Big business & global warming

Corporate manipulation moves to Phase II

By Deirdre Griswold

The huge corporations that have spent the last two decades lobbying forcefully to get government and the media to deny the existence of global warming and climate change have embarked on a new tack.

In the first phase of their campaign, these capitalist enterprises used every trick in the book to deny or belittle global warming. Since before the Kyoto Accords—which went into effect in 1994 and which the U.S. refused to sign—the energy companies in particular were setting up front organizations to dispute the scientific evidence.

These groups have had innocuous-sounding names like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), Americans for Balanced Energy Sources (ABEC), Center for Energy and Economic Development, Cooler Heads Coalition, Global Climate Coalition, Global Climate Information Project and the Greening Earth Society.

There are many more. From a long list available at sourcewatch.org, the sampling provided here goes only as far as the Gs.

The wolf in sheep’s clothing

TASSC started as a front for Philip Morris. It morphed from disputing the danger of tobacco smoke to advancing “industry-friendly positions on a wide range of topics, including global warming, smoking, phthalates and pesticides.” (sourcewatch.org)

The Cooler Heads Coalition, according to its website, globalwarming.org, was formed in 1997 to “dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis. ... The risks of global warming are speculative; the risks of global warming policies are all too real.”

Before it disbanded in 2002, the Global Climate Coali tion (GCC) “was one of the most outspoken and confrontational industry groups in the United States battling reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” It collaborated with groups such as Sovereignty International, which believes that global warming is a plot to enslave the world under a United Nations-led “world government.”

The members of the GCC read like a Who’s Who of the largest U.S. industrial corporations and their organizations, including the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron Oil, Chrysler, Dow Chemical, Duke Power, DuPont, ExxonMobil, Ford, General Motors, McDonnell-Douglas, Shell Oil, Texaco and Union Carbide.

According to the Los Angeles Times (Dec. 7, 1997) the GCC spent $13 million on its 1997 anti-Kyoto ad campaign, an amount roughly equivalent to Greenpeace’s entire annual budget.

Common Cause has documented more than $63 million in contributions to politicians from members of the GCC from 1989 to 1999.

The Global Climate Information Project, sponsored by the GCC and the American Association of Automobile Man u facturers, among others, was created to sponsor an adver tising campaign in the U.S. against the Kyoto agreement.

The Greening Earth Society, funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association, an association of coal-burning utility companies, claims that greenhouse gas emissions are a good thing because they will lead to greater plant growth and a greener environment.

For a while, this full-court press by U.S. big business fed the media with false information that kept a large part of the population confused. In this period, more than half the reporting by the U.S. corporate media echoed the well-funded industry lobbyists’ claim that climate change and global warming were just an unproved “theory.” They ridiculed the view that the combustion of fossil fuels—especially oil and coal—leads to an accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that then traps the earth’s heat.

But then came the hurricanes, the drenching rains leading to disastrous floods and mud slides, the tornadoes, the grapefruit-sized hail, the droughts, the wildfires, the melting of glaciers, the death of coral reefs, the shrinking of the polar ice caps, and the biggest “natural” disaster to hit a major U.S. city since the San Francisco earthquake—the flooding of New Orleans.

Global warming is now virtually undisputed in the world’s scientific community, which has moved on to creating models to predict the impact of climate change on low-lying coastal areas, deserts, tundra, ocean currents and so on.

So what are the big corporations that spent hundreds of millions on disinformation doing now?

The wolf gets through the door

They are moving into the area of ecology and conservation in order to make sure that whatever is done is profitable for them.

Take something like the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. It is a product of the Pew Charitable Trusts, set up by the descendants of Joseph Pew, founder of the Sun Oil Co.

For generations, this super-rich family has funded a panoply of right-wing organizations, from the American Liberty League in the 1930s to the Christian Freedom Foundation and the John Birch Society in the 1950s and, more recently, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. This last organization was set up by William Casey, later to become Reagan’s CIA director.

Unlike the earlier industry-sponsored organizations, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change does not dispute global warming. Rather, it seeks to set the agenda of the environmental movement and any related legislation so businesses can take advantage of it.

Its website talks about “the emerging greenhouse gas market.” The center has set up a Business Environmental Leadership Council, which says that “companies taking early action on climate strategies and policy will gain sustained competitive advantage over their peers.”

“The BELC,” they go on, “is now the largest U.S. based association of corporations focused on addressing the challenges of climate change, with 40 members representing $2 trillion in market capitalization and over 3 million employees.

“Many different sectors are represented, from high technology to diversified manufacturing; from oil and gas to transportation; from utilities to chemicals. We accept the views of most scientists that enough is known about the science and environmental impacts of climate change for us to take actions to address its consequences.”

And what kinds of actions do they propose?

“Businesses can and should take concrete steps now in the U.S. and abroad to assess opportunities for emission reductions, establish and meet emission reduction objectives, and invest in new, more efficient products, practices and technologies.

“The Kyoto agreement represents a first step in the international process, but more must be done both to implement the market-based mechanisms that were adopted in principle in Kyoto and to more fully involve the rest of the world in the solution.”

These words may sound innocent enough—to someone unfamiliar with the crafty and devious nature of the class of robber barons who, in a relatively short period of time, have become fabulously wealthy by disregarding the health and well-being of millions of workers and their families.

On closer examination, however, it should be clear that this wing of the ruling class has decided that there is a lot of money to be made from new technologies that may, or may not, slow down global warming. They want to push “market-based mechanisms” because that’s where the money is. And the targets of much of their “analysis” on global warming are developing countries like China, India and Brazil, which they want to “fully involve ... in the solution.”

According to Environment News Service, these three countries emit only one-tenth the amount of greenhouse gases per capita as North America. That hasn’t stopped the U.S. government, which is bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists, from opposing the Kyoto Accord largely on the grounds that it doesn’t demand enough of poorer countries. The corporate media, always ready to blame the Third World, is stoking the fires with dire speculation on what the world will be like when every Chinese family has a car, etc.

In fact, even though its opening of a market economy in many areas to spur development has brought grave problems to China—from the growth of bourgeois values to a widening income gap, unemployment and horrendous conditions in its older, privatized coal mines—there is a robust environmental movement in China that has a great deal of input into government planning. (We will discuss this in our next article.)

Challenge facing
environmental movement

The biggest challenge facing the environmental movement here is to break free of the clutches of big capital, whose embrace is really the kiss of death. Too many of the “mature” environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, are tied in directly to the ruling class. Its library, for example, is named after William E. Colby, the first secretary of the Sierra Club and a director for 49 years. Colby launched the Accelerated Pacification Campaign during the Vietnam War and was named director of Central Intelligence by Richard Nixon in 1973.

This dependence on the largess of the very rich makes such groups look for solutions amenable to big business. It promotes the idea that the interests of the mass of people and of the billionaire owners of capital can be conciliated.

That approach may work when the object is to preserve a beautiful piece of wilderness for fortunate hikers to enjoy, or to keep a pristine lake unpolluted.

But the predicted catastrophes that will follow global warming and climate change are far too big to yield to this class-collaborationist approach. Climate change has the potential of producing disasters on a scale that we have seen only during the all-too-frequent imperialist wars of the last hundred years or so.

To politically prepare for what lies ahead, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of the capitalist system and why even the most illogical, anti-scientific courses of action can become the norm under the pressure of the profit needs of big capital.

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