Corporate Accountability is Earth Day's Inconvenient Truth

Corporate Accountability is this Earth Day's Inconvenient Truth

By Harvey Wasserman

April 23, 2007

The great green bandwagon that came of age this Earth Day has been a very long time coming. Its lag time has been no accident.

From Rachel Carson's 1963 Silent Spring and Earth Day 1970 and the first arrests at the Seabrook Nuke in 1976 and the decades of writing and marching and organizing and fundraising, the landmarks to a growing green consciousness are epic.

The past fifty years have seen the rise of the movements for civil, gay, and women's rights; for an end to nuclear bomb testing and atomic power plants; for peace in Vietnam, central America and Iraq; for the right to open access and accurate vote counts in elections that cannot again be stolen, and much much more.

These national and global campaigns have been accompanied by never-ending battles at the grassroots, against Jim Crow, for equal housing, against local polluters, for paper ballots, and for an ever-growing range of vital causes that demand human attention if we are to retain our rights and dignity.

This on-going grassroots fervor is the essence of democracy, the lifeblood of our ability to survive and grow.

Today, another specific cause---this time the environment---has finally become fashionable.

But this moment has been long delayed by big corporations that profit immensely from the destruction of the Earth, and that intend to continue.

After fighting us for so long, we are now witness to a classic hijack---the theft of imagery. It's now the height of corporate fashion to be painted the color they have so long opposed.

Many companies have indeed come around, and deserve their new badge of honor. But some paint themselves green no matter how much harm they do.

From Exxon to Ford, from Mobil to Monsanto, the world's worst polluters buy fuzzy, feel-good advertising with an environmental message. Columnists and politicians who've pushed catastrophic policies like utility deregulation and the war in Iraq now genuflect at the media's green altar. Without a hint of irony, some claim authorship of a movement they've scorned for decades.

The German-based Coalition Against Bayer Dangers ( http://www.cbgnetwork.de/4.html ) reports that the infamous chemical and pharmaceutical giant has been designated for an award at a "Rachel Carson Reception" in Pittsburgh. Among other things, Bayer makes pesticides such as Endosulfan and Parathion, along with Bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor used in baby bottles, food cans, dental sealants, etc.

Bayer "has a long tradition in trying to `greenwash` their image," says the German group. "Rachel Carson turns in her grave."

To be sure, we can be thankful for progress on the part of many who are sincere, and who will make a genuine difference. But in too many cases, the green advertising costs more than what the companies spend to better the environment.

It is absolutely true that individual behavior is a core element of our eco-crisis. Each of us bears some guilt for our part in fouling our global nest.

We consume too much. We waste with impunity. So at its finale, Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" rightly lists individual steps we can take for saving the planet. We all must do our individual part.

But the world's biggest polluters have corporate names. While we individually do the right things by changing our light bulbs and riding our bikes, they will continue their eco-rampage as long as it's profitable to do so and they can legally get away with it.

As important researchers and historians like Thom Hartmann, Ted Nace and others have shown, under current American law, corporations enjoy a wide range of supra-human rights. Their charters require no social or ecological services. They have hijacked the 14th Amendment. The economic system imposes no real charges for destruction of the air, water, food or public health. The legal system makes it hard, if not impossible, to levy the full costs of eco-chaos, and thus to bring it to a halt.

It is the tragedy of the commons brought to the 21st century. It must change.

We can all feel good about being more individually green. It does make a difference.

But we'll never save this planet without also re-defining the nature of the polluting corporation.

Going green means no more business as usual. This Earth Day and beyond, the need for complete accountability, both individual and corporate, is the ultimate inconvenient truth.

Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is available via http://www.solartopia.org/. HIs writings appear at http://www.freepress.org/ .

GREEN BEACON by Bob Koehler

GREEN BEACON
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media Services
Harvey Wasserman’s newly published “Solartopia!” is a breath of fresh air, blowing — well, whipping, at Great Plains velocity —across the thinking person’s vision of the future. What a gift this book is: an informed, science-savvy vision of tomorrow that isn’t an eco-nightmare.
Rather, it’s an enthusiastically optimistic look at a rational, very green near future. (To order, go to solartopia.org.) The setting is 2030; the premise is a flight in a hydrogen-fueled airship from Hamburg to Honolulu, with Wasserman serving as tour guide and eco-historian as we watch the world unfold beneath us and gradually learn about the death of King CONG, the joyous global proliferation of rooftop gardens and how all those giant wind turbines wound up off the coast of Holland, among much else.
King CONG, an acronym of Wasserman’s coinage — Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas — is the fossil-fuel addicted junkie-beast we think of today simply as reality, but to the relaxed narrator of “Solartopia!,” this beast, which in 2007 seemingly runs the world and holds it hostage to its appetites, is nothing more than a historical curiosity.
Listen up, boys and girls: We make it! We survive as a species. King CONG collapses of its own irrationality. Mind you, it ain’t pretty, but by 2030 its death throes, its meltdowns and final mad wars of resource acquisition (though not, of course, its radioactive waste and eco-dead zones) are behind us, and renewable-resource technology — wind, solar and biomass, along with extreme techno-efficiency — powers the human race to a sustainable, prosperous and democratic future, in which healing can begin.
This isn’t sci-fi. Wasserman, prolific author and long-time environmental activist, describes a world that has rethought and rebuilt itself on the basis of what we know right this moment. “All the technology that was ever needed for a post-pollution world was available in 2007,” he writes. He also makes the point that this technology, once the foot of King CONG is off its chest, is hugely profitable. That’s the clincher.
“Solartopia!” powers along, as we silently cross Europe in the hydro-jet, then glide across the Atlantic Ocean and the North American continent, with nonstop ironic wonder that the world below us was once run by self-destructive fools.
“Nuke weapons were once tested here,” our guide, for instance, informs us as we cross Nevada. “Then King CONG tried to stuff the place with radioactive waste. The dormant volcano at Yucca Mountain was once drilled with a $10 billion tunnel-and-train gizmo meant to accept huge quantities of spent reactor rods. Now it’s just another offbeat tourist attraction, with slot machines in the caverns and a spa in one of the would-have-been waste chambers.”
The pervading good sense that prevails in Wasserman’s 2030 is predicated on the existence of a human survival instinct that, while responsive to fear, is not centered in the reptilian (fight or flight) brain. Oh my, I hope he’s right.
When “people began keeling over dead from China’s brown, filthy air,” the guide notes, and “the wrath of climate chaos drowned millions and starved more,” what happened wasn’t the worst of human nature coming to the fore but — my God, finally — the emergence of our capacity to take the long view.
A sustainable world “became less an impossible dream than a fervent prayer for deliverance,” he writes. “And it demanded, first and foremost, that we ‘face the waste.’ To avoid extinction, ultra-efficiency became a vital necessity. . . . Nothing — NOTHING — on ‘Spaceship Earth’ is manufactured that cannot be . . . recycled or composted.”
Wasserman even cites a late-20th-century cultural reference point for inspiration: the 1995 Ron Howard/Tom Hanks movie “Apollo 13,” about the ill-fated 1969 moon expedition that, following a shipboard explosion on the return trip, “could only limp back to Earth by preserving every electron their damaged craft could muster.” This heroic flight becomes the metaphor for the plight of the whole planet.
In the twilight of the era of King CONG, Wasserman writes, “the West wasted fully half the juice it produced” and the emerging economies of Asia were even worse. Turning this around was not simply a matter of “super-compact fluorescents, ultra-light composites, mega-efficient manufacturing, totally tight solar building designs,” but also, ahem, the rational recycling of waste, human and otherwise.
“Sewage systems everywhere,” he writes, “double as energy-generating compost operations” and have morphed into “the trillion-dollar business of converting waste to power. Few today can comprehend it . . . but this country once actually dumped human waste onto the lands and into the oceans!”
The only downside to this book is that it ends, and we’re left treading the polluted water and grappling with the flaky politics of 2007. The book returns us to a world that believes far more in guns than recycling; and our survival — our willingness to make peace with the planet — is still very much in doubt. But with “Solartopia!” Wasserman has planted a beacon two decades into the future to guide us past the rough spots.
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Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com.
© 2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Can Al Gore Get Us to Solartopia?

Al Gore has leapt to center stage with well-founded concerns about global warming. He has been gratefully successful in publicizing the fact that there is a virtual library of irrefutable evidence that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising in our atmosphere, that this is being caused by human beings, and that the potential impacts are catastrophic.

What's not being said is that the solution to the problem---the necessary transition to Solartopia, a world based on renewable energy---is also the key to the future of our economic well-being, and would be whether global warming was a problem or not.

In short: even without the dire disaster of climate change, a transitioning to green power is the only hope our global economy has for future prosperity.

Indeed, moving to an industrial system that runs on wind, solar, bio-fuels and other renewable sources, along with increased efficiency, including a revival of mass transit, can and will do for the global economy in the next 25 years what the computer/internet revolution has done for the last.

What's also clear is that there is absolutely no room in this future for fossil fuels or nuclear power. But King CONG (coal, oil, nukes and gas) is not going to give up without an epic fight.

First up is the insane idea of bulding new nuclear plants. A debate now rages about a possible "renaissance" for atomic energy. It's a non-starter. Nuclear power is nothing more than a half-century of proven failure.

It is 50 years since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. But no solution has been found for the long-term management of spent nuclear fuel.

Nor is the private insurance industry willing assume liability for a possible catastrophic accident.

We have had a taste of such disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. We agree with the insurers that risk of another one, by terror or error, is too great to sustain.

The scant experience with these new reactors has already been bad, with cost overruns and other problems plaguing the few projects that have been tried.

The economics for new nukes are catastrophic. Bush Administration partisans may be willing to pour billions of taxpayer dollers into them. But we see no rush from Wall Street to embrace more nukes, especially when Bush is threatening war with Iran to prevent them from doing the same.

Which leaves us with this obvious challenge: if we reject fossil fuels and nuclear power, how will we heat and light an increasingly crowded planet, whose people are rightly intent on material prosperity?

The answer is in green power: renewable energy and increased efficiency.

For decades it has been argued that a planet run entirely on natural energy---a "Solartopia"---is an unrealistic dream, that might, at best, come in fifty or a hundred years.

But our planetary eco-systems can not wait that long.

And the economic engines now driving the conversion to green power---the big investment dollars pouring into wind, solar, bio-fuels, etc---will not allow such a delay.

In fact, there is a "great green avalanche" of investment dollars now flooding the renewable markets. The global wind business is booming with 25-35% annual growth. Far more new wind capacity is being installed than nuclear. Major technological advances in commercial-scale turbines mean there is no cheaper form of new electric generation. New gearless machines promise even better performance.

Though siting issues often arise (as they certainly will with new nuclear plants), properly installed wind machines do virtually no environmental damage. Though there are exceptions, the bird-kill issue is mostly anti-wind hype. Wind turbines are in fact proven to the point that financial powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, Edison Capital, John Deare, and many more are lining up to invest in these projects. Wind power's principle problem today is a shortage of turbines.

Solar power is also plummeting in cost and soaring in demand. Solar water heating has long been economically competitive throughout the northern hemisphere. Photovoltaics (PV), which convert sunlight to electricity, are being incorporated into roofing shingles and window glass.

Solar power towers and parabolic trough collectors have proven themselves to be cost effective.

Passive solar architecture can be as simple as facing a building's biggest windows to the south, with resultant heat gain worth big money for decades to come.

Ethanol from corn and diesel from soy have become major cash crops. But in the long run, bio-fuel stocks that need annual planting will give way to perennials with high cellulose and vegetable oil content. These "incredible inedibles" will include switchgrass, miscanthus, hemp, canola and more.

Meanwhile, simple devices to harness the tides, the currents, and the thermal differentials between solar-heated water at the surface of the oceans and the colder waters deeper down, are already proving do-able. Geothermal power, built on the heat beneath the Earth's crust, has been with us for centuries.

All these sources are great job-creators. But can they add up to a totally green-powered planet?

That depends on our most crucial energy wild-card---increased efficiency. Despite all we've been through since the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, this nation---and much of the rest of the world---still wastes at least half the energy it burns.

Light Emitting Diodes (LED), superconducting, mag-lev, and a wide range of other high-performance technologies will redefine how we use---and abuse---energy. The projections for unsustainable rises in global energy consumption in the next decades are posited on energy inefficiencies that economic factors will force us to transcend.

In fact, we see a society that has no choice but to go totally green. The primary reason is that our survival on this planet depends on it.

Green energy and efficiency make perfect economic sense. They are our future, both economically and ecologically.

But none of that matters if we are still stymied by the hugely rich and powerful fossil/fuel industry. We won't get to Solartopia until King CONG (coal, oil, nukes and gas) is shoved out of the way.

And that's the hugest "if" of all. Those awaiting Al Gore to take on these industries may have a long wait. Even if he were an ideal leader, it will take nothing less than a gargantuan grassroots campaign to change our energy system to what it must be if we are to survive. For many of us, that will be the real work of the coming era.

A century ago, a great leader named Eugene V. Debs warned that he could not lead the American people into a worker's paradise, because if one leader could take them there, another could take them out.

In the long run, Al Gore is right, global warming is a dire threat. There are major investors now willing to invest big money in solar power. And it is certain that one leader after another will emerge to lead us toward a world based on green energy and efficiency.

But King CONG will not give up on its gargantuan investments without an epic struggle. We will not get to a green-powered world without dismantling the enormous infrastructure that is the fossil/nuke cartel, with all its power and money.

No single politician will ever do that. In the long run, the only route to Solartopia is through the grassroots.