GlobeSt.com: At USGBC's GreenBuild Conference in Chicago last year, Bill Clinton announced the Clinton Climate Initiative's agreement with GE Real Estate for global retrofits. Talk about that, please.

Pressman: The Clinton climate initiative is trying to put in place a variety of incentive programs for owners of real estate to address retrofit opportunities that would improve the environmental footprint of existing real estate. They've pursued that program for one fundamental reason: existing real estate around the world represents some 40% or so of the global CO2 that exists today.

We happen to have a substantial real estate portfolio. We concluded that, under the umbrella of GE's Ecomagination program, we could be address opportunities in the real estate we own to make it a bit greener by the time we sell it. In addition to our debt business, our equity business is really a trading business. We purchase to create value and trade out over a three-to-five-year time frame.

GlobeSt.com: Is that the time frame for such retrofits?

Pressman: In terms of green retrofits, we would hope to build that into the asset management strategies, where they make sense, and execute it in that three-to-five-year time frame, consistent with whatever the asset-management strategy was. For example, in our portfolio in California, the team has focused on retrofit opportunities and have become our poster child for this initiative. They were already doing it before we looked to expand it, and in the past 24 months they have retrofit some 10 million sf of office and they have improved the energy efficiency of those buildings by 30% and dramatically reduced the CO2 footprint.

So we think we have a case in point and in this case green is green. Not only are we improving the energy efficiency but also the net operating income of those buildings by reducing the cost to operate them, and ultimately improving the return on investment for General Electric shareholders. But the value-creation period will include measures well beyond what we'll call the greening of the portfolio.

GlobeSt.com: Can you give me a sense of how the ROI in California was impacted by green?

Pressman: I don't have the data on that, and I'm not sure the team in California has a precise view of the delta achieved by creating a lower CO2 footprint. They obviously added value in lots of other ways. We do think there's a compelling case for it in terms of improving NOI, and that's the better way to look at it because that's the most fact-driven evaluation of creating value. The rest is math.

GlobeSt.com: We've found that most owners say it's tricky to isolate the returns Greening can provide other than NOI.

Pressman: Ultimately the way we've asked our teams to look at it is very simple. As we evaluate properties we're acquiring, in addition to every other criteria of value-creation, we need to add green retrofit opportunities that could result in a strong return on investment and/or improvement in net operating income. We need to build that into the asset-management plan and execute it as we would any other piece of the equation for that asset.

We also think that consumer sensitivities are increasingly being focused on energy efficiency and more sustainable environments in which to operate businesses and to live. While we're focusing on a green-is-green initiative, and we feel we are creating strong economics for the General Electric Co., a piece of those economics is related to the increasing appetite for more sustainable product in the marketplace.

GlobeSt.com: I hear both--that consumers are asking and that sometimes they're not.

Pressman: Let's put it this way. Every time we have a conversation with our clients and partners, the folks who have actually created a more sustainable product--whatever shape or form that may have been--that product has been wildly successful. So those who have done it are absolutely convinced that it is an attractive value-creation opportunity for investors and a very attractive asset class from the consumer standpoint. Those who have not done it we find are more skeptical.

GlobeSt.com: To what extent will new investments be judged on their green capability?

Pressman: It's just another criterion. We're not investing in product because it's already green--although that doesn't mean we won't invest in a green product. We're certainly interested in any great product we see. But if you look at a green office building that's at the highest level of LEED certification, it probably means that there's not a lot of value to create in that building. And that's not typically what we buy. We look for product where we can create value, and we're now adding to that equation the concept of achieving a more sustainable building as well.

GlobeSt.com: On your website you talk about the creation of new debt and equity structures. Are current conditions making that tough?

Pressman: We build businesses to thrive through market cyclicality, recognizing that cyclicality can result in tougher environments. That's the story of GE Capital and various businesses where we have grown dramatically--largely through acquisitions in periods of market dislocations and organically in more benign periods. That's been our mantra. We're not writing off assets as we see in some other banking and financing institutions around the world. Our portfolio--both debt and equity--is in great shape and highly performing in terms of flow delinquencies and the quality of the assets on our balance sheet. So that puts us in a great position to grow and seize opportunities that present themselves in a market dislocation. We've concluded that this period of tightening liquidity could lead to some attractive debt-financing opportunities, and we've closed on roughly $8 billion in new debt transactions in the past 45 days, which represents about 40% of the entire volume of last year.

In equity trading, we continue to trade through the dislocation--both buying and selling. We enter 2008 very optimistic about the equity investing prospects around the world, the values we see. As a predominantly cash buyer for equity acquisitions it's a good market for us to be operating in.

We're trying to expand who we invest for and that will lead to a whole new set of structures beyond those we've pursued in the past. We're vehicles with which we can attract capital outside of General Electric to see if we can't expand the breadth of who we invest for. That will be the most substantive change in our business over the next decade.