could say, and the Baker Hughes deal. Things have changed a lot since then, but even then, things were beginning to change. So, did you see the signs at that point and just thought that it would be slower? Or what were you thinking as you made those kinds of deals?

JEFF IMMELT: It could be-- I think I believed in the beginning and I believed at the end that the energy transition would always be about a transition. So I've always believed that climate change was real. I've always believed that this is a pivot that has to take place. We built a big wind turbine business. We built a big grid business that was very positive. And we did finance lots of projects in the clean tech space.

I guess, Julie, I believed-- we believed that natural gas would be a key pivot for the world as it pertains to how we get to a cleaner world, how we actually achieve the standards that we need to achieve. I believe that legacy industries had to be cleaned up in order for us to make progress. To a certain extent, I still personally believe in those things today, even though there's lots of people that will disagree with me.

You know, in other words, I believe in renewables, but I believe without nuclear power and natural gas and some of the other things in the mix that this transition is not going to be as successful as we all want it to be. So I understand the question. I think we had a very strong belief that there would be a transition. And I still hold many of those beliefs today.