[R-G] The Green Masquerade

[Macdonald Stainsby]

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.
-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
Coordinator, http://oilsandstruth.org
--
moderated radical news & discussion list:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green

In the contradiction lies the hope.
    --Bertholt Brecht.