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Greenpeace, Business Join Forces for Climate Change

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allAfrica.com

INTERVIEW
August 30, 2002
Posted to the web August 30, 2002

Akwe Amosu
Johannesburg

A joint initiative announced this week in Johannesburg at the World Summit on Sustainable Development highlights the increasingly diverse range of organizations willing to work together to combat global warming. The World Business Council on Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and Greenpeace on Wednesday issued a joint call for an international framework to combat climate change.

For both sides, the relationship represents the overcoming of prejudice and organic disagreement. Greenpeace actively campaigns against some companies who are members of the WBCSD; and the council takes an approach towards solving environmental problems which differs radically from that of Greenpeace.

Yet in the joint press statement they pledged to urge governments to work more energetically for an international political framework on climate that rewards innovation and implementation and also called on both private and public sector actors to step up action. For business it provides an opportunity to influence the climate debate and Greenpeace hopes this new initiative will ultimately put more pressure on the U.S. government to rejoin the Kyoto discussions.

Akwe Amosu talked to Steve Sawyer, Greenpeace International’s Climate Policy Director, about the new initiative

What has led Greenpeace to make such an unlikely alliance?

Well, first of all, we haven’t made an alliance, we came together on a very, very, very carefully negotiated, carefully worded statement that we could both support in relation, very specifically, to the risk of climate change and the need for a single international framework, and [on the assumption] that the basis of that had to be the United Nations framework convention on climate change and its Kyoto protocol.

Now that took a long negotiation; I have gotten a lot of grief from colleagues both inside and outside Greenpeace, I know the leaders of the WBCSD have got even more grief from their community in north America.

When the WBCSD started we coined this term 'greenwash' to describe the phenomenon where some corporations were spending a lot on public relations to try and seem green. But in a few instances and, perhaps in many instances in Europe at any rate, it’s really gotten beyond greenwash. I mean we’re not happy with the rate of change in companies, but thing are beginning to move. And one of the important ways is that there’s been an initiative of large corporations in Europe and Japan supporting the ratification and entry into force of the Kyoto protocol.

That’s for two reasons. One, an uncertain environment is bad for business - they need some certainty and having different rules in different places is a nightmare for them; and secondly, at some level, I believe that some of them, anyway, recognize the seriousness of the threat of climate change.

That, if I may so, is a slightly grudging acknowledgement that they might actually share some beliefs with you. Is it not possible that they wholeheartedly share your concerns about the climate?

You have to look at it, individual by individual; what any individual believes, however, is less important than what they say publicly and what their company actually does. And that is moving in some places. A very important marker came on June 4 when the World Business Council put out a statement saying that, the European Union and Japan having ratified Kyoto, they urged the United States to come back and rejoin the process and come up with a single global framework for addressing climate change.

That to us was a very, very significant thing. It didn’t get a huge amount of coverage but if you look at the list of companies that are members of the WBCSD, among them are the same very large American corporations that have been supporting the Bush administration, who have been part of this corporate fossil fuel lobby that has been propping up the Bush administration’s position ever since March of last year when he withdrew from Kyoto. That’s the nut that we have to crack.

To what extent can we expect corporate members of the WBCSD to buy into whatever the leadership says?

Well, I don’t know much about their internal rule-making, but I don’t believe they are bound by it. If they get too upset with what the leadership of the WBCSD does then, presumably, they leave the organization. But they don’t want to leave the organization because they use it as PR. So it is an indirect pressure. But there is some pressure on them to remain, both in relation to their corporate responsibilities and the relationship with their shareholders.

So I got a lot of grief about this initiative but they were getting much more - they were getting calls from Washington, from Detroit, calls from Canberra [from those who were] really, really pissed off. But if it shakes up the self-perception of the business community, that’s most important.

Would it be true to say that, for Greenpeace, the attraction of making this relationship was mostly to try and have an impact on fossil-fuel-burning, corporate America?

It’s not the exclusive reason, I mean, companies’ attitudes are a problem in many parts of the world, but the most important place for climate change is, of course, the United States.

Obviously you’re hoping that you’ll be able to get to those companies directly, so as to put the policy issues on the table in their boardrooms. Is that something that the council will facilitate?

I hope so. As we said in our press conference, we have no plans for any further events, but we’ll continue talking, I’m sure.

We have been fighting on the climate issue for 15 years now. In terms of corporate America and the political establishment, we haven’t made any progress. We’ve made progress with the business establishment in Europe, we’ve made big progress in sectors like the insurance industry and with financial services industry, but it’s mostly in Europe and Japan. We haven’t been able to crack the corporate monolith in the US and we’ll do anything [to achieve that], because it needs to happen, we need to break down that wall dividing the middle of the Atlantic.

Because to be truthful, the Europeans aren’t all that great but they look really good compared to the US; so it’s awful hard for us to push them, when the US is so much worse. So the US is a big problem if we’re going to make progress on a global basis.

In Bali [at the preparatory conference for the summit in June] there were people wandering about with T-shirts which said, 'What are we going to do about the United States?' It’s not the elephant sitting in the corner; it’s the elephant sitting in the middle of the table!

We aren’t going to make long-term progress on any of these issues without them. But the current administration is just immoveable. So we need as strong an alliance of everyone that we can, to put pressure on them and eventually they have to change or in just over two years, there’s another presidential election and we can move in that direction. But it’s not just a Republican and Democrat thing. Bill Clinton wasn’t great on these things either. That administration did, in the end, come in and sign the Kyoto protocol but they couldn’t get it ratified.

And the Kyoto protocol was weakened so much by the Americans! That’s been the American negotiating tactic for the past 15 years. Engage, water the draft down, weaken it; everybody will agree to weakening it to keep the US in, because they know they need to have the US on board; the US weakens it until the lowest common denominator is reached and then they walk away from the table, leaving everybody-else at the bottom.

It’s the negotiating tactic they’ve used at the Convention on Biological Diversity, they’ve done it in a host of other environmental treaties, they tried to sabotage the International Criminal Court, the chemical weapons convention, they are not a part of the landmines treaty, I mean, it’s a familiar story.

Is that the role you see them playing here at the Johannesburg Summit?

Exactly the same! Throughout the summit process, the US has refused to acknowledge what the UN general assembly resolution that convened this conference says; that the purpose of this conference is to implement Agenda 21 [a plan of action drawn up at the Rio Earth summit ten years ago] with targeted, time-bound measures, means of implementation, monitoring and follow-up on specific programmes, to fulfill the promises made in Rio. The US, very consistently at every one of these negotiations says, 'no targets, no timetables, no new money'. So you can ask them why they’re here and I guess why they’re here is to make sure that no-one else agrees to those things either.

We have another week. We’ll see what happens when Mr Powell gets here, we’ll see what happens when the other heads of state get here; the only hope is that, either they can put enough pressure on the US to make them move, or, as in Kyoto, they can say, 'we’re very sorry but we can’t wait for you, we have to go our own way.' Those are the only two options - except for the other, which is that the US wins and nothing happens.

Does this new relationship give you access at a political level? Can you leverage a developing relationship with the US corporate world to start persuading individual congressmen to take all this more seriously?

We’ll have to see how far this initiative has any impact on those American companies. But, yes, that’s one of the logical consequences. In Europe, one of the most powerful arguments that we’ve had on renewable energy targets is the fact that we’ve had both the business sector and the NGO sector saying the same thing to governments. Usually they can count on us to disagree so they can make up their own mind; but if we’re both saying the same thing, it’s much more difficult for them to resist.

Relevant Links

Most of the oil majors in the US, for example, are members of the WBCSD: Chevron-Texaco, Conoco, Unical. But the big one, Exxon, is not, but it is becoming more and more isolated. They have very high symbolic value, obviously, the world’s most profitable corporation, one of the biggest corporations.

The real 'neanderthal,' red neck, Texas cowboy image - that model of the corporate marauding planet-raper - has to go away and Exxon’s one of the last, although they’re one of the biggest, and we have to do something, to make them change.

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