Bush goes green?

Calling Bush's Bluff on Global Warming

By Kelpie Wilson, TruthOut.org. Posted June 5, 2007.

Bush now says global warming is a danger but his actions don't reflect that acknowledgment. Here's how we can call the president's bluff and force meaningful changes.
So G.W. Bush has had his conversion. He now believes global warming is a danger and we ought to do something about it. Call him Global Warming Bush.

The reaction of world leaders and environmentalists to Bush's announcement last week that he has a global warming plan (with no targets and no timelines) was mostly skeptical. Until now, the president has been the "Denier-in-Chief," concerned mostly with deleting climate concerns from the scientific reports and action agendas of federal agencies and doing his utmost to derail international efforts to tackle global warming, like the upcoming G-8 meeting this week.

In fact, the shift was so sudden that one of his appointees, NASA chief Michael Griffin, seemed to have missed the course correction. Griffin said on NPR that he was not sure that global warming was "a problem we should wrestle with." Imagine the reaction if the NASA chief had made a comment like that about an impending asteroid strike.

Of all the analogies and metaphors that have been offered to explain the threat of global warming, the one clearest to me is that global warming is like an asteroid, or perhaps a swarm of asteroids. We are already getting hit by some of the smaller ones that are showing up as hotter weather, more violent storms and mega-droughts, but there is a really big one out there headed our way.

Until now, George Bush has barely acknowledged that the asteroid exists. As of Thursday's announcement, the asteroid now exists and it is a danger, but any attempts to head it off must be voluntary and can only be deployed if they will not hurt economic growth.

It is obvious that Bush does not really believe in the asteroid. His announcement is an attempt to subvert the global effort to fight climate change. Nancy Pelosi, returning from a trip to Greenland, where she observed the rapid melting of the ice sheet, said: "The president continues to be in denial. He says now he believes that global warming is happening, and he accepts the science that it is. But if that were so, if he truly understood that, he could not have come up with a proposal that is 'aspirational.' He would have to come up with a commitment that is real."

Still, some leaders and some environmentalists feel that the president has given ground on the issue just by admitting that it exists. What we need to do now is call the president's bluff. For world leaders, that means sticking to their guns on hard targets and timelines and not allowing Bush to divert their energy to another round of meaningless talks.

From statements made this weekend by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, there is hope that European leaders will stay the course. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Merkel said "One thing is clear. We must agree on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012, as part of a process led by the United Nations. ... There will certainly be other meetings and initiatives before then. ... They can even be helpful. What matters is that they all eventually merge into the UN process. This is non-negotiable."

Domestically, the Democrats need to seize this opening and pass veto-proof legislation to combat global warming as soon as possible, but it should not look like the bill that Senate Energy Committee Chair Jeff Bingaman is drafting. Bingaman's bill, which he plans to introduce in June, includes an economic "safety valve" that puts a limit on how high carbon prices can go.

The safety valve is there to make it easier for Bush to sign the bill, but according to the Environmental Defense Fund, the safety valve could "undercut the development of the very technologies that some high emitting-industries will need in the future to meet their emissions targets."

Various companies bragged that their products in aerosol cans were now safe for the environment when all they had done was comply with a ban on the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Some of the self-proclaimed green producers found themselves being investigated by state attorneys general for false advertising and other offenses against the consumer.

The insistence that companies actually substantiate their claims put a damper on the entire green product movement. Yet some companies continued to see advantages in being associated with environmental principles. In one of the more brazen moves, DuPont ran TV ads in the late 1990s depicting sea lions applauding a passing oil tanker (accompanied by Beethoven's "Ode to Joy") to take credit for the fact that its Conoco subsidiary had begun using double hulls in its ships, conveniently failing to mention that it was one of the last oil companies to take that step.

At the same time, some companies began to infiltrate the environmental movement itself by contributing to the more moderate groups and getting spots on their boards. They also joined organizations such as CERES, which encourages green groups and corporations to endorse a common set of principles. By the early 2000s, some companies sought to depict themselves as being not merely in step with the environmental movement but at the forefront of a green transformation.

British Petroleum started publicizing its investments in renewable energy and saying that its initials really stood for Beyond Petroleum--all despite the fact that its operations continued to be dominated by fossil fuels.

This paved the way for General Electric's "ecomagination" p.r. blitz, which it pursued even while dragging its feet in the cleanup of PCB contamination in New York's Hudson River. GE was followed by Wal-Mart, which in October 2005 sought to transform its image as a leading cause of pollution-generating sprawl by announcing a program to move toward zero waste and maximum use of renewable energy.

In recent months the floodgates have opened, with more and more large companies calling for federal caps on greenhouse gas emissions. In January ten major corporations--including Alcoa, Caterpillar, DuPont and General Electric--joined with the Natural Resources Defense Council and other enviro groups in forming the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. A few months later, General Motors, arguably one of the companies that has done the most to exacerbate global warming, signed on as well.

A Cause for Celebration or Dismay?

Today the term "greenwash" is rarely uttered, and differences in positions between corporate giants and mainstream environmental groups are increasingly difficult to discern. Everywhere one looks, enviros and executives have locked arms and are marching together to save the planet. Is this a cause for celebration or dismay?

Answering this question begins with the recognition that companies do not all enter the environmental fold in the same way. Here are some of their different paths:

Defeat. Some companies did not embrace green principles on their own--they were forced to do so after being successfully targeted by aggressive environmental campaigns. Home Depot abandoned the sale of lumber harvested in old-growth forests several years ago after being pummeled by groups such as Rainforest Action Network. Responding to similar campaign pressure, Boise Cascade also agreed to stop sourcing from endangered forests and J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to take environmental impacts into account in its international lending activities. Dell started taking computer recycling seriously only after it was pressed to do so by groups such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

Diversion. It is apparent that Wal-Mart is using its newfound green consciousness as a means of diverting public attention away from its dismal record in other areas, especially the treatment of workers. In doing so, it hopes to peel environmentalists away from the broad anti-Wal-Mart movement. BP's emphasis on the environment was no doubt made more urgent by the need to repair an image damaged by allegations that a 2005 refinery fire in Texas that killed 15 people was the fault of management. To varying degrees, many other companies that have jumped on the green bandwagon have sins they want to public to forget.

Opportunism. There is so much hype these days about protecting the environment that many companies are going green simply to earn more green. There are some market moves, such as Toyota's push on hybrids, that also appear to have some environmental legitimacy. Yet there are also instances of sheer opportunism, such as the effort by Nuclear Energy Institute to depict nukes as an environmentally desirable alternative to fossil fuels. Not to mention surreal cases such as the decision by Britain's BAE Systems to develop environmentally friendly munitions, including low-toxin rockets and lead-free bullets.

The Germans praised him and look at the pic.........lol

Have a good one!:s4:

In other words, the suggestion that the new business environmentalism flows simply from a heightened concern for the planet is far from the truth. Corporations always act in their own self-interest and one way or another are always seeking to maximize profits. It used to be that they had to hide that fact. Today they flaunt it, because there is a widespread notion that eco-friendly policies are totally consistent with cutting costs and fattening the bottom line.

When GE's "ecomagination" campaign was launched, CEO Jeffrey Immelt insisted "it's no longer a zero-sum game -- things that are good for the environment are also good for business." This was echoed by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, who said in a speech announcing his company's green initiative that "being a good steward of the environment and in our communities, and being an efficient and profitable business, are not mutually exclusive. In fact they are one in the same." That's probably because Scott sees environmentalism as merely an extension of the company's legendary penny-pinching, as glorified efficiency measures.

Chevron Wants to Lead

Many environmental activists seem to welcome the notion of a convergence of business interests and green interests, but it all seems too good to be true. If eco-friendly policies are entirely "win-win," then why did corporations resist them for so long? It is hard to believe that the conflict between profit maximization and environmental protection, which characterized the entire history of the ecological movement, has suddenly evaporated.

Either corporations are fooling themselves, in which case they will eventually realize there is no environmental free lunch and renege on their green promises. Or they are fooling us and are perpetrating a massive public relations hoax. A third interpretation is that companies are taking voluntary steps that are genuine but inadequate to solve the problems at hand and are mainly meant to prevent stricter, enforceable regulation.

In any event, it would behoove enviros to be more skeptical of corporate green claims and less eager to jump into bed with business. It certainly makes sense to seek specific concessions from corporations and to offer moderate praise when they comply, but activists should maintain an arm's-length relationship to business and not see themselves as partners. After all, the real purpose of the environmental movement is not simply to make technical adjustments to the way business operates (that's the job of consultants) but rather to push for fundamental and systemic changes.

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.