Jared Diamond's evil op-ed piece in today's NYT

Today's NYT contains an outrageous op-ed piece by corporate cheerleader Jared Diamond, who states, "I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability." The examples he provides? Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron.

It is here.

His title asks, "Will Big Business Save the Earth?" That's not a difficult question to answer: No. No, big business will not save the Earth. Instead of being honest, though, Diamond, answers the question in the affirmative and subjects us to a poorly-argued, mind-warping, illogical and denial-drenched apology for some of the most destructive corporations that curse our planet with their existence.

His overall argument doesn't hold up to even the most casual scrutiny. He spends the whole column arguing that we shouldn't hate big corporations because market forces are causing them to make changes to help the planet. "Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run." He attempts to show that Wal-Mart, Coca Cola and Chevron are transforming their production practices to reflect their concern for the natural world (and that this also improves their bottom line, so it's a big win-win).

His actual agenda is revealed in the last paragraph, which is partly a plea for the government to give corporations incentives like tax breaks and money for research to facilitate these changes. But if they're already modifying production practices to help the environment because that is good for profits, then why do they require incentives? I don't get it.

Mainstream liberal environmentalist groups lack credibility among real environmentalists for many reasons, one of which is the presence of corporate executives on their boards, and another of which is the huge amounts of money that they accept from corporations. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, landed a $3 million contract with Chevron in the early 1990s to implement an "Integrated Conservation and Development Project" in Papua New Guinea, where Chevron's oil drilling was vehemently resisted by the affected indigenous people. (See "Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond Greenwasher" here)

Diamond happens to serve on the WWF board. I'm sure it's purely by coincidence that he praises Chevron's efforts to improve the environment in his book "Collapse," and again in this NYT op-ed piece. I can imaging him hanging out with his fellow board members, business execs who complain of being misunderstood while sending him meaningful glances brimming with unspoken promises of millions of dollars in donations. I can imagine him deciding, "Hey, these guys aren't so bad! I'm going to convince the American people to give them some love, damn it!"

In his op-ed piece he states, "I ... have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies." In contrast, he seems to have carefully avoided speaking with even one of the countless victims of these companies. There's not a single quote by an indigenous person in the Amazon whose forest home was leveled for oil exploration and contaminated by oil spills. Not a single statement by a farmer in India whose crops died because Coca-Cola depleted and contaminated the village ground water. Not a peep from a single exploited factory laborer in China suffering with illnesses caused by the pollution generated by producing cheap plastic crap for Wal-Mart to import and sell to us.

The motivations for these companies to reign in their destruction of the world are, without exception, self-serving and purely concerned with the bottom line. It costs too much to clean up oil spills, retrofit factories, and crush angry natives. Diamond's sympathies are 100% in line with this, and his only desire is to assist these corporations in their accumulation of profit. "We should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy," he urges. He doesn't express the slightest concern for the well-being of the natural world itself or for the living beings who comprise it.

He talks about the challenges that Coca-Cola faces in finding acceptable sources of water, and tries to convince us that "Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture." But the obvious point remains unsaid: Coke is not a necessity. It is in fact harmful to those who drink it. We don't NEED to solve the problem of how Coca-Cola obtains water, or provide incentives for them to do it less destructively, because they could just fucking stop making it. Now there's a simple solution.

Diamond tries to confuse us by conflating slightly restrained rates of massive destruction with a net positive effect. Even if companies make changes that cause them to destroy nature at a slower speed than they have been accustomed to, this is hardly the same thing as not destroying it at all (which is what sustainability means), and the exact opposite of helping the planet heal.

As a collaborator with and propagandist for ecocidal corporations, Diamond should not be granted space to spread his lies. Both he and the NYT deserve scathing contempt for this op-ed piece.

Capitalists can never stop killing the planet

This is from my own blog, but I thought you all might enjoy it over here in the Rall Universe too...
-- Stephanie

***
In a discussion group I participate in, someone asserted that capital, as a unified entity, could act to save itself by reducing its damage to the environment, even if it had to sacrifice significant profit to do so. I'm sure that for many people, this belief underlies their hopes for progress at the Copenhagen talks. But these talks are now falling apart before they even happen, which was inevitable given the fundamental nature of global capitalism.

I'm revising some of my comments to the group for re-posting here:

Because of the globalization of production and consumption, the intertwining of complex financial markets, and because capitalists employ mechanisms (like the UN or World Bank) for uniting for particular cooperative purposes, they can seem essentially multinational in character. But the ruling class is not in fact globally unified and can not act as such, even in this final stage of the imperialist era. They are still separate blocs rooted in nations, competing over resources and markets. China vs. India vs. U.S.... these are still real rivalries. Capitalists still require their national governments and armies to defend their interests as they persist in trying to expand their global reach.

One might argue that national governments act as international representatives to facilitate relationships between blocs of capital that are more cooperative than competitive. But let's see what happens when the value of China's investments in US treasuries dissolves when the dollar collapses. Let's see what happens when China builds a dam that blocks a major river from reaching India. Or how the current struggle over Central Asia's oil plays out. On an individual level, the national character of capital blocs becomes obvious during the simple act of attempting to buy or use foreign currency.

Any talk by governments, individually or collectively, of managing the environmental crisis is either 1) lies to pacify the people and divert the energy of more potentially radical environmental movements or 2) schemes for making more profit while actually making the crisis worse (carbon offsets, for example, actually increase carbon emissions).

Those in power can and do collectively make minor specific adjustments in policy, and trumpet these as evidence that they really won't destroy the planet, or at least will try very very hard not to. But these are meaningless -- it's the trend overall that matters. Who cares about adjustments when they're still killing everyone? They congratulate themselves for these plans and schemes and agreements, while their rate of destruction actually accelerates.

Those who run this system are not stupid. They know that their system is unsustainable and will result in omnicide, and in their own demise. Yet they will fight over the last bit of profit from the last bit of earth, until it's too late to save anything. They have little control over this -- the economic mechanism that brought them into existence and keeps them in existence *as capitalists* makes it impossible to stop, as impossible as it would be for me to tie a knot in a rainbow.

The ruling class can not decide to stop competing and give up capitalism deliberately in favor of a sustainable global new order. Francis Fukuyama argued in "The End of History" that that had happened in an economic/political sense after the fall of the Soviet Union -- he turned out to be wrong. New blocs of capital coalesce, strengthen and face off once again.

Capitalism has an inherent law of expansion that can not be reformed, even by itself, even to save itself. It is only when capitalism is in crisis, like crisis of overproduction, that contractions must happen, but these are only times of regrouping to expand even further still. Capitalism, if not overthrown, will end up destroying itself along with us. It can not do otherwise. It's not because capitalists are bad people, it's because of mechanisms in the system (that are still described best by marxists) of competition and the constantly falling rate of profit. Though there is also a mechanism leading toward increased monopolies, competition remains primary -- there can never be a situation where one corporation swallows all the rest into one overarching global über-bloc of capital.

Governments can, though, sacrifice some capitalists to save the system, as happened with the New Deal, and has happened in the recent financial crisis too. But this is to preserve a system with competition at the core, and they will always protect the interests of "their" blocs of capital first. The best that capitalists can hope for is to get as much as they can while they can get it. They can't make the system stop even if individuals among them might wish to; the only way for it to stop is for those with opposing interests (that's us) to stop them.

It might seem counter-inituitive that some members of the ruling class like Al Gore are helping to expose that the planet is in trouble. But the ruling class needs spokespeople to convincingly address the concerns of the people, or they risk social disorder. These spokespeople may even personally care very deeply about reforms. Unfortunately they are incapable of calling the system that causes all this into question, so their net effect is negative.

All these recent exposure movies like "Inconvenient Truth," "Food Inc.," "Capitalism: A Love Story" do not really challenge the system's fundamental nature, or exploitation as a way of life. They serve (whether intentionally or not) as ways of making people think their issues are being addressed while bringing them back into the fold. They soothe and divert percolating discontent before it has a chance to break the surface as open rebellion. The election of Obama was used for this too -- it drew millions of disillusioned people back into the system's political orbit, changed them from outsiders into participants and defenders. NGOs do this, all reformers do this, even if their intentions are good.

There are always contending ideas within the ruling class about how best to preserve and expand their rule. They're not one united monolith. They have differences about how it's best to rule and protect their capital. Some of them think it's best to try to minimize the damage, prevent social disorder, make reforms; while others are more in favor of raw exploitation and the iron fist. These opinions contend, and sometimes reforms are made when the ruling class as a whole finds them necessary for the continuation of their ability to exploit. But their fundamental activity is the exploitation, not the reforms. It always will be, as long as they hold power.

For those upset by the failure of the Copehagen talks, they were doomed from the start. Even if agreements had been reached, the nations involved would have been incapable of going against their own nature. Agreements would have been unavoidably broken, limits regretfully breached.

Our future should not be thrown away on impossible wishes and hopes. For us, there's no dodging responsibility -- we must stop omnicide ourselves, by overthrowing those in power and dismantling their system.

Happy Earth Daze
posted by Susan Stark

This past week has been about the environment, coinciding with Earth Day on the 22nd. I was a little less than enthusiastic.

Unfortunately, like many holidays, this one has been compromised by those who oppose the very spirit the holiday is supposed to represent. Corporations used the event to trot out their "environmentally friendly" junk that people can whip out their credit cards for. And that includes the trotting out of ethanol and other supposedly friendly "biofuels" (never mind that biofuels cause increases in the price of food as arable land is used to grow gas). But the whole point of Earth Day is not to "buy" environmental products.

The whole point of environmentalism is to consume less. That is, to decrease your energy and material footprint on the planet, thus reducing global warming and the overconsumption of natural resources.

In the so-called developed world, especially in the US, this is not always easy to do. But it's possible. You can start by doing this:

1) To decrease your energy footprint, make it a rule in your household that the last one leaving a room must turn off the lights and other appliances being used.

2) To decrease your energy footprint, install night-lights in the hallways so you can see without having to turn on the over-head lights. Night-lights use less energy.

3) To decrease your energy footprint, unplug ALL appliances in the household when they are not being directly used. All of them. Many appliances, such as a stereo or cable/satellite box, use energy even when not turned on.

4) To decrease your energy footprint, find out if there are any public transportation facilities where you live (train or bus), and use them as much as possible. Even out in the country, there may be a county bus system you can use.

5) To decrease your energy footprint, use a scooter, bicycle, moped, or your own two feet to get around instead of lazily using the car to go to the corner store or anywhere else nearby.

6) If you have a gas-guzzling automobile, go online or check around to see if you can have your vehicle modified so that it uses less gas per mile. Needless to say, this will decrease your energy footprint dramatically.

7) To decrease your energy footprint in the summertime, use a fan instead of air-conditioning. A fan uses less energy than the other. Also, take cool showers instead of hot showers. Not only do cool showers keep you cool, they also use less energy than hot showers. And, if it is REALLY HOT, take a t-shirt, run it under cold water, wring out the excess water, and put it on. This will keep you cool for hours. You can also wet your hair to keep you cool.

8) To decrease your energy footprint in winter, shut down the heat when there will be no one in the house or apartment. If you worry about pipes freezing, see what you can do to prevent this. If you want plants in the household that don't die without heat, get plants like small cedars or spruce trees or any other type of evergreen plant. When there are people in the house or apartment, bundle up as much as possible and keep the heat on low. To keep cold air outside and warm air inside, put duct tape or weather stripping on the cracks of your windows and on the doors that you don't use very often.



Reducing Waste:


1) If there is any item in your possession that you have no use for anymore, but can still be used by someone else, do not throw it away. Either give it or sell it to someone you know who wants or needs it, such as a friend, co-worker, family member, or neighbor.


2) There is website you can go to that can help you reduce waste:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites.html

At this site, you can post one or more items that you are either selling or giving away. You can also obtain items that others are selling or giving away. Here is another extemely useful website you can use:

http://www.freecycle.org

At Freecycle, you can give or obtain items, but only for free. Hence the name "Freecycle".


3) You can do the traditional method of decreasing waste, and that is to give items to your local charitable organizations (Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc.).


4) If you have electronic appliances that no longer work, you can recycle these:

http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/hazwaste/recycle/ecycling/donate.htm

You can also do a google search on where you take e-waste to in your local area.


5) Finally, when you buy anything, try to buy it used. As much as possible.


6) And most finally, when considering buying an item (like a video game) or a service (like cable tv) of any kind, ask yourself, do I really need this crap?

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: ECO-TERRORISM? THERE'S NO SUCH THING

Property Rights Extremists Equate McMansions to 9/11 Victims

The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock--more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over--are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?

Several "model houses" at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of "Quinn's Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities" at the edge of Seattle's creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.

Then I laughed. I wasn't alone. Time magazine bemoaned "a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes" among residents of Washington state.

Quinn's Crossing, says its website, was "dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first." In this case, putting Mother Earth "first" led the developers to construct "energy efficient" 4,500-square-feet McMansions. "The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn," reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. "The houses, and their polluting septic systems, also sit atop an aquifer, which provides drinking water for the area's Cross Valley Water District."

4,500 square feet? My last Manhattan apartment had 725. Visitors (New Yorkers, most of whom live in even tighter quarters) cooed over how big it was. The house in which I grew up had 1,000; it was designed for a nuclear family of four.

What galled ELF was the developers' attempt to pass off self-indulgent, gargantuan McMansions as ecologically friendly. "The builders heavily promoted the 'built green' concept and pointed out that the homes were smaller than the 10,000-square-foot houses on previous Street of Dreams tours," reported The Los Angeles Times.

Barnett's story asked: "Were the Terrorists Right?" She noted: "An energy-efficient mansion will never use less energy than even a large urban apartment."

Right or wrong, they're not terrorists.

The feds say they are. They call Earth Liberation Front, the loose-knit "group" that took responsibility for the blazes in unincorporated Snohomish County, the biggest threat to mom, freedom, apple pie and three-minute pop songs since the Soviet Union closed shop. Six months before 9/11, shortly before the famous "Bin Laden Wants to Kick Our Ass Six Ways to Sunday" memo, the FBI went so far as to list the ELF as a federally designated terrorist organization. Like Al Qaeda.

Terrorism--you can look it up--involves killing people. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a building is terrorism. Destroying property--property that, for the most part, made the world a worse place--is not.

ELF's goal of "inflict[ing] maximum economic damage on those profiting from the destruction and exploitation of the natural environment" has inspired people to set fire to SUVs at a New Mexico car dealership, Hummers in California, and a Vail ski lodge whose construction threatened the lynx, an endangered species. Damage to the Colorado ski project amounted to $12 million.

ELF members are vandals. They're arsonists. But they aren't terrorists.

ELF demands that its adherents "take all necessary precautions against harming any animal--human and non-human." Although it could happen someday, no one has ever been killed or hurt in an ELF action. Equating the burning of a Hummer to blowing up a child exposes our society's grotesque overemphasis on the "right" of property owners to do whatever they want. The word "eco-terrorism" is an insult to the human victims of real terrorism, including those of 9/11.

The closest ELF's critics come to landing a punch is pointing out that fires send crud into the atmosphere. "This is releasing more carbon into the air than they ever would have by building the houses," the listing agent for one of the destroyed "rural cluster development" houses told The New York Times. Newsweek asked: "If their cause is to save the environment, how does burning houses, and thereby releasing carbon and toxins into the atmosphere, help achieve that goal?"

Eye-roll alert: A house fire releases air pollution once. A family living in a house does it day after day for decades. Anyway, why are builders making houses out of toxins?

Property rights extremists raised the same point after ELF set fire to 20 Hummer H2s at a California car dealership in 2004. "There's a lot more pollutants from the fire than the vehicles would pollute during their lifetime," said the West Covina fire marshal. Even if that were true, he forgot where those gas guzzlers would have eventually ended up: in landfills, their nasty chemicals seeping into the ground.

"Think of all the resources those fires wasted," moaned Seattle Times columnist Jerry Large. He explained that lawful means--petitions, politely worded letters to the editor, speaking at public hearings--are the proper way to take a stand against the destruction of the environment. "The development where this latest arson took place, situated atop the area's water supply, has been challenged by other groups, using negotiation and the law," he says approvingly. That's true. The local zoning board heard from hundreds of opponents of Quinn's Crossing before voting, 4 to 1, in favor.

Challenged, yes. But not successfully.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL