Corporate America's Latest CounterAttack:
The Green Masquerade
By ALAN MAASS and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Alan Maass: The latest trend for corporations is to show off green
credentials--BP has a series of commercials with a guy standing in a
field talking about alternative fuels, and Rupert Murdoch is vowing to
make his international operations carbon neutral. What kind of impact do
corporate green solutions have on curbing global warming?
Jeffrey St. Clair: NONE. That's the short answer. Must we really elaborate?
I remember being up in Alaska with the Inupiat, looking at Prudhoe Bay.
BP wants to expand in every direction up there, into ANWR [the Alaska
National Wildlife Refuge] on one side of Prudhoe Bay, and then into the
Alaska Petroleum Reserve on the other side. And one of the Inupiat
tribesman said to me, "They want it all."
If they can't get into ANWR now, they'll go into the Alaskan Petroleum
Reserve and drain that. Then they'll come back and get ANWR, and they'll
drain that. And meanwhile, they're investing in solar and biofuels, too.
They want it all.
To pretend that this green enlightenment on behalf of BP or ARCO or any
of the others has to do with anything other than maximizing their
profits is a serious delusion.
Oil and coal are almost free assets for corporations. They're not going
to stop coal mining and burning coal until they're out of it--unless you
regulate them out of that business. The free market is going to
encourage them to dig up every last coal vein in Appalachia, using the
most cost-efficient method, which is mountaintop removal.
This is the most noxious, environmentally destructive form of mining
imaginable, but they're even using a kind of global warming defense for
engaging in this kind of activity--because the coal that they're going
after is low-sulfur coal or synthetic fuels or liquified coal. On and on.
Alan Maass: WHEN A company like BP talks about developing alternative
fuels, is this real, or is it a PR sham?
Jeffrey St. Clair: THERE'S MOVEMENT toward alternative fuels that they
can profit from.
This is nothing new. I remember talking to Enron executives back in the
early 1990s, as they were making their first forays into Oregon and
California, and they were saying that they were the good guys--that they
were going to combat global warming and reduce toxic emissions, because
they were promoting natural gas instead of nukes or coal-fired power plants.
What they saw were tremendous opportunities for profit. That's what
motivates them.
In BP's case, it's not a matter of developing biofuels at the expense of
extracting oil from the north slope of Alaska. It's developing biofuels
and extracting oil. For the other integrated companies, it's strip
mines, oil, gas, biofuels and nukes--the whole gamut.
There's another aspect of this, which is that biofuels are providing a
new excuse for genetically engineered crops.
So you have Third World countries where there's indigenous resistance to
Monsanto's saturation bombing of Frankenfoods--whether it's cotton,
corn, soybeans. There's been resistance--in some cases, relatively
successful.
But now, the new excuse for genetically engineered crops is to save the
world from global warming. So we've seen deals struck with Lula's
government in Brazil and elsewhere.
This isn't just a back-door way to force GM crops down the Third World's
throat. If you look in the U.S. at ethanol and other biofuels, which are
promoted as the salvation of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, they're
essentially running on topsoil. These are not sustainable solutions to
these problems.
Alan Maass: AMONG A number of politicians, including Democrats, the
concerns about global warming seem to have become an excuse for talk
about resurrecting nuclear power.
Jeffrey St. Clair: THAT COMES out of the Gore shop. Anyone who has the
slightest familiarity with Gore's political biography will know that
he's his father's son, and his father was one of the prime movers behind
the Tennessee Valley Authority, behind nuclear power in Appalachia, and
the Oak Ridge nuclear lab. Gore Junior was their congressional protector
as a congressman and as a senator.
If you go back to Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, behind the scenes
of that book is a cooling tower. That's Gore's solution to the global
warming crisis--a world that is clotted with nuclear power plants. If
you look at his advisers on global warming while he was vice president,
that was their message, too.
Those had been lean times for the nuclear power industry. I think that
the Clinton administration could have sealed the nuclear power
industry's fate in the U.S. if it had wanted to. But of course, it
didn't. They sort of kept them on life support, with a lot of research
funding and renewing all the protections.
So is there a renewed faith in nuclear power from the Democrats? Yes.
And they now have a justification for it. If you scare yourself into
believing that we're going to be having a runaway greenhouse effect, and
the only way to stop it is to take immediate action in reducing the
burning of fossil fuels, then you're going to be confronted with the
argument that a proliferation of nuclear power plants is the fastest way
to do that.
Alan Maass: WITH GORE, it's also a question of who gets the blame for
global warming.
Jeffrey St. Clair: IT'S ALL about personal responsibilit with Gores,
whether its rap music or toxic waste. It's like listening to Jerry
Falwell or Dr. Laura. There's no critique of capitalism, there's no
political critique, there's no critique of large corporations. Call it
guilt trip politics.
There never has been. Earth in the Balance wasn't a critique. Back then,
in the late 1980s, Gore was already talking about this as the dividing
moral issue of our time. But there was never a critique of the
transgressors--except the individual responsibility of the American
consumer of electrical power and gasoline.
Alan Maass: CAN YOU talk about the attitude of the environmental
movement toward this corporate greenwashing?
Jeffrey St. Clair: THE ENVIRONMENTAL movement made its deal with the
devil at least a decade ago, when they essentially became neoliberal
lobby shops. The idea was that if we can't defeat capitalism, if we
can't change capitalism, then let's just give in and see if we can use
some of the mechanics of the free market in order to tweak the damage
done to the environment.
These kinds of seeds were sown in green groups in the early 1980s, but
really reached an apogee in Clinton Times.
I don't even think the term greenwashing even applies any more. That was
the industry response to the great environmental tragedies of the 1970s,
and '80s--Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez. But
they don't have to do that any more, because essentially, corporations
like BP and environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the
Environmental Defense Fund share the same basic mindset.
You can't distinguish between, for example, Ikea, one of the world's
great predators of rain forests, and the World Wildlife Fund, which is
in a joint venture with Ikea--so Ikea gets a little panda stamp on the
lumber cut from primary forests in Indonesia. So greenwashing seems to
me to be very passé.
Environmental politics are largely controlled by the foundations--they
control what's discussed and what the major issues are. The foundations
are shackled at the hip to the Democratic Party, and the dominant ones
are all children of big oil companies. Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund,
W. Alton Jones--their endowments were the fortunes of big oil.
I was talking to an environmentalist who said that if you want a grant
from any of those foundations, you have to have global warming in your
agenda.
Now, let's say you're working on fighting chemical companies in Cancer
Alley. How do you work global warming into your agenda? Or if you're
fighting factory trawlers, which are creating dead zones off the Pacific
coast, how do you work global warming into that? But if you can't, then
the money dries up.
What it creates is a kind of inchoate state of environmental politics,
because I don't think you can build a mass political movement around
global warming.
This is one of the ways where Alex Cockburn and I differ. Alex doesn't
believe that humans can affect the environment. I know we can screw
things up royally--I just don't think we can fix it.
In some ways, to me, global warming ought to be a kind of liberating
experience. Yes, this is bad, but you really can't build a movement to
fight it or correct it, so let's go fight things that we can
defeat--whether it's strip mines, or the mismanagement of the Colorado
River, or the Bush administration removing the grizzly bear in
Yellowstone from listing under the Endangered Species Act.
Those are battles that you can fight and win. But if you're cowering
under the shadow of global warming, then you're not going to be able to
wage those battles successfully.
I think that's one of the many reasons why the environmental movement is
as impotent as the antiwar movement. It's shackled to a political party
that has no vision, no spine and no guts. And it's economically
dependent on a tiny network of foundations that it allows to control its
political agenda.
These foundations frown on any kind of militancy even when the moment
demands militancy. If you take their money, and they expect you to dance
to their tune.
