This Changes Everything (37 page)

These “free allowances” to burn or trade carbon were, in essence, bribes.
As solar entrepreneur Jigar Shah put it: “When you look at these companies that were in USCAP, they were not interested in regulating carbon. They were interested in a huge amount of wealth being transferred to their companies in exchange for their vote on climate change.”
⁸⁰
Needless to say, a deal that made fossil fuel interests this happy would have brought us nowhere near the deep cuts to our
greenhouse gas emissions that scientists tell us are required to have a good chance of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius. And yet the green groups in USCAP didn’t merely stand back and let the corporations in a direct conflict of interest write U.S. climate policy—they actively recruited them to do so.

And the saddest irony in all this pandering is that it still wasn’t enough for the polluters.
Working with USCAP to help draft climate legislation was, for many of the big corporate players who joined the coalition, a hedge. In 2007, when the coalition was formed, climate legislation looked extremely likely, and these companies wanted to be sure that whatever bill passed Congress was riddled with enough loopholes to be essentially meaningless—a classic Beltway strategy. They also
knew that getting behind cap-and-trade was the best way of blocking the worrying prospect of a newly elected president using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to put firm limits on the amount of carbon companies could emit. In fact, Waxman-Markey, the primary piece of climate legislation based on the coalition’s blueprint, specifically barred the EPA from regulating carbon from many major
pollution sources, including coal-fired power plants. Michael Parr, senior manager of government affairs at DuPont, summarized the corporate strategy succinctly: “You’re either at the table or on the menu.”
⁸¹

The problem for Fred Krupp and his colleagues was that these companies were sitting at plenty of other tables at the same time. Many continued to be members of the American Petroleum Institute,
the National Association of Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—all of which actively opposed climate legislation. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, it looked like the corporate hard-liners were going to lose. But then, in the summer of 2009, with USCAP still trying to push cap-and-trade through the U.S. Senate, the political climate abruptly shifted. The economy was
still deeply troubled, Obama’s popularity was tanking, and a new political force came to centerstage. Flush with oil money from the Koch brothers and pumped up by Fox News, the Tea Party stormed town-hall meetings across the country, shouting about how Obama’s health- care reform was part of a sinister plan to turn the United States into an Islamic/Nazi/socialist utopia. In short order, the president
started sending signals that he was reluctant to pick another major legislative fight.
⁸²

That’s when many of the key corporate members of USCAP began to realize that they now had a solid chance of scuttling climate legislation altogether. Caterpillar and BP dropped out of the coalition, as did ConocoPhillips, after having complained of “unrecoverable costs . . . on what
is historically a low-margin
business.” (ConocoPhillips revenues the year after it left USCAP totaled $66 billion, with a tidy net income of $12.4 billion.) And some of these companies didn’t just leave Krupp’s coalition of “former enemies”: by directing their formidable firepower squarely at the legislation that they had helped craft, they made it abundantly clear that they had never stopped being its enemies. ConocoPhillips,
for instance, set up a dedicated webpage to encourage visitors (including its roughly thirty thousand employees) to tell legislators how much they opposed the climate bill. “Climate change legislation will result in higher direct energy costs for the typical American family,” the site warned, further claiming (outlandishly) that it “could result in a net loss of more than two million U.S.
jobs each year.” As for fellow defector BP, company spokesman Ronnie Chappell explained, “The lowest-cost option for reducing emissions is the increased use of natural gas.”
⁸³

In other words, thinking they were playing a savvy inside game, Big Green was outmaneuvered on a grand scale. The environmentalists who participated in USCAP disastrously misread the political landscape. They chose a stunningly
convoluted approach to tackling climate change, one that would have blocked far more effective strategies, specifically because it was more appealing to big emitters—only to discover that the most appealing climate policy to polluters remained none at all. Worse, once their corporate partners fled the coalition, they had no shortage of ammo to fire at their former friends. The climate bill
was a boondoggle, they claimed (it was), filled with handouts and subsidies (absolutely), and it would pass on higher energy costs to cash-strapped consumers (likely).
^IX
To top it all off, as pro-oil Republican congressman Joe Barton put it, “The environmental benefit is nonexistent” (as the left flank of the green movement had been saying all along).
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It was a classic double-cross, and it worked.
In January 2010, the climate legislation modeled on USCAP’s proposals died in the Senate, as it deserved to—but not before it discredited the very idea of climate action in the minds of many.
⁸⁵

Plenty of postmortems have been written about what the greens did wrong in the cap-and-trade fight but the hardest hitting came in a scathing report by Harvard University sociologist Theda Skocpol. She
concluded that a major barrier to success was the absence of a mass movement applying pressure from below. “To counter fierce political opposition, reformers will have to build organizational networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy boardrooms, and posh retreats.”
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As we will see, a
resurgent grassroots climate movement has now arrived that is doing precisely that—and it is winning a series of startling victories against the fossil fuel sector as a result.

But old habits die hard. When the cap-and-trade fight in the U.S. Congress was finally over, with around half a billion dollars spent pushing the policy (ultimately down the drain), the man who led the pro-business revolution
in the green movement offered his version of what went wrong. Fred Krupp—in a sharp gray suit, his well-styled hair now white after two and a half decades leading the Environmental Defense Fund—explained that climate legislation had failed because greens had been too hard-line, too “shrill,” and needed to be more “humble” and more bipartisan.
⁸⁷
In other words, compromise some more, tone it down
even further, assert ideas with less confidence, and try to be even more palatable to their opponents. Never mind that that is precisely what groups like EDF have been doing since Reagan.

Fittingly enough, Krupp chose to share these pearls of wisdom during the annual Brainstorm Green session hosted by
Fortune
, a magazine devoted to the celebration of wealth, and sponsored by, among others, Shell
Oil.
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I
. By 2011, the situation had become so surreal that Conservation International (CI) was the target of an embarrassing prank. A couple of activist/journalists posed as executives of the weapons giant Lockheed Martin and told the director of corporate relations for CI that they were looking for help greening their company’s image. Rather than cutting their emissions, they said they were
thinking of sponsoring an endangered species. Without missing a beat, the CI representative was recorded helpfully suggesting a bird of prey, to make the “link with aviation.” (“We do not help companies with their image,” CI later maintained, stressing that Lockheed would have needed to undergo a “due diligence process.”)

II
. After my article on the subject appeared in
The Nation
, The Nature
Conservancy adopted a policy to “divest from companies that derive a significant percentage of their revenue from fossil fuels with the highest carbon content and will support a shift to carbon-free energy in the longer term.”

III
. It’s worth keeping this history in mind when free market ideologues treat a cleaner environment as a natural stage in capitalist development. In fact it is the result
of specific sets of regulations, ones that run directly counter to hard-right ideology.

IV
. By the end of the 1980s, the majority of self-identified Republicans were telling pollsters that they thought there was “too little” spent protecting the environment. By 1990, the percentage of Republicans who agreed with that statement topped 70 percent.

V
. Indeed the worlds of finance and Big Green
would become so entangled in the years to come—between donations, board members, and partnerships—that when The Nature Conservancy needed a new CEO in 2008, it recruited not from within the nonprofit world but from Goldman Sachs. Its current director, Mark Tercek, had been working at the notorious investment bank for some twenty-five years before moving over to the NGO, where he has consistently advanced
a model of conservation based on bringing ever more parts of the natural world into the market.

VI
. This is one of the many ironies of the Heartlanders’ claim that greens are closet socialists. If so, then they are deep in the closet. In reality, many mainstream environmentalists bristle at the suggestion that they are part of the left at all, fearing (correctly) that such an identification would
hurt their chances with foundation funders and corporate donors. Far from using climate change as a tool to alter the American way of life, many of the large environmental organizations spend their days doing everything in their power to furiously protect that way of life, at the direct expense of demanding the levels of change required by science.

VII
. The Nature Conservancy, ever the envelope
pusher, has been particularly enthusiastic in this regard, hiring its chief marketing officer straight from World Wrestling Entertainment and participating in the marketing frenzy that accompanied the release of Universal Pictures’ film version of
The Lorax
(which used Dr. Seuss’s anti-consumerism classic to hawk IHOP pancakes and Mazda SUVs). In 2012, the conservancy managed to outrage many of
its female staffers by partnering with the online luxury goods retailer Gilt to promote the
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Edition (the magazine explained that “whether you decide to buy a bikini, surfboards or tickets to celebrate at our parties, any money you spend . . . will help The Nature Conservancy ensure we have beaches to shoot Swimsuit on for another half-century”).

VIII
. Interestingly,
before Nilsson got into the carbon game, he was investigated by a member of Queensland’s parliament for selling what appeared to be entirely fictional Australian real estate to unlucky marks in none other than Nauru.

IX
. Heartland regular Chris Horner called the bill “crony capitalism” on the Enron model—and Horner should know, because he used to work there.

“I had always got away with breaking rules and thought this was no different. I would have got away with it as well if I hadn’t been greedy.”

—
Richard Branson, on getting caught dodging taxes in the early 1970s
¹

“You gotta lead from the front. Nobody is going to start it from the grassroots.”

—Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, 2013
²

In his autobiography/New Age business manifesto
Screw It, Let’s Do It
, Richard Branson, the flamboyant founder of Virgin Group, shared the inside story of what he describes as his “Road to Damascus” conversion to the fight against climate change. It was 2006 and Al Gore, on tour with
An Inconvenient Truth
, came to the billionaire’s home to impress upon him the dangers of global warming, and to
try to convince Branson to use Virgin Airlines as a catalyst for change.
³

“It was quite an experience having a brilliant communicator like Al Gore give me a personal PowerPoint presentation,” Branson writes of the meeting. “Not only was it one of the best presentations I have ever seen in my life, but it was profoundly disturbing to become aware that we are potentially facing the end of the world
as we know it. . . . As I sat there and listened to Gore, I saw that we were looking at Armageddon.”
⁴

As he tells it, Branson’s first move following his terrifying epiphany was to summon Will Whitehorn, then Virgin Group’s corporate and brand development director. Together “we carefully discussed these issues and took the decision to change the way Virgin operates on a corporate and global
level.
We called this new Virgin approach to business Gaia Capitalism in honor of James Lovelock and his revolutionary scientific view” (a reference to Lovelock’s theory that the earth is “one single enormous living organism and every single part of the ecosystem reacted with every other part”). Not only would Gaia Capitalism “help Virgin to make a real difference in the next decade and not be ashamed
to make money at the same time,” but Branson believed it held the potential to become “a new way of doing business on a global level.”
⁵

Before the year was out, he was ready to make his grand entrance onto the green scene (and Branson knows how to make an entrance—by parachute, by hot air balloon, by Jet Ski, by kite-sail with a naked model clinging to his back . . . ). At the 2006 Clinton Global
Initiative annual meeting in New York City—the highest power event on the philanthropic calendar—Branson pledged to spend roughly $3 billion over the next decade to develop biofuels as an alternative to oil and gas, and on other technologies to battle climate change. The sum alone was staggering but the most elegant part was where the money would be coming from: Branson would divert the funds
from profits generated by Virgin’s fossil fuel–burning transportation lines. As Branson explained in an interview, “Any dividends or share sales or any money that we make from our airlines or trains will be ploughed back into tackling global warming, into investing in finding new, clean fuels and investing in trying to find fuels for jet engines so that we can hopefully reverse the inevitability
of, you know, of destroying the world if we let it carry on the way it’s going.”
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