Scam Artists Are Prepped to Fleece Green Industries as Soon as the Money Comes i

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Scam Artists Are Prepped to Fleece Green Industries as Soon as the Money

Comes in

_http://www.alternet.org/story/83478/_ (http://www.alternet.org/story/83478/)

 

As long as an investing class makes all major environmental decisions, no

new sources of energy will replace even one barrel or ton of fossil fuel.

 

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted on April 28, 2008, Printed on April 28, 2008

 

 

Hard times are looming. And in their desperation to keep the American

economy afloat, government and business will be tossing overboard any proposals

for

real environmental protection. No time for such romantic foolishness when

there are investments to be protected. Get those tax refunds back into

retailers' registers, quick!

 

Not that we won't be hearing about the environment; indeed, the next growth

spurt, if it comes, is likely to be clothed in a green as green as the felt

on a blackjack table.

 

Earlier this year, entrepreneur Eric Janszen declared in Harper's magazine

that the next bubble -- alternative energy -- had already been " branded " . His

projection: the eventual creation of $20 trillion in fictitious, speculative

wealth, " money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices

rather than to deliver 'energy security.' " and that " when the bubble finally

bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. " After

that next big bust, not only alternative energy but a host of other " green "

industries will be left in ruin.

 

As long as an investing class is allowed to make all major environmental

decisions, no new sources of energy will actually replace even one barrel or

ton

of fossil fuel; rather, they will go to further parasitizing the planet in

the cause of growth. The boosters of " green " capitalism have never even

bothered to argue otherwise in any effective way.

 

Typical is a book by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston entitled Green to Gold:

How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and

Build Competitive Advantage, which became an immediate hit among " green "

tycoons when it was published in 2006. It was a how-to manual for business

people wanting to run the kinds of companies that, in the authors' phrase, " get

ahead of the Green Wave, " whose " environmental strategies provide added degrees

of freedom to operate, profit, and grow. "

 

These are some of the helpful tips to be found in Green to Gold:

 

- " Most successful green marketing starts with the traditional selling

points -- price, quality, or performance -- and only then mentions

environmental

attributes. Almost always, green should not be the first button to push. "

 

- " Eco-labels can provide legitimate environmental information to a

demanding public. But they can also be used as a trade barrier, disadvantaging

competitors in the marketplace. "

 

- " Corporate strategy 101 tells us that a company can drive revenues by

increasing price or volume. With green products, volume is a much safer route. "

 

- " Partnering gives a company a strong defense against NGO [nongovernmental

(nonprofit) organization] attacks, but a large part of that defense is the

demonstration of genuine progress. We call it brand inoculation ... " [their

bold]

 

Right in the first chapter, Esty and Wilson rank companies they've

designated as green " WaveRiders " . Number One in their international ranking is

petroleum giant BP. Their account of how BP reached the top of the green heap

is

little more than a description of a masterful public-relations campaign.

" Despite being in a business with large environmental impacts, the company is

now

seen as green, " they write, and " Here's the real proof: BP's brand value, as

measured by experts in measuring intangibles, has jumped significantly. "

 

But BP's primary mission is still to earn a profit by selling fossil fuels,

so it was no big shock when the Independent reported in 2005 that the company

had been lobbying against substantive proposals then before the U.S.

Congress that would cap carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, BP supported a

watered-down move that would have " companies only try to cut emissions with the

promise

of tax breaks. "

 

Then, last year, the Environmental Protection Agency exempted BP from what

the company regarded as a too-restrictive environmental law, allowing its

Whiting, Indiana facility to discharge increased quantities of ammonia and

other

pollutants into Lake Michigan and to continue dumping mercury into the lake.

This reportedly was done so that BP could refine heavy crude oil from

Canadian tar sands.

 

Under a hail of criticism from local residents and environmentalists, BP

promised, cross-its-heart, to stick to the old water-pollution limits, but its

pending state permit for a $3.8 billion expansion of the Whiting facility has

critics fuming over potential impacts on local air quality. The permit is

expected to be approved by June 1. That is an important deadline, because it's

then that some of BP's previously earned air-emission credits will expire. BP

claims that by juggling credits, it will decrease the " net " carbon emissions

from the new plant -- ecological virtue as thin as the paper the credits are

printed on. And, according to reports, " particulate matter and sulfur dioxide

emissions would increase. "

 

Writing recently for In these Times, Michael Moreci described the ecological

crimes that will be committed far to the northwest in the Alberta tar sands

that are going to supply BP's refinery:

 

" The first step involves razing vast amounts of wilderness for open-pit

mining -- meaning that small plants, trees and topsoil must be extracted by the

ton. And because five barrels of water are typically needed to produce a

single barrel of crude, surrounding rivers must be routed to the pits, then

re-routed to man-made lakes of toxic sludge. ... Once the forest and wildlife

are

out of the way and the pits have been dug, the raw process of extraction

requires substantial manpower, heavy machinery (some of which can be up to

three

stories tall and weigh as much as a jetliner) and an incredible amount of

energy. And that's to produce only a single barrel of unrefined crude oil from

two tons of tar sands. ... Over the next seven years, global warming pollutants

released into the atmosphere from tar sands oil production are projected to

quintuple to 126 megatons ... What's more, the tar sands industry consumes

enough gas in a single day to heat approximately 4 million American homes. "

 

If BP is a " WaveRider " , the wave is one of toxic sludge.

 

Greenwash your body

 

In a chapter section of Green to Gold headed, " Perfect is the Enemy of the

Good " (that well-frayed motto of green capitalism), Esty and Wilson contrast

what they see as an exemplary decision by McDonald's -- to give its McNuggets

a package that was not environmentally offensive enough to drive away

eco-conscious customers yet not so " flimsy " that it would annoy conventional

customers -- with what they see as the too-radical approach of The Body Shop

International, whose pursuit of its " environmental and social mission " was

" inattentive to economic realities. "

 

To cite the The Body Shop, a U.K.-based firm specializing in

skin-and-hair-care products, as a company striving for the " Perfect " reveals the

shallowness

of Green to Gold's analysis. For more than 30 years, The Body Shop and its

CEO, self-styled anti-capitalist capitalist Anita Roddick, avidly cultivated a

corporate image as pioneers of high business ethics. But The Body Shop has

been dismissed by critics as no more than a world leader in pale-green

consumerism.

 

A 1994 expose by John Entine charged the company with exploiting workers,

franchisees, and indigenous peoples who supply ingredients; using artificial

and sometimes harmful chemicals in products labeled as " all natural " ; selling

bacteria-contaminated products; flushing toxic chemicals into sewage systems;

and promoting overconsumption of costly but Wal-Mart-quality products.

 

Others have blasted the company's much-publicized relationships with

indigenous peoples who supply some of their ingredients. An anthropologist who

worked for more than thirty years among Brazil's Kayapo people charged in 1995

that The Body Shop purchased much smaller quantities of products like

brazil-nut

oil than the Kayapo wanted to sell, and forbade them to sell to other

companies. The company did that, he charged, because the real purpose of the

project was to acquire not oil but rather the exclusive right to heartwarming

photographs of the Kayapo that would appeal to the tastes of " Western

ecoliberals. "

 

The Body Shop was purchased in 2006 by L'Oreal, the world's largest

cosmetics company. L'Oreal has refused to sign a proposed international Compact

for

Safe Cosmetics. The buyout prompted Ethical Consumer magazine to drop The Body

Shop from a rating of 11 on the magazine's 1-to-20 " Ethiscore " scale all the

way down to 2.5.6 (The company has since climbed to a still-wretched 5 out

of 20).

 

Ethical or not, The Body Shop can't be considered an environmental leader,

wrote Entine on the occasion of Roddick's death last year: " She sold cosmetics

made mostly with water, colorings, fragrances and preservatives made from

petrochemicals. Body Shop packages beauty notions in plastic bottles, an

anathema to serious environmentalists, and ships them around the world in

carbon-belching trucks and planes. From an environmental perspective, its

business

model is a train wreck. "

 

But in having offered its healthy business and virtuous image for sale to a

huge corporation, The Body Shop is far from alone. Noting that Ben & Jerry's

ice cream has " melted into the Unilever empire, " that " organic and fairtrade

chocolate producer Green & Black's was snapped up by Cadbury Schweppes, " and

that Colgate-Palmolive was about to " clean up on the American ethical

toothpaste brand Tom's of Maine, " journalist Faith Glasgow looked into the

reasons

that well-intentioned companies sell out:

 

" The founders of small ethical firms face a challenging dilemma when it

comes to bringing their products into the mainstream. Many of their supporters

buy those products at least partly because they do care about the irresponsible

behavior of big corporations: sell out, and a proportion will walk away. On

the other hand, the quickest and easiest way to reach and maybe raise the

awareness of a much wider audience is undoubtedly by accessing the superior

marketing and distribution network of a multi-national. 'I think they genuinely

want to reach wider audiences with their products, and they see a takeover as

the best way of accessing that market, " affirms [Ethical Consumer's Rob]

Harrison. 'They believe that the knock to their reputation will be outweighed

by

the boost to sales.' "

 

In Green to Gold, Esty and Winston applaud two other companies, Wal-Mart and

Whole Foods Market, for making environmental improvements and peddling green

products. They quote with approval Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, who told his

fellow executives " that their sustainability efforts would help protect the

company's 'license to grow'. "

 

One chapter of my own book Sick Planet recounts how those two Fortune

500 companies (Wal-Mart now at No. 1, Whole Foods at No. 411) are

attempting, each through its own tried-and-true strategy, to expand the market

for

natural and organic food.

 

The two Goliaths are slugging it out to capture that big stretch of

socioeconomic territory that separates them. Wal-Mart, the shopping home of

American

families who live below the median income, made headlines in May 2006 by

announcing a big increase in its marketing of organic food and cotton clothing.

(Organic coffee has since been added to the menu.) By the end of 2006,

probably not by complete coincidence, the 196-store chain Whole Foods, leader

in the

natural-food market and purveyor of edible wonders to the prosperous,

announced that its long string of double-digit growth years was ending, with

projected 2007 growth dipping to " only " 6 to 8 percent.

 

Whole Foods handled that problem last year by the time-honored method of

buying out the competition: Wild Oats Marketplace, operator of more than 70

stores in the U.S. In August, with a Federal Trade Commission antitrust suit

still standing in the way of the merger, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey

unwittingly

bolstered the government's case with an email to his board. He wrote that his

target Wild Oats " is the only existing company that has the brand and number

of stores to be a meaningful springboard for another player to get into this

space ... Eliminating them means eliminating this threat forever, or almost

forever. "

 

Whole Foods has grown phenomenally by selling luxury goods to consumers in

the upper income brackets. Mackey is frank about that. In 2005, he told the

Independent, " You can't have it both ways. If you want the highest quality, it

costs more. It is like complaining that a BMW is more expensive than a

Hyundai. Yes, but you're getting a better car. " And that's why you don't see

rusty

Fords and Plymouths parked outside a Whole Foods Market.

 

Of the pre-merger company's 170 U.S. stores in 2006, not a single one was

located in a zip code with an average 2003 household income as low as $27,800

-- the most common Whole Foods hourly-job salary. More than 95 percent were in

zip codes above the national median income, with more than 25 percent above

$100,000. Lower-level Whole Foods employees could eat fairly well shopping at

Wal-Mart, but supplying all their food needs at Whole Foods would be a

stretch. Meanwhile, most Wal-Mart employees would have trouble affording their

own

employer's rock-bottom food, let alone its organic food, and could not

afford to open the doors at Whole Foods.

 

Asked how virtuous food can be made more affordable, Mackey has shown a

touchingly simple faith in economic progress: " I think [organic and natural

food]

can continue to penetrate, as the culture becomes wealthier. " If that's what

it takes, don't count on much progress in the economically fraught years

that lie ahead.

 

Wal-Mart's announced goal was to sell organic food at only 10 percent over

the price of conventional food. That hasn't happened. This week at the

company's Supercenter in Salina, Kansas, organic food was available but not

easy to

find, tucked into small bins scattered here and there in the huge produce

section. Organic versions were selling at the following premiums: spinach, 28%

above its conventional counterpart; lettuce, 50%; onions, 56%; potatoes, 100%

(i.e., double the price of conventional " NASCAR " brand Russets); milk, 105%;

and tomatoes, 200% (and the organic ones were from Mexico).

 

One result of the corporate takeover of organic food retailing has been the

industrialization of organic agriculture. Whole Foods and other big sellers

are forced to seek out suppliers who can deliver massive loads of a relatively

uniform product, even out of season. Those generally idealistic companies

unintentionally paved the organic highway that Wal-Mart is now traveling, and,

too late, fear is spreading. For one thing, everyone's afraid a big share of

Wal-Mart's organic products will come from the company's favorite source for

just about all other merchandise: China.

 

Michael Pollan has asked how Wal-Mart will manage to cut organic food's

typical premium of 50 percent over conventional food to only

10 percent: " It may mean that they'll have to import food from China or

other countries. They'll have to buy only from the biggest suppliers. "

 

Critics charge that corporations are exploiting organic agriculture's

feel-good image even when selling conventional products. At a Whole Foods store

in

Manhattan, writer Field Maloney spotted pictures and folksy profiles of

neighborly food-growers (like " a sandy-haired organic leek farmer named Dave " )

positioned above non-organic onions from Oregon and Mexico. (Wal-Mart has been

caught in similar deception). Maloney guessed that Whole Foods executives are

feeling a little off-balance these days, amidst so much talk about the

virtues of locally grown food: " After all, a multinational chain can't promote

a

'buy local' philosophy without being self-defeating. "

 

If you want to coax higher prices out of customers and keep employees happy

at low pay, it helps for both groups to feel a connection to a movement

that's making the world a better place. But the bigger Whole Foods and other

retailers grow, the harder it will be to extract premium prices from consumers

while convincing workers that they're part of an important cause.

 

Of all religions, the one to which Americans cling most tightly is the

doctrine of the free market. No belief is more deeply held than the one that

says

markets will always satisfy people's needs in the best and most efficient

way. That belief persists, unaffected by the market economy's repeated,

spectacular failures to perform as advertised. If green energy and green

consumption

remain as they are -- as sects within the religion of the market -- they also

are doomed to fail.

 

 

 

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick

Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.

 

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

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