FIGHTING GLOBAL WARMING, ONE POORLY ILLUMINATED CANDY BAR AT A TIME

On September 23rd, the Business Roundtable, an association of 150 CEOs whose corporations employ 10 million Americans and produce $4 trillion in annual revenues, purchased ads in the Washington Post and Roll Call touting 70 percent member participation in its Climate RESOLVE program. Against a background featuring a tight V-formation of geese crossing a sparsely clouded blue sky, the ads read, “When America’s businesses all work together, it’s amazing what we can accomplish.”

Climate RESOLVE is the name of the Roundtable’s voluntary greenhouse gas management program, launched in February, 2003, in response to President Bush’s challenge to the private sector to help meet the Administration’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 18% by 2012. In contrast with the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates absolute reductions below 1990 levels, the Bush plan based on emissions intensity – the ratio of emissions to GDP – actually allows emissions to continue to increase, as long as corporate revenues keeps growing.

Click image to see the full ad

History suggests that the intensity approach should achieve effortless, albeit modest, success: without a national climate change policy yet in place, emissions intensity dropped 21% during the ‘80s and another 16% during the ‘90s. In other words, America's corporations can conduct business as usual and still meet the mark.

But should America somehow fail to meet the 18% intensity reduction, participants in Climate RESOLVE will suffer no consequences. Individually, they have no mandatory, enforced targets to shoot for, only voluntary, self-assigned strategies to implement some form of greenhouse gas management, however insignificant. Collectively, their only goal is 100 percent participation in Climate RESOLVE among the Business Roundtable’s members. Kind of like in Little League, where the coach only cares that everyone plays. Yet the environmental stakes of global warming are too high for such a laid-back managerial style. America’s leading corporations aren’t kids learning how to play ball. They should be treated like marquee players, whom much is expected of and on whom the spotlight always shines.

Climate RESOLVE’s expectations are set low, while its spotlight is turned on only when participants are flattered by it. Take General Motors, which not only qualified for participation in Climate RESOLVE, but was noted in the Exemplary Company Actions listed in the program’s first progress report, released last month, for initiatives including “the removal of bulbs illuminating the front panel of over 100 vending machines.” Meanwhile, General Motors’ fleetwide fuel economy – the truest gauge of an automaker’s impact on the climate – is the same as it was ten years ago.

There are companies involved in Climate RESOLVE that have set clear goals for themselves to go beyond token measures and emissions intensity reductions and achieve absolute reductions. Indeed, many of such goals exceed even Kyoto’s targets. For example, BP has reached ahead of schedule its target to cut emissions 10 percent from 1990 levels by 2010. However, these individual achievements should not be considered substitutions for sweeping policies across and throughout industries, or signs that companies which excel in cutting their own emissions want to be models for others. It’s all well and good for BP meet it’s Kyoto-level targets, but not as beneficial for the world, or as desirable to the company, as if other companies used 10 percent less of BP’s petroleum products. Under Climate RESOLVE, companies that feel like cutting emissions to save money on energy use and attract good publicity are free to do so. Those that are content with maintaining their unsustainable status quo can carry on as they please.

Though Climate RESOLVE treats climate change policy as a game, its participants certainly don’t play just for fun. If necessary, particpants will fight tooth and nail to avoid a climate contest in which they don’t get to make their own rules. The Roundtable has lobbied against the mandatory emissions reduction of the Kyoto Protocol since the international agreement was created in 1997. By rallying around the Administration’s voluntary strategy, the Roundtable demonstrates its unwavering policy of avoiding mandatory regulation. (Moreover, the Roundtable has openly questioned the validity of climate change science for nearly ten years – even today, the Roundtable only acknowledges the “potential” effects on the climate that “may” be caused by greenhouse gas emissions. So much for fighting for what you believe in.) It’s no coincidence that the Roundtable’s advertisement promoting Climate RESOLVE was printed in the nation’s capitol, where it has the highest likelihood of influencing legislative decision makers.

Along with political influentials, the ad is also meant to reach the public, whom it is supposed to convince that corporate interests align with the public interest. The ad asks rhetorically, “Why are we volunteering to do this? Because what’s good for the environment is good for business. And that’s good for everybody.” Yet regardless of what its publicity materials claim, in practice the Roundtable understands, as stated in its “WTO Environment Paper” published last year, that “[m]arket access can be impeded by a wide variety of environmental measures.” Like the Kyoto Protocol, for instance. What’s good for the environment is therefore not necessarily good for the Roundtable’s members, among them a range of multinationals pushing for open markets in oil (BP, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips), logging (Georgia-Pacific, International Paper) automobile (Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler) and other environmentally destructive industries.

With Russia about to ratify, the climate change policies of 123 nations accounting for around 60 percent of the industrialized world’s carbon dioxide emissions are expressed in the Kyoto Protocol, a 23-page document housed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. In contrast, the climate change policy of the United States, which accounts for 25 percent of emissions, is neatly contained in a glossy, gushing advertisement. How embarrassing for the country, how shameful for the participants of the Business Roundtable’s Climate RESOLVE to allow the world’s most important environmental issue to be governed by corporations that skirt governance.

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