[Mb-civic] FW: Cromwell / Burning The Planet For Profit / Jan 18

[Michael Butler]

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From: "ernesto ciccarelli" <chiosceola at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 07:08:19 -0500
To: michael at michaelbutler.com
Subject: FW: Cromwell / Burning The Planet For Profit / Jan 18

>
>ZNet Commentary
>Burning The Planet For Profit January 18, 2006
>By David Cromwell
>
>After 4.6 billion years of planetary history, we may become the first
>species to monitor its own extinction. In impressive detail, humankind is
>amassing evidence of devastating changes in the atmosphere, oceans, ice
>cover, land and biodiversity.
>
>And yet mass media, politics, the education system and other realms of
>public inquiry demonstrate a stunning capacity to focus on what does not
>really matter. Meanwhile, the truly vital issues receive scant attention to
>the point of invisibility: namely, the parlous prospects for humanity's
>survival and the root causes underlying the global environmental threat.
>
>Current patterns of 'development' and consumerism, fuelled annually by
>billions of advertising dollars, are unsustainable. But huge corporations
>and powerful investors have governments and societal institutions in a
>stranglehold, delivering policies that demand endless 'growth' on a finite
>planet.
>
>
>The Corporate Killers
>
>Take the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the most influential
>business pressure group in the UK. Friends of the Earth (FoE) notes that
>the core objective of the CBI, and other "corporate lobby groups who favour
>short-term profit over sustainable development", is to promote endless
>opportunities for business 'growth', and to do so by bending the ear of the
>UK government. (Friends of the Earth, 'Hidden Voices: The CBI, corporate
>lobbying and sustainability', June 2005)
>
>FoE reported: "many companies are using their influence over Government to
>promote public policies that are bad for communities and the environment."
>As years of New Labour in power have shown: "the Government seems to
>readily accept the CBI arguments at face value." A major consequence is
>that the government "is failing to reach its targets to reduce greenhouse
>gases because it is promoting policies that encourage more pollution, such
>as significantly expanding airports following intense lobbying by big
>business lobby groups."
>
>Tony Juniper, head of FoE in England & Wales, observes that the "CBI agenda
>is a simple one - to increase deregulation and reduce business taxes."
>There are "serious concerns about how the CBI uses the threat of potential
>damage to UK business and job losses to oppose regulations that would
>improve workers' rights, benefit the environment and deliver economic
>benefits." (FoE, ibid.)
>
>Thus Sir Digby Jones, CBI director-general, criticised even the
>government's modest target to reduce carbon dioxide as "risking the
>sacrifice of UK jobs on the altar of green credentials." (Andrew Taylor,
>'Jobs warning over tough move on emissions', Financial Times, January 20,
>2004). Note the standard rhetorical device of expressing concern for "jobs"
>when the focus of business worries is, in fact, "profits."
>
>The CBI not only has a discernible influence over state policies, the
>government is actually "in thrall to the CBI." FoE explains why:
>
>"There is a clear 'alignment of values' between the CBI and many similar
>figures in Government [in] that they broadly agree in minimising Government
>intervention in the market (ie neo-liberal economics)."
>
>Moreover, the CBI is able to get "critical comments on Government policy
>put out through the media, which obviously attracts Government attention.
>This is further entrenched by many business journalists who simply do not
>challenge the CBI claims and accept them as representing totally the views
>of business." (FoE, ibid.)
>
>As Media Lens has noted before, the corporate media industry is a vital
>component of the business world. It is therefore not surprising that
>journalists working in the business sections of the media - indeed,
>throughout the news media as a whole - promote corporate aims.
>
>
>Corporate Defenders of Climate Myths
>
>There are other corporate groups which, like the CBI, are determined to
>prioritise short-term greed. One of them is the Cato Institute, a US
>"non-profit public policy research foundation" which "seeks to broaden the
>parameters of public policy debate" to promote the "traditional American
>principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and
>peace."
>
>This perspective satisfies the Institute's sponsors who mainly consist of
>"entrepreneurs, securities and commodities traders, and corporations such
>as oil and gas companies, Federal Express, and Philip Morris that abhor
>government regulation." ('"Evidence-based" research? Anti-environmental
>organisations and the corporations that fund them', October 19, 2005;
>www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=2099)
>
>Among Cato's sponsors are ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco, Tenneco gas,
>pharmaceutical companies Pfizer Inc. and Merck, Microsoft, Proctor &
>Gamble, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company and many others, including those with
>business interests here in the UK. Shell Oil Company, a sister company of
>Shell in Europe, is a past sponsor of the Cato Institute.
>
>One of the Institute's "adjunct scholars" is Steven Milloy who publishes a
>website devoted to exposing "junk science." Milloy has a background in
>lobbying for the tobacco industry. John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton,
>analysts of the 'spin' industry, have pointed out that "junk science" is
>the term that "corporate defenders apply to any research, no matter how
>rigorous, that justifies regulations to protect the environment and public
>health. The opposing term, 'sound science,' is used in reference to any
>research, no matter how flawed, that can be used to challenge, defeat, or
>reverse environmental and public health protection." (Corporate Watch,
>ibid.)
>
>The Cato Institute has published reports with titles such as 'Climate of
>Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming', and 'Meltdown: The
>Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and
>the Media.' In May 2003, in response to a report by the Worldwatch
>Institute which linked climate change and severe weather events, Jerry
>Taylor, the Cato Institute's "director of natural resource studies"
>retorted:
>
>"It's false. There is absolutely no evidence that extreme weather events
>are on the increase. None. The argument that more and more dollar damages
>accrue is a reflection of the greater amount of wealth we've created."
>(www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=21)
>
>Another major US-based lobby group whose tentacles of influence extend
>across the Atlantic is the American Petroleum Institute, a powerful trade
>association for the US oil industry - an industry which has sister
>companies in many other countries, including the UK.
>
>Among the API's members are Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, BP Amoco
>and Shell. Researcher Robert Blackhurst has described how the API has
>"sustained a long guerrilla campaign against climate scientists." A memo
>leaked to the New York Times in 1998 exposed its strategy of investing
>millions to muddy the science on climate change among "congress, the media
>and other key audiences." (Blackhurst, 'Clouding the atmosphere', The
>Independent, September 19, 2005)
>
>The API recently funded a scientific paper in the journal Climate Research
>denying that 20th century temperatures had been unusually high, giving
>well-publicised ammunition to climate sceptics. After finding the paper's
>methods and assumptions had been flawed, five of the journal's editors
>resigned.
>
>Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an Amsterdam-based research and
>campaign group, notes that "Shell and BP Amoco, both formerly ardent
>critics of global warming theory, have shifted their strategies
>dramatically." CEO continues:
>
>"These masters of climate greenwash have undergone expensive corporate
>makeovers and now present themselves as leaders in reducing CO2 emissions
>and supporting renewable energy."
>(www.corporateeurope.org/greenhouse/greenwash.html)
>
>Shell and BP Amoco employ a sophisticated public relations approach:
>
>"Expensive TV and newspaper advertisements portraying an
>environmentally-friendly image are at the heart of this strategy. In many
>cases, small-scale environmental projects which the companies fund are used
>to justify the green credentials of the corporation as a whole - projects
>which often cost less than the advertisements used to showcase them to the
>general public... Both Shell and BP Amoco continue to increase oil
>production year after year and have no intention of changing that in the
>next decades." (CEO, ibid.)
>
>Corporate news media rarely report the influence of corporate lobby groups
>on governments, or expose their expensive PR campaigns, and how detrimental
>these business activities are for the climate stability of the planet.
>
>The news media also take capitalism as a given, much like the laws of
>physics. What rare discussion there might be is only permitted to reinforce
>the corporate prejudice that the system is irreplaceable.
>
>
>The 'Ecowarrior' and the War Criminal
>
>For instance, the Independent newspaper (London) recently granted extensive
>space to Sir Jonathan Porritt, formerly a great green hope in Britain, to
>promote his new book, 'Capitalism: As If The World Matters'.
>
>He believes that "the emerging solutions [to the climate crisis] have to be
>made within the embrace of capitalism." (Porritt, 'How capitalism can save
>the world', Independent Extra, 8-page supplement, Independent, November 4,
>2005)
>
>Porritt, Blair's top environmental adviser, fails to see that current
>government policies are almost wholly opposed to social justice and
>environmental health. Instead, he claims that "almost all key policy
>processes continue to move slowly in the right direction" and that "the
>benefits of today's globalisation process still outweigh the costs."
>
>For Porritt, once leader of the Green Party in England & Wales, this:
>"means working with the grain of markets and free choice, not against it.
>It means embracing capitalism as the only overarching system capable of
>achieving any kind of reconciliation between ecological sustainability, on
>the one hand, and the pursuit of prosperity and personal wellbeing, on the
>other." As for current ecological activism: "Unless it throws in its lot
>with this kind of progressive political agenda, conventional
>environmentalism will continue to decline."
>
>We are to believe that Tony Blair - forever bending to the will of business
>and exposed as one of the most cynical and dishonest politicians in living
>memory - is at the vanguard of this "progressive political agenda":
>
>"I admire a lot about him [Blair]. I do, genuinely. I have to keep saying
>this because people forget it: on climate change, if he hadn't done what he
>has done, we would be looking at a world in which there was no political
>leadership on this agenda." (Marie Woolf, 'Jonathon Porritt: The constant
>ecowarrior', The Independent, November 6 2005)
>
>The Independent, owned by billionaire Sir Tony O'Reilly, can manage to
>provide an eight-page supplement for a former 'ecowarrior' to explain why
>environmentalism must throw in its lot with capitalism.
>
>But there are no multi-page supplements to present community initiatives
>and grassroot debates around the world on alternatives to the present
>disastrous system. We await the day when the Independent, or any other
>mainstream newspaper, publishes a major supplement on, for example,
>participatory economics, a radical vision detailed by ZNet's Michael Albert
>(see Albert, 'Parecon: Life After Capitalism', Verso, London, 2003; and
>www.parecon.org).
>
>Tony Blair has put down his corporate cards on the table, declaring
>bluntly:
>
>"The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption
>substantially because of a long-term environmental problem." (Andrew Balls
>and Alan Beattie, 'Insurance for terror risk is "key to Gaza"', Financial
>Times, September 16, 2005)
>
>But Ross Gelbspan, author and journalist, points to the essential truth
>that economics is subservient to nature, not the other way around:
>
>"...nature's laws are not about supply and demand. Nature's laws are about
>limits, thresholds, and surprises. The progress of the Dow does not seem to
>influence the increasing rate of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet; the
>collapse of the ecosystems of the North Sea will not be arrested by an
>upswing in consumer confidence." (Gelbspan, 'Boiling Point', Perseus Books,
>2004, pp. 128-129)
>
>  David Cromwell is co-editor with David Edwards of Media Lens
>(www.medialens.org). Their book, 'Guardians Of Power - The Myth Of The
>Liberal Media', has just been published by Pluto Press, London
>(www.plutobooks.com).
>
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