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Oil industry's bait and switch
What is the oil industry's position on climate change? You'd have to be a detective to figure it out.
After bruising revelations that companies, notably ExxonMobil, had funded contrarian "science" on climate change, the industry claimed to get religion but actually only reduced its funding.
Then, as it appeared inevitable that carbon regulations would happen eventually, a group of corporations, including a handful of energy giants, formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, asking for clear regulation soon. (The devil you know is better than the devil you don't know.)
Yet, several of the companies in this partnership have hired a PR firm to coordinate an astroturf (or faux grassroots) campaign to protest the Waxman-Markey bill that, on paper, they support.
Greenpeace recently obtained a memo coordinating an effort, funded by the American Petroleum Institute, for energy companies to bus their employees to political events disguised as everyday Americans opposed to "Waxman-Markey-like" legislation (a generalization that I find somehow creepy). It appears that USCAP was at least aware of the campaign, if not an active participant.
Other bait-and-switch efforts include the coal lobby's recent forged letters of opposition to the bill, sent by yet another PR firm, to members of Congress, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's continued efforts to deny climate change, although most of its (paying) members acknowledge it and many support carbon regulation.
What is wrong with out political system that these bought-and-paid-for lies are allowed to dominate our public discourse, much like they have on health care? Well, one clear problem is that lobbying disclosure requirements are not expansive enough to include astroturf campaigns, so a company can spend $10 officially lobbying for a politically popular position—most Americans support climate regulations—and spend $10,000 working against that position in ways they don't have to disclose.
According to Greenpeace, $82 million have been spent by the fossil fuels industry openly opposing climate regulation.
Greenpeace
Greenpeace reacted to the API memo with an astroturf protest of its own.
| August 19 2009 at 12:51 PM
Radio host and author Thom Hartmann talks about Threshold
Thom Hartmann, a former Air America radio host, currently hosts The Thom Hartmann Program, which claims to have more listeners than any other progressive talk show in the nation. Hartmann's book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, inspired Leonardo DiCaprio's movie The 11th Hour. I talked to Hartmann about his most recent book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (Viking, $22.95).
Wikipedia
Radio hosting and writing seem like radically different undertakings. One is interactive and spontaneous; one is solitary and highly planned. How did you wind up doing both, and how do you balance the two?
You're right that in the process piece of it, there's a real radical difference between the two. But at a larger level, they're really kind of the same thing, which is trying to share ideas with people in ways that are meaningful and hopefully transformational. These have been two of my passions my whole life. When I was a little kid—literally eight years old, I used to watch Walter Cronkite and I would try to imitate him. I always thought doing news would be just the coolest thing, then when I was 16, I got a job as a DJ and kind of worked my way through college for a while and I had been writing the whole time. I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wanted to do broadcasting, and that's what I do. It's pretty cool to do what you always wanted to do.
In the book, you make a strong critique of the way we use—and overuse—the word sustainability. What does the word ultimately mean to you?
Well if we're going to continue to use the word sustainability we need to totally recalibrate its meaning [to mean that] we are part of interpenetrated by inseparable from the world around us, we need to view every part of the biosphere, from the mosquito to the redwood as equally sacred as we are—I know that flips out a lot of religious folks. But I'm concerned that if we don't recapture that in our culture, our culture is screwed or doomed. To be sustainable is not to be in our own human cocoon or cubicle, and say, here, look at this, we can make our machines work. It has to mean to be seamlessly integrated with all of nature. And that's not what it means for most people now; it means they can recycle their plastic bags or something.
What practical suggestions would you make for businesses and environmentalists who use the word to describe efforts at becoming more sustainable, which rarely means truly sustainable?
I think sustainable is fine, I just think we just need to broaden the frame. For example, we try to conserve water, but...the vast majority of water used is not used for bathing and washing—it has nothing to do with low-flow toilets; it's used by industrial processes and industrial agriculture. We can use fluorescent bulbs all day long, but the majority of our electricity is used by industry. You can go down the list where we're trying to be more sustainable and [every category is] dwarfed by what our military and our industry are using. We need a fundamental rethink of how we've constructed our economies: the idea that growth is good, and the understanding of the carrying capacity of the earth for human flesh. In the absence of oil, the planet had only a billion people on it and it was groaning under that—and, at that we were killing off whales like crazy. Arguably, the planet might only be able to handle half a billion people without oil—and we've hit peak oil. We've got to figure out how to keep the other 6.5 billion from starving, and to stop producing more of them. I mean we need some fundamental rethinks here and they all tie in to how we view ourselves in relation to each other and in relation to the planet.
It took all of human history to reach the first billion people in 1800; the second billion took only 130 years, and the fifth billion took just 14 years. We tell ourselves that this explosion of population is simply the way it is for human beings, but there are many cultures in the world that have been population-stable for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. What we find that the most consistent factor that will stabilize a population, even within a single generation, is when women have power equal to men, and that's a huge cultural issue.
How did you come to the conclusion that women's rights is the determining factor in population?
There's been some pretty decent research on it over last couple decades, and I don't think it's something that's highly in dispute; it's just that it doesn't get talked about very much because it gets into religious issues, and scientists don't like to get into issues that deal with religion.
The country in Europe that has highest rate of birth control is Italy, which is almost entirely Catholic. What that means to me is that it is possible for the people in a culture to move faster than the religious institutions in a culture. We don't have to go out and teach the Catholic Church, or Muslims in countries where it's legal to have up to four wives, or teach the fundamentalist Mormons that their religion is wrong—we just have to empower the women.
The Old Testament has over 600 rules in it, most of which are ignored today—but that doesn't mean that there's been a wholesale rejection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many people get a lot of solace and meaning from their religion but they don't follow the rules.
Part of what's revolutionary about that point is simply that it allows you to talk about population control, while, as you note, most greens don't. What would you add to lists like "51 Ways to Save the Planet" to address the issue of population?
I would say that they're just nibbling around the edges. Most of the pop-culture environmental movement, the corporate-acceptable environmental movement is just nibbling around the edges. The real issue is culture: resacralizing our world...It doesn't have to be in a religious context, but reconnecting with a sense of awe—re-respecting the Earth might be a word that people would find less inflammatory—and resacralizing each other. The obvious sense of that is the empowerment of women and ending discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender—those are the biggies I guess. In a way that change brings us to another very large frame, which is, are we going to be a we society or a me society? The Northern Europeans concluded long ago that they were a we society: They have very high taxes on high income, so they don't have super wealth; they have a very strong social safety net, so they don't have super poor, and everybody's part of we.
Since the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher and Milton Friedman winning the Nobel Prize, we've celebrated ourselves as a me society, and what it's brought about is incredible destruction of our social fabric, our environment, and of many countries around the world. We need to have a national conversation about whether we're a we or a me society. And I think what we'd find is that majority of Americans really want to live in a we society.
What's your beef with Thomas Friedman?
He was the main cheerleader for [free market economics] with The Olive Tree and the Lexus. That book was very influential in the Reagan era in convincing people to go this way. The unfortunate reality is, Friedman got it completely wrong; he didn't do his homework. For two decades [Japan] heavily subsidized Toyota [the company that makes the Lexus]; they made it illegal to sell American cars in Japan. The Lexus was result of government subsidies and protectionisms: if you want a poster child on how to build up an industry, it should be the Lexus. And Friedman turned it totally on its head. It's a little bizarre, actually; economists read this book and go huh?—or at least those that aren't enthralled to the Cato Institute.
You certainly seem to be arguing for a return to big government and protectionism as important parts of ameliorating the environmental crisis. Those are not politically popular ideas—how do you imagine us getting back to them?
People don't know the history of this country and other countries and don't realize that the economies doing well around the world are those that are heavily protected: China, Japan, and the European Union heavily protect their products.
Alexander Hamilton put forward in 1791 his "Report on Manufactures"; he laid out a plan on how to create an economy that was self-sustaining, and a big piece of that was tariffs. We had strong tariffs in place from 1793 to the 1980s, and the result of that was that we made our own clothes and food and TVs, and we don't make any of that anymore. We've become a country that exports raw materials—we export trash and wood—and imports finished products, and that's a pretty textbook definition of a third world economy. We were the largest creditor and now we're the largest debtor. Thirty years of free market economics brought to you by Ronald Reagan and Thomas Friedman has destroyed this country. We've made some big mistakes, and they've really only helped transnational corporations. There are entire think tanks devoted to pushing these ideas, like the Cato Institute, and they're very well funded.
Using health care as the example, the question is not do you want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, because we can't all afford to insure ourselves individually. The question is really do you want a representative to a democratic institution that is answerable to we the people, or do you want Bill McGuire—who, when he left UnitedHealth Group he had taken a 10-year compensation package of $1.78 billion—standing between you and your doctor? If you don't like the way your health care company is doing something and you try to protest, they will laugh at you, and if you show up at their office with a sign, they will have you arrested for trespassing. If you don't like the way the government is handling your health care, you can call your congressman or picket his office or run against him in the next election.
| August 06 2009 at 03:19 PM
Pee in the shower to save the rainforest
As water becomes an increasingly hot topic, there's more and more public discourse about a private act: peeing. In the 80s, Western U.S. states brought in the slogan, "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down."
Now, in Brazil, a new public service announcement says, "Go green—go in the shower." And that second go means pee.
While all of these ways of peeing, as well as peeing on a leaf pile in the back yard, do save water, I have to wonder about the PR value of getting, literally, in people's business. After all, I don't want people peeing in public showers, or leaving their yellow to mellow in my (water-saver) toilet unless I know them pretty well. And there's already a backlash against the preachy aspects of green.
More substantively, micromanaging individuals with suggestions for micro-saver actions like this one directs attention away from the really big industrial polluters. I'm talking about companies that leave the lights on all night and the water running all day and industries that haven't even tweaked their processes for easy energy savings, as a recent McKinsey report on efficiency showed. Before I pee on my feet in a Navy shower under an aerated faucet, shouldn't they be forced to do some of those things?
What do you think?
| August 05 2009 at 07:22 AM
Socially responsible fund divests from paper giant
Today, Calvert Social Responsibility Index divested from Weyerhaeuser Corp., the Seattle-based lumber and paper giant (next time you buy groceries, check the bottom of your bag for the Weyerhaeuser logo).
The investment firm, which manages $13 billion, cited a long conflict in Grassy Narrows, Ontario, in the Boreal Forest (Boreal Forest near Grassy Narrows pictured). Full disclosure: I worked on a Rainforest Action Network campaign to get Weyerhaeuser out of the area before coming to SFGate. For nearly a decade, the Grassy Narrows indigenous group that claims the land as its ancestral and actual territory had protested clear-cut logging there. Even after its supplier abandoned ship, citing residents' objections, Weyerhaeuser attempted to log the area itself.
Calvert's move creates all that much more pressure on the lumber company to change its business practices. That's good news for the people of Grassy Narrows, but it's also good news for socially conscious investors: It means your investments are helping to change the world, one small, beautiful corner of it at a time.
SRIs have generally performed at least as well as the market as a whole, and in some cases they've fallen less far over the past year. For tips on socially responsible investing in a bear market, read this L.A. Times article.
| June 15 2009 at 12:23 PM
Blowing toxic smoke
I've been a little bit obsessed with climate change denial this week. My fascination is whether those who generate the talking points repeated, sometimes ad nauseum, by citizen denialists, believe what they are saying or are engaged in a deeply, deeply cynical activity.
According to two major articles this week, signs point to deep cynicism. The first is a Slate article by Marc Gunther, formerly of Fortune magazine. Gunther ticks off a long list of companies that individually lobby for climate regulation, which also belong to, or sit on the board of U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The chamber is among the most hysterical voices against carbon regulation:
In response to last year's Lieberman-Warner climate bill, the chamber ran a TV commercial showing a family shivering in their own home and a businessman literally running to work. Regulating greenhouse gases, the ad said, could make it "too expensive to heat our homes, drive our cars, or power our lives." The chamber and its allies also held "dialogues" in about 10 swing states, challenging climate science and arguing that regulation would destroy between 3 million and 4 million jobs and raise household energy costs by $4,000 to $6,700 a year by 2030.
The companies supporting climate regulation that occupy positions on the chamber's board include: Alcoa, Caterpillar, Deere, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, PepsiCo, Siemens, and Xerox. IBM, News Corp, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Toyota—hardly REI and Whole Foods.
The Chamber of Commerce creates talking points that a significant portion of its board knows are false and charges companies for lobbying and PR for those points, while they also spend money on lobbying and PR for the other side. There is a major fiduciary responsibility problem that ensues: It's a misuse of shareholder money to fuel both sides of a debate, when companies are legally obligated to use shareholder funds to advance the interests of the company.
The second article is by the Times' Andrew Revkin, who is even more politically moderate than Gunther. The Global Climate Coalition, before it disbanded in 2002, was a key player in opposing carbon regulation by questioning climate science. Yet, as early as 1995, the group's own experts knew its positions were flatly untrue:
[A] document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
"The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied," the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
In a bit of delightful irony, the documents were provided by an automakers' lobby during the discovery phase on an ongoing lawsuit challenging California's efforts to regulate emissions from vehicles. If the automakers hadn't sued, in other words, the documents would never have surfaced.
A summary paragraph drawn up by GCC's board echoes what I recently said to a climate skeptic: "The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change." A section that actually debunked those contrarian arguments was cut by the board, as the coalition continued to use those arguments to throw into question IPCC's ongoing work on climate change.
The GCC disbanded in 2002, but former members, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute, continue to lobby against curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.
| April 24 2009 at 12:35 PM
Obama rubberstamps business as usual in Detroit
At this point, it's hardly even controversial to say American cars suck. They are less fuel efficient than the Model T and don't last as long or drive as well as their Asian counterparts.
American car companies have been hellbent on rejecting innovation. We're shelling out cash for them, as I understand it, essentially because we need those big factories to crank out tanks and the like. We can't go without some sort of vehicle industry, however lame.
Here's what I don't understand: Why don't we tell the auto companies that we'll give them more bailout money only if they retool their factories to make hybrid electric or pure electric vehicles? Doing so would make the industry part of the solution instead of part of the problem, as it's been for so long.
Americans want greener cars, as sales of the Prius and advance demand for the American-made all-electric Tesla indicate. Overall, small car sales have flagged much less than SUV and sedan sales.
A new cash-for-clunkers proposal is circulating on Capitol Hill that would offer consumers a big incentive for trading in vehicles that get 18 or fewer mpg. The House version would only offer the incentive to consumers purchasing American cars.
Huh? American cars barely average better than 18 mpg. The incentive should be for hybrids and other very fuel-efficient vehicles only. Forcing American automakers to produce the cars they've been promising to make for a decade or more may make that move more politically palatable. But, in any case, if the government is handing out money, it should be paying for desirable outcomes, and greater fuel economy helps everyone but the automakers (think money in your pocket)—and they should have seen it coming long, long ago.
Why isn't this move on the agenda? After all, Obama clearly isn't afraid to put his nose in the companies' business.
| April 02 2009 at 11:56 AM
Bush Blocked In The Red Zone
You could have knocked me over with a feather last night when I got a press release from the National Parks Conservation Association saying that the Bush administration had withdrawn its proposed rule-changes affecting pollution from power plants. (In case you've been asleep for the last eight years, Bush wants to loosen regulations on pollution, including in Class I areas such as National Parks.) The press release had a giddy feel to it, too: After all, this reversal swims against the current of all of Bush's industry-pandering midnight regulations.
And it's no small victory. "It's stunning. This is the most high-profile prize sought by the utility industry," John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the AP.
The rule relaxation would have allowed power plants to calculate their pollution annually instead of hourly, as currently required, which would allow them to average low demand times in with peak demand times, misrepresenting the intensity of the pollution created at peak times, which in the summer also coincide with the inversions that cause polluted air to hover over cities. It would also have made it easier to build plants in areas with pristine air.
How was this last-minute victory snatched from the jaws of defeat? The National Park Service and some EPA officials opposed the move. But the coup de grace was a lawsuit filed by environmental groups that would have made it impossible for the administration to finalize the rules before January 20.
It's hard not to be giddy when sanity and the democratic process prevail over Bush's financially-motivated giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. As we lift our glasses to Obama on January 20, we should remember to lift them for the environmental and other civic society activists and organizations that have toiled thanklessly for eight years, scoring the rare victory to ensure that Americans would have a country—lands and government—to get back on that historic day. As bad as this administration has been, those checks and balances prevented it from being much worse.
Share some of those victories, small or large, in the comments.
| December 11 2008 at 11:07 AM
Taking Control Of The Means Of Production
There's a distinct Marxist resonance—in a fun way—to Electronics TakeBack Coalition's Times Square ad, which plays on a Panasonic jumbotron, asking Panasonic to agree to take charge of recycling its old products when consumers are done with them.
Or you could just call it ironic.
For info on recycling your old TV, click here.
| November 26 2008 at 11:16 AM
Electronica
E-waste is a serious environmental problem that few are making attempts to resolve. But electronics aren't guilt-free before they hit the trash can. Many electronics suck a lot of power, even when they are ostensibly "off," and manufacturers often use toxic materials. Of course, as in any other industry, electronics makers' green standing also depends on how they conduct their own operations.
Greenpeace has a new report out, grading manufacturers on their efforts. The international group's San Francisco office has blogged about the report on SFGreen. Check it out. Greenpeace also runs a campaign focused on the San Jose-based computer giant, Apple (adorably, it's called Green My Apple), which has prompted the company to use fewer toxics, though it still has a ways to go.
| November 25 2008 at 02:48 PM
GM: Climate Change Is a Crock...Of Cash?
GM sure is getting a ride out of its Volt. After promising in 2007 to mass produce the plug-in hybrid by 2010, the company got props from greens and a big puff piece in the Atlantic. Business Week even praised notorious eco-clutz Bob Lutz for leaving the Volt as his legacy.
When the company unveiled the Volt prototype Tuesday, CEO Rick Wagoner used the opportunity to ask for government assistance to the tune of $25 billion. When Lutz went on the Colbert Report to pimp the Volt he claimed that, like "32,000 of the world's leading scientists," he believes the warming climate is unrelated to human activity. In February, Lutz was a bit less sanguine in his dismissal of human-caused climate change, calling it "a crock of sh-t." Nevertheless, his company is happy to take government money intended to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions.
Lutz's embarassing comments aside, GM is, as Climate Progress's Joseph Romm puts it, "a master greenwasher." And greenwashing, sadly, can pay.
| September 18 2008 at 12:07 PM
