Needs Improvement

The Economic Giants Must Do Better than Meh

No one expects small businesses to be the leaders on climate change, though of course a noble handful are. It’s the giants—who have enormous brands to protect, and large margins to cover the cost of changing—that need to be out front. The ones with big ad campaigns with lots of windmills and penguins and cheerful shots of the smiling future. The ones who have made a lot of noise about ‘net zero.’ And how are they doing? Meh.

The New Climate Institute, a European think tank, just released a study of 25 of the biggest companies on earth, ranging from the shipping giant Maersk to the bookshelf giant Ikea to the stare-at-your-palm giant Apple. These titans account for 5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions all by themselves. And they’re not dropping those emissions anywhere near fast enough.

In fact, the report finds that for many companies the promised 100% reduction will look more like 40%. “It is not clear these reductions take us beyond business as usual,” Thomas Day, the researcher who compliled the report, told the Guardian. “We were very disappointed and surprised.” The “over-use of offsetting” was one of the main reasons most companies were marked down, said Day—i.e., these companies were promising to buy and protect forests. Except that too many credits go for forests that were never going to be cut down in the first place, or for forests that burn up in fires.

Two more notes: these companies are also often cash-rich, and there’s not yet been a proper accounting of how that money sitting in the bank is unwittingly underwriting the fossil fuel industry. And these companies don’t just make things—they also buy political influence with vast fleets of lobbyists. Too many of those lobbyists fanned out across Washington in recent months to wreck the Build Back Better bill—it was a target of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce and of most of the Fortune 500, because it dares to raise corporate tax rates a smidge to pay for, you know, a working planet for capitalists to plunder, I mean consumers to live on, I mean—you know. As Rolling Stone pointed out at the height of the BBB battle in the fall, many of the tech execs who spoke loudest about the climate crisis were blocking the most useful effort so far to stop it.

The very low comedy of this particular drama was highlighted late in January when Biden hosted CEOs at the White House to build support for some version that Prime Minister Manchin might be persuaded to support. Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, was on hand—GM had actually supported the bill because it handed over a goodly sum for EVs. But Barra had also just taken over the rotating chairmanship of the Business Roundtable, which is the toppest of top CEOs, and as Politico reported, she was not planning to push the organization to change its implacable opposition.

“General Motors has been very clear about our support for Build Back Better, particularly the climate change provisions that will accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and support to build out US supply chain,” Jeannine Ginivan, a spokesperson for General Motors, told Politico. “Mary was at the White House this week to support Build Back Better. She was there in her role as chair and CEO of General Motors.” And, as its part of this farcical pas de deux, the spokesperson for the Business Roundtable duly explained that of course they’d like the “climate investments” too but not if “Congress adopts the sweeping and anticompetitive tax increases included in the House-passed bill.”

One assumes that Nero’s tune was more on-pitch than this.

A few notes from around the climate world

+Three consecutive rainy seasons have failed in the Horn of Africa, and the UN this week estimated 13 million people face famine as a result. At least it’s good to see reporters explaining the situation: as Reuters put it, “experts say extreme weather events are happening with increased frequency and intensity due to climate change.” Meanwhile, readers may recall that I reported last week on the devastation in Madagascar from Tropical Cyclone Ana; now the country has been pounded by Cyclone Batsirai. “Mananjary is completely destroyed, no matter where you go everything is destroyed,” one resident named Faby told the AFP news agency. It’s worth repeating the most bottom-line fact: the average person in Madagascar produces about 1/125th as much carbon as the average American each year.

+Third Act, our progressive organizing group for people over age 60, got a profound publicity boost—and many thousands of new signups—after the Times published an oped explaining its aims. Within a day, the singer Neil Young had signed on publicly to the pledge to break ties with the four big American banks (Chase, Citi, Wells-Fargo and BofA) if they won’t break ties with the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile, a useful account here of how older and younger activists can learn to listen to each other.

+Yet another study, this one from the good folks at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, demonstrating that producing hydrogen from natural gas (so-called ‘blue hydrogen’) is a bad idea.

“It finds that blue hydrogen is a competitive laggard. By the time planned blue hydrogen projects become operational, most of the expected market for energy demand will have been taken over by renewable energy, electrification and green hydrogen. The shift will make blue hydrogen less attractive for private investors.”

+In New Jersey, hundreds of people were left homeless by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, when it smashed all rainfall records for the region in August. Now, the state is evicting them from temporary housing—one woman, a refugee from an apartment complex where four of her neighbors drowned—reported getting a call telling her to pack up and leave within 15 minutes.

+Unity College—the first in the world to publicly divest from fossil fuels a decade ago—issued a report celebrating the milestone, and noting that its endowment had grown steadily, “outperforming key market indexes.” Meanwhile a giant Danish pension fund, which divested from fossil fuel stocks in 2018, extended that to hundreds of millions in oil company bonds

+A fine report from the Daily Poster reminding us that the insurance companies still underwriting fossil fuel expansion are also terminating coverage for homeowners in wildfire-prone areas like California, arguing that climate change makes the policies unprofitable.

“Insurance companies have known about climate risk for decades,” said Alana Sulakshana, senior campaigner at the Rainforest Action Network. “Yet instead of actually tackling the root of these disasters, they’re making short-term adjustments and refusing to fundamentally change their relationship to the fossil fuel industry.”

+Guess who’s suing to stop wind projects off Martha’s Vineyard? Fossil fuel interests, arguing that the turbines might endanger right whales. It’s worth remembering not only that they’ve filled the ocean with drilling platforms, not only that their endless seismic tests make the ocean painfully nosiy for cetaceans, but also that forty percent of the world’s ship traffic is devoted to moving fossil fuels around. If you want to cut down on whale collisions, its pretty clear where to start.

+Annals of self-serving environmentalism: As Insider.com reports, ‘a wealthy town in Silicon Valley has declared itself a "mountain-lion habitat" to halt new affordable-housing projects in the area.’ 

Another chapter of our epic nonviolent yarn, this one from the roads of India. If you need to catch up on the first 45 chapters of The Other Cheek, check out the archive.

At first, Lopsak Tuseng had been annoyed by their new work of garbage collection. After several days of walking the roads picking up debris, he felt some combination of tired and degraded. He’d been an assistant chef, after all; he’d risen from garbage duty. Finding himself near the DL one morning, without thinking, he’d said, “I didn’t sign up for this,” he said.

The DL looked at him with amusement. He motioned to an aide for a pad and pencil, and wrote “me neither.”

Which, Lopsak had to agree, was true. He was the one who’d somehow started them on this journey, thinking he was making a music video. And if the Dalai Lama had gone along with that fiasco, Lopsak thought he probably shouldn’t be complaining about a little trash. And of course the DL, beyond being a good guy, was also essentially god on earth, so that made it easier to follow him.

Anyway, with the passage of a few more days, Lopsak found that he was actually coming to enjoy the trash-picking. It beat shepherding the various minor celebrities, all of whom had returned to Delhi or Hollywood. In fact, the entire entourage was down to a more manageable number. A few dozen clerics from various traditions had joined the trek even after the conference debacle, but most of them were matching the DL and staying silent, which Lopsak thought was perhaps not the worst state for a cleric.

And it was undeniably true that they were doing something useful. At the end of each day, when he’d ride back on a truck to collect the full green plastic bags they’d left by the roadside as they went, it was evident where they’d come. Most of roadside India tended toward trashy, but now there was a narrow strip heading slowly to the east from Ahmedabad where the shrubs weren’t decorated with wrappers and where the roadside didn’t glint with glass. Lopsak knew it wouldn’t last, but still.

He’d come to suspect that doing good was, in general, more difficult than one might have guessed. The scene with the pigs stuck in his mind (and Sonam’s too, he knew—the bodyguard took the security lapse as a personal failure and was even warier now). These were all supposed to be holy men, and yet they fought like children; how could normal people overcome their own weaknesses? For instance, he knew the Dalai Lama’s concern about the melting Himalayas, and he shared it. But apparently slowing it down would require people to stop burning gasoline. One hour, just for fun, he counted the passing cars and motorbikes: 1,493. And this was on a single road in a single region of a single country on a single continent. Also, he kind of wanted a car himself; any self-respecting hiphop star would, preferably a Bentley. Or, at least, a motorbike. So it was complicated.

Trash, on the other hand, was fairly simple. There was no real argument for trash. And picking it up all day taught you a good deal. “Have you noticed,” he asked Sonam one day, “that trash is very different one kilometer to the next?”

“Not really,” said Sonam. “It all stinks.”

“When we’re near poor villages there’s not so much,” said Lopsak. “Mostly animal dung. Maybe some plastic water bottles. But as you get by towns with a little money, it’s endless. Guthka wrappers, pan masala wrappers, plastic bags. I bet I picked up a thousand plastic bags today. Old batteries. Toys. I found a broken cricket bat today—not even badly broken, just cracked. I showed it to Sister Shareen and she said we should come to America to see the trash there.” Sister Shareen, whose church was near Baton Rouge, had told him that when the school year ended at Louisiana State University, students would leave behind beds, bicycles, stereos. “They’ll just get another one wherever they’re going,” she’d explained. “The streets of America are paved in trash.”

Sister Shareen was another reason that Lopsak found himself enjoying this new phase of the march. She had not joined the DL in his vow of silence; in fact, she seemed to be making up for the dour line of imams and monks and priests. When she found out that Lopsak was a hip hop aficionado, she started calling him ‘Dawg,’ which he much enjoyed. “Dawg,” she’d say. ‘You know that Lil Wayne is from Louisiana, right? ‘Me and you through thick and thin, me and you to the very end.’”

“You know Lil Wayne?” he asked.

“No, he’s from New Orleans, and I’m not sure he’s a Christian, though he said he was. But I’ll tell you who I do know. Frank Ocean—you listen to Frank Ocean? He came up in New Orleans too, but after Hurricane Katrina flooded him out he went to Lafayette to go to school, and he came to my church for a little while. It wasn’t my church then, or at least I wasn’t preaching, and I don’t know if he still goes to church church, but listen to ‘Voodoo.’ I mean, he is going to church.”

She punched up Blonde on her phone, handed the earbuds to Lopsak, who listened for a long moment. “This isn’t really hip hop, is it?” he said.

“It’s what comes next, or what came before,” she said. She downloaded the album for him as a present, and he listened to it straight through 21 times the next day as he picked trash. But he also listened to Shareen as she told him about what she called ‘environmental justice.’ “The poorer the place and the darker the people, the more it gets dumped on,” she said. “We’re picking up trash, which is fine, but the real trash comes from the big companies. And a lot of it is invisible—they just fill the air with chemicals. Half the kids in my church would like to rap, but they got asthma so bad they get halfway through a verse and start gasping on the chorus. Environmental justice. U.S. is the richest country in the world and we’ve got people sick like that?”

“I know what you mean,” said Sonam, who had drifted up to where they were spearing plastic bags. “And if you think about it, it works the same way for the whole world. I mean, Tibet didn’t put out those gases that are melting the mountains, right? Not even India put out that much of them?”

“That’s right,” said Shareen. “And we’re coming to a town in a few days that I always wanted to get to. Because it’s the ultimate Cancer Alley. You boys are probably too young, but you ever hear of Bhopal?”

Both of them shook their heads.

“Well, dawgs,” she said. “I will tell you about it when we get there. For now we’ve got some trash to pick.”

Sonam shouldered his bag, and headed up to the front of the thin line still walking the road. Security was so much easier now with fewer people on hand, and so the DL’s aides had given him other tasks as well, including explaining to the few journalists who continued to arrive that the Dalai Lama was indeed serious about remaining silent. Sonam tended to refer them to Sister Shareen, but today one Reuters reporter had managed to reach the DL himself, as he was using a pointed stick to spear a discarded diaper from a roadside ditch, no easy task considering that he was also still holding the Chinese flag on his shoulder. The man shouted question after question, and eventually the DL motioned to his aides for pen and paper.

“One question only, please,” he wrote on a note, and handed it to the reporter.

The man thought for several minutes, obviously trying to concoct the most searching possible query for a man sometimes called the wisest person on earth. Finally he wrote: “What has your experience gathering trash—perhaps the lowest of all occupations—taught you about the human condition?”

The Dalai Lama thought for a moment, and then wrote back “I have considered that question a good deal these past few days, and as far as I can tell, Indians prefer Sprite by a large margin.”