[Peace-discuss] Politics of global warming

[C. G. Estabrook]

[JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is co-editor with Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch, and the 
author of numerous books, including "Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to 
Me: The Politics of Nature" and "A Pocket Guide to Environmental Bad Guys" (with 
James Ridgeway). In this interview from last summer he discusses a new wave of 
corporate “greenwashing” -- public relations campaigns designed to portray the 
biggest polluters as environmentally conscientious. --CGE]


Q: 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?


NONE. That’s the short answer.

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.


Q:WHEN A company like BP talks about developing alternative fuels, is this real, 
or is it a PR sham?


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.


Q: AMONG A number of politicians, including Democrats, the concerns about global 
warming seem to have become an excuse for talk about resurrecting nuclear power.


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.


Q: WITH GORE, it’s also a question of who gets the blame for global warming.


IT’S ALL about personal responsibility--it’s like listening to Jerry Falwell or 
something. There’s no critique of capitalism, there’s no political critique, 
there’s no critique of large corporations.

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.


Q: CAN YOU talk about the attitude of the environmental movement toward this 
corporate greenwashing?


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, and they really want you to 
dance to their tune.

http://www.socialistworker.org/2007-1/634/634_07_StClair.shtml