IS BIG BUSINESS BUYING OUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT?

A recent article from
Corporate Research E-Letter No. 65, May-June 2007. speaks of the current surge of Environmental Enthusiasm in corporate America.

The article reminds me of feelings I had in the the early 90's when we saw environmental fervor in every media publication and many corporate advertisements. I recall one highlight was the 1990 issue of TIME Magazine which made "Earth" the Person of the year.

At that time the world was all about ‘green’ with the 20th anniversary of Earthday raising awareness of the environmental issues and the Earth Summit in 1992. This flash media hyper-attention fizzled rapidly from a green hue to a light brown as the public channel-surfed to other "issues".

This time, I am a bit more optimistic that many of the current green efforts of corporate America will stick, mainly due to the fact that the environmental crisis is on full fire alarm status and it appears that people are afraid - to lose profits.

Yet there are many corporate giants are who simply capturing the wave of environmental concern to continue a trend of green-washing as a means to obscure the business-as-usual mentality.

I recently visited a friend's home where he had a poster created by DOW Chemical highlighting all the spots on the planet where there are areas of concern on a particular green topic. I frankly wasn't inspired enough to read more.

Furthermore, the more corporations are willing to spend to advertise hollow, or shallow efforts, the greater the danger to environmental groups who would align with these shenanigans in order to receive much needed funding.

"Moreover, there is a risk that the heightened level of collaboration will undermine the justification for an independent environmental movement. Why pay dues to a green group if its agenda is virtually identical to that of GE and DuPont? Already there are hints that business views itself, not activist groups, as the real green vanguard. Chevron, for instance, has been running a series of environmental ads with the tagline “Will you join us?”

Join them? Wasn’t it Chevron and the other oil giants that played a major role in creating global warming? Wasn’t it Chevron that used the repressive regime in Nigeria to protect its environmentally destructive operations in the Niger Delta? Wasn’t it Chevron’s Texaco unit that dumped more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in Ecuador? And wasn’t it Chevron that was accused of systematically underpaying royalties to the federal government for natural gas extracted from the Gulf of Mexico? That is not the kind of track record that confers the mantle of environmental leadership.

In fact, we shouldn’t be joining any company’s environmental initiative. Human activists should be leading the effort to clean up the planet, and corporations should be made to follow our lead."

Read the entire article here

I agree with the skepticism in the article since many companies like GE, Union Carbide, Texaco, Exxon and Oxy have not paid a dime to clean up the messes they have made in the past. In fact they continue to fight tooth and nail in legal battles in order to avoid paying anything!