"US environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair – the president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995 – was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.
Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s, it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilising the climate – the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment.
He began to suck millions from them, and his organisation and others gave them awards for
"environmental stewardship".
Companies such as Shell and BP were delighted. They saw it as valuable
"reputation insurance":
every time they are criticised for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for events such as the massive oil spill that has just turned the Gulf of Mexico into the "Gulf of Texaco", they wheel out their shiny green awards to ward off the prospect of government regulation and to reassure the public that
they Really Care.
At first, this behaviour scandalised the environmental community.
Hair was vehemently condemned as a sell-out and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled – so they, too, started to take the cheques. Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered
how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for CI in 2006. She told me: "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organisation's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organisation, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo.
You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green.
They were 'helping' us, and that was it."
She soon began to see how this behaviour had pervaded almost all of the mainstream green organisations. They take money, and they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of Ikea's dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) leapt to the company's defence, saying that Ikea "can never guarantee" this won't happen; many environmental groups strongly disagree. Is it a coincidence that the
WWF is a "marketing partner" with Ikea, and takes cash from the company?
Likewise, the Sierra Club – the biggest green group in the US – was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the club endorsed their new range of "green" household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales. The club's Corporate Accountability Committee said the deal created a blatant conflict of interest – but took it anyway. But Jessica Frohman, the club's Toxics Committee co-chair, said, "We clearly corrected the record. We never approved the product line." Beyond asking a few questions, she has said, the committee had done nothing to confirm that the product line was greener than its competitors', or good for the environment in any way. The club's chairman, Carl Pope, says he made sure the products met the EPA's most stringent standards and spent four months reviewing them.
The green groups defend their behaviour by saying they are improving the behaviour of the corporations.
But as these stories show, the pressure flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core. As MacDonald says, "Not only do the largest conservation groups take money from companies deeply implicated in environmental crimes, they have become something like satellite PR offices for the corporations that support them."
It has taken two decades for this relationship to become the norm among the big green organisations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is.
It is as though Amnesty International's human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe.
For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous – yet in the US it is now taken for granted....
It seems the US "green" groups have come to see the world solely through the funnel of the US Senate and what legislation it can be immediately coaxed to pass. They say there is no point advocating a strategy that senators will reject flat out and urge environmentalists to be "politically realistic"....
The atmosphere doesn't care where the fall in emissions comes from, as long as it happens in time to stop runaway warming. A ton of carbon in Brazil enters the atmosphere just as surely as a ton in Texas. But if this argument sounds deceptively simple, that's because it is deceptive. In practice, the Redd programme is filled with holes large enough to toss a planet through.
To understand the trouble with Redd, you have to look at the place touted as a model of how the system is supposed to work. Fourteen years ago in Bolivia, a coalition of the Nature Conservancy and three big-time corporate polluters – BP, PacifiCorp and American Electric Power (AEP) – set up a protected forest in Bolivia called the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project. They took 3.9 million acres of tropical forest and said they would clear out the logging companies and ensure that the forest remained standing. They claimed this plan would keep 55 million tons of CO2 locked out of the air – which would, in time, justify their pumping an extra 55 million tons into the air from their coal and oil operations. AEP's internal documents boasted: "The Bolivian project... could save AEP billions of dollars in pollution controls."
Greenpeace sent an investigative team to see how it had turned out. They found that some of the logging companies had simply picked up their machinery and moved to the next rainforest over. An employee for one of the biggest logging companies in the area bragged to them that nobody had ever asked if they had stopped. This is known as "leakage": one area is protected from logging, but the logging leaks a few miles away and continues just the same. In fact, one major logging organisation took the money it was paid by the project to quit and used it to cut down another part of the forest. The project had to admit it had saved 5.8 million tons or less – a tenth of the amount it had originally claimed. Greenpeace says even this is a huge overestimate.
It's a Potemkin forest for the polluters.
When you claim an offset and it doesn't work, the climate is screwed twice over – first because the same amount of forest has been cut down after all, and second because a huge amount of additional warming gases has been pumped into the atmosphere on the assumption that the gases will be locked away by the now-dead trees. So the offset hasn't prevented emissions – it's doubled them....
If their primary concern was the environment, the major conservation groups would be railing against this absurd system and demanding a serious alternative. But on Capitol Hill and at Copenhagen, these groups have been some of the most passionate defenders of carbon offsetting.
They say that, in "political reality", this is the only way to raise the cash for the rainforests, so we will have to work with it. But
this is a strange kind of compromise –
since it doesn't actually work.
In fact, some of the big groups lobbied to make the protections weaker, in a way that will cause the rainforests to die faster. To understand why, you have to grasp a distinction that may sound technical at first but is crucial.
When you are paying to stop deforestation, there are different ways of measuring whether you are succeeding. You can take one small "subnational" area – such as the Noel Kempff Climate Action Project – and save that.
Or you can look at an entire country, and try to save a reasonable proportion of its forests. National targets are much better, because the leakage is much lower. With national targets, it's much harder for a logging company simply to move a few miles up the road and carry on: the move from Brazil to Congo or Indonesia is much heftier, and fewer loggers will make it. Simon Lewis, a forestry expert at Leeds University, says: "There is no question that national targets are much more effective at preventing leakage and saving forest."
Yet several groups – such as TNC and CI – have lobbied for the weaker, lamer, worthless subnational targets to be at the core of Redd and the US climate bills. Thanks in part to their efforts,
this has become official US government policy.
The groups issued a joint statement with some of the worst polluters – AEP, Duke Energy, the El Paso Corporation – calling for them.
An insider who is employed by a leading green group and has seen firsthand how this works told me:
"They will generate a lot of revenue this way. If there are national targets, the money runs through national governments. If there are subnational targets, the money runs through the people who control those forests – and that means TNC, Conservation International and the rest.
Suddenly, these forests they run become assets,
and they are worth billions in a carbon market as offsets.
So they have a vested financial interest in offsetting and in subnational targets – even though they are much more environmentally damaging than the alternatives. It's shocking."...
There is a broad rumble of anger across the grass-roots environmental movement at this position. "At Copenhagen, I couldn't believe what I was seeing," says Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch, an organisation that sides with indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin to preserve their land. "These groups are positioning themselves to be the middlemen in a carbon market. They are helping to set up, in effect,
a global system of carbon laundering...
that will give the impression of action, but no substance.
You have to ask – are these conservation groups at all? They look much more like industry front groups to me."
So it has come to this. After decades of slowly creeping corporate entanglement, some of the biggest environmental groups have remade themselves in the image of their corporate backers: they are putting profit before planet. ...
Some of the failing green groups can be reformed from within. The Sierra Club is a democratic organisation, with the leadership appointed by its members: they can put it right. But other organisations – such as CI and TNC – seem incapable of internal reform and simply need to be shunned. They are not part of the environmental movement."...
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7/21/11, "Why did Bloomberg Tap the Sierra Club for his $50 Million Donation?" WNYC.org
"Why the Sierra Club? They were the lucky environmental group to get $50 million pledged from Bloomberg Philanthropies Thursday. Turns out that Mayor Bloomberg, who was the nation's second largest donor in 2010, has been chummy with the senior leadership of the Sierra Club since 2007. Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Cub, was present at the launch of the city's Greener Greater Buildings Plan in 2009, one of the mayor's signature environmental achievements."...
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2/10/11, "How Bloomberg Does Business," The Nation, Aram Roston
"Though Bloomberg doesn’t run the day-to-day affairs of Bloomberg LP, he still owns almost all the shares, handpicks the firm’s managers, talks with them as much as he feels he needs to, and therefore imposes his own will on the firm when he likes. (New York’s ineffectual Conflicts of Interest Board limited but never fully defined the mayor’s role at the company he founded: the board allows him to “maintain the type of involvement that he believes is consistent with his being the majority shareholder.”)...
Given Bloomberg’s push for a national platform, any intersections between his corporation’s interests and the government warrant scrutiny. And Bloomberg LP runs an effective and sophisticated lobbying shop to promote the firm’s interests with federal agencies and Congress.
It’s striking how, in a fully synergistic Bloomberg style,
a news organization,
a financial information company and
a team of lobbyists
often seem to be working in smooth concert."...
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With "reputation insurance" purchased from the Sierra Club, Mayor Bloomberg is seen as a planetary savior rather than the single biggest polluter in New York City:
2/14/11, “Flight records uncover elusive Mayor’s tracks,” WSJ, Maremont, McGinty, Saul
"The records also show that the Bloomberg fleet has been the single largest user of scarce slots allocated to private aircraft at La Guardia airport. The flights continued apace even after the mayor two years ago called for curbs on small commercial planes at La Guardia and other area airports to reduce congestion. ...
A billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg also owns vacation homes in London and Vail, Colo., and enjoys playing golf in various locales....
Bloomberg planes departed or landed 853 times between August 2008 and the end of 2010. That is 8% of all general aviation movements at La Guardia during that period....
Mr. Loeser declined to comment on any conflict between Mr. Bloomberg’s public stance on airport congestion and the number of Bloomberg Services flights at La Guardia.“
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