Silence lets anti-green bullies win
That deafening silence you hear? It’s all the sustainability-aware media, CEOs and investors who — in seeking to maintain the high ground, preserve their nice images and focus on the positive — are losing to a well financed and increasingly emboldened mob of anti-green bullies setting the tone for our future.
Case in point: did you realize that, over the past several months, four high-profile members of the US Climate Action Partnership have quietly, unceremoniously quit their memberships? These one-time and, now, not-so-much warriors against global warming include Deere & Co., ConocoPhilips, Caterpillar and — what a slap in the planet’s face is this? — BP America. And why are these firms no longer championing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Because they can. Because conservative (though not of a livable climate or natural resources, apparently) groups like FreedomWorks and the Free Enterprise Project feel free to run attack ads against companies that dare to come out in support of things like cap-and-trade. And because no one on the other side is running an equally aggressive, big-budget attack on the attackers.
In similar fashion, a Sunday Telegraph article late last year implied that Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had profited millions from “conflict of interest” dealings with carbon traders and other firms. The allegations reverberated loudly throughout the blogosphere, unquestioned for the most part by other media outlets or climate organisations that could have easily proved otherwise. It took Pachauri’s own employer, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), to undertake an audit that concluded — as published today in The Guardian — there was “no evidence” of financial gain from any conflicts of interest. In fact, as Guardian columnist George Monbiot notes, rather than millions, Pachauri made “£45,000 as his salary at TERI, and a maximum of £2,174 in outside earnings.”
And then there’s California’s Proposition 23, a so-called “jobs initiative” set to be decided by that state’s voters this December. However, the initiative is more of an anti-jobs proposal — at least as far as green jobs are concerned. According to the Huffington Post, the proposal, which would suspend some of the state’s ground-breaking environmental regulations, has the financial backing of — surprise — oil companies like Valero and Tesoro. Never mind that such green legislation on California’s part has actually stimulated jobs growth. But if the cleantech crowd doesn’t speak up, as well as pony up the bucks needed to finance an equally large media campaign before election day, those green jobs could become history.
More than being repeated year after year, these types of stories appear to be becoming more common. As the unsustainable nature of reality on the ground and in the atmosphere becomes harder to deny, those who stand to lose the most in a greener, more sustainable society dig deeper into their pockets and crank up the volume ever more loudly on their PR machines. Unfortunately, their ever increasing noise is too often met with the type of silence Pastor Martin Niemöller warned against.
Let’s not wait until there’s no one left on the pro-sustainability side to speak up.
