THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VII, Issue # 166, August 3, 2005
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY DOUBLETALK:
SOCIAL & ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS ATTACK EXXONMOBIL,
BUT HAVE ABOMINABLE ETHICAL STANDARDS FOR THEMSELVES
By Paul K. Driessen
IN RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF THE POLITICAL AGENDA & IDEOLOGY OF RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM: RADICAL SOCIAL &
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS CONDUCTING THEIR DISHONEST, UNETHICAL, & VICIOUS CAMPAIGN OF PROPAGANDA &
INTIMIDATION AGAINST ENERGY CORPORATIONS THAT DOUBT CATACLYSMIC GLOBAL WARMING THEORIES, REFUSE TO
ACCEDE TO THE DEMANDS OF THE ACTIVISTS, & CONTINUE TO INVEST IN & FOCUS UPON THE DEVELOPMENT & EXPLOITATION
OF PETROLEUM, COAL, & NATURAL GAS AS SOURCES OF ENERGY -- POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS DETERMINED TO IMPOSE
THEIR WILL ON THE ENTIRE WORLD, RIDING ROUGHSHOD OVER THE RIGHTS & VITAL INTERESTS OF MOST OF THE WORLD'S
POPULATION
FULL STORY:
All companies should be honest, ethical, and devoted to the well-being of the publics they serve: employees, investors, customers,
and communities. It’s good business, common sense, and what’s simply expected of corporations today.
According to social and environmental activists, it’s also the essence of “corporate social responsibility” campaigns. CSR, they
insist, is a lighthouse – an ethical beacon – that corporations must follow, if they are to “earn their right to continue operating,”
underpin “sustainable” economies, and make the world “fairer” and “more just.” While this may be the idealized or sanitized version,
reality is somewhat different.
“Social responsibility” is now a movement, designed and defined to promote narrow political agendas, silence critics, tarnish
corporate reputations, give favored companies leverage against competitors, and make up for power lost at ballot boxes or in union
halls. Liberal foundations, like Heinz, Pew and Soros, help bankroll the movement, and labor bosses use pension funds for campaigns
that don’t always serve their members’ best interests.
A number of companies actively promote CSR and “sustainable development.” Others have capitulated to pressure groups, like
Rainforest Action Network, to buy “peace for our time” and garner fleeting accolades for acceding to activists’ ethical precepts.
The real danger, though, is that CSR’s “ethical beacon” is actually more like the bonfires pirates once lit along Ireland’s coast, to
lure unsuspecting ships onto the rocks, where they would be plundered and destroyed. The verdict is still out on the movement’s
longterm effects on corporate ethics and viability, but its suspect moralizing has been amply demonstrated.
Campaign ExxonMobil employed street theater, shareholder resolutions, kangaroo courts and myriad accusations, in an attempt to
force the oil giant to recant its skepticism about global warming and its continued investments in petroleum, rather than “ethical”
and “responsible” technologies like solar power that impact vast acreage to produce expensive, unreliable energy. Proponents
included ethical icons like the Anarchist Black Cross, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Coalition for Environmentally
Responsible Economies, Ralph Nader’s U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG), the Monkeywrench Collective, Father
Michael Crosby, and UPROAR.
Next, the Foundation for National Progress and its Mother Jones tabloid pilloried the company for supporting public policy
think tanks that dare to question catastrophic global climate change theories or point out that there is no scientific consensus on
the issue. Exxon donated a total of $5 million to 18 such institutes, including several for which this author works part time. (The
Congress of Racial Equality, for example, received $40,000 in 2003 – less than 2% of its annual budget.) By contrast, Liberal
foundations gave $23 million to just 11 major global warming advocacy groups in 2002.
The latest assault, ExxposeExxon.com, was launched recently by moveon.org, NRDC, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra
Club, the Pew Foundation’s National Environmental Trust, and others. They’re upset that ExxonMobil still doubts cataclysmic
global warming theories, supports development of huge potential oil reserves in Alaska, and continues to focus on its core
business: petroleum.
ExxonMobil amply serves the needs of its customers, shareholders, and employees. It invested $1 billion in renewable energy two
decades ago, before doing so was fashionable. Its energy efficiency and pollution reduction programs have had “a greenhouse
gas equivalent to removing over 1 million cars from the road” since 1999, according to company sources. It pours tens of millions
of dollars annually into habitat preservation, malaria control, climate research, minority education, and numerous other programs.
By any fair benchmark, that’s solid corporate social responsibility. But not by the skewed ethics of environmental political
activists, who seek to dominate the political arena, stifle debate, and control personal and societal choices on transportation,
housing, heating, air conditioning, medicine, and manufacturing.
Over the past century, changes in these sectors have been mind-numbing: from horses to automobiles and jet airplanes, from
telegraphs to televisions and computers, from wood and coal furnaces to natural gas and nuclear energy, from typewriters to
laptops and Blackberries, from bone saws to heart transplants. Every advance brings new efficiencies and requires new energy
and mineral resources. Few would hazard a guess as to where our talents for innovation (mankind’s ultimate resource) might take
us next.
But radical activists claim this progress is not “sustainable,” that it violates the “precautionary principle.” They routinely ignore
the very ethical precepts that ExxposeExxon.com claims its coalition members revere: “protecting habitats,” safeguarding
consumers from “rising gasoline prices,” and fostering “a more healthy and just world,”
The coalition and its allies demand that wind power replace petroleum, even though a single 555-mW gas-fired power plant (20
acres) generates more electricity annually than all 13,000 of California’s wind turbines (106,000 acres). They battle wintertime
drilling for oil on Alaska’s frozen North Slope and oil drilling anytime in U.S. coastal waters and western states – preferring to
see forests of 300-foot-tall wind turbines ruining scenic vistas and killing birds and bats by the tens of thousands. Their
antipathy toward pipelines, refineries, and liquefied natural gas ports (LNG ports) further helps create artificial shortages and
drive energy prices skyward.
By obstructing hydroelectric, fossil fuel, and nuclear power development in Third World nations, they keep 2 billion people
permanently deprived of electricity – and of the safe food and water, quality medical care, good schools, economic productivity,
and other benefits that abundant, reliable, affordable electricity brings. US$1,500 will buy photovoltaic panels, batteries, and
regulators sufficient to power a small television, mini-refrigerator and dozen 20-Watt light bulbs, says Uganda-born Connie
Miranda. However, such systems are beyond the reach of most African families, whose total annual income is a few thousand
dollars, and the systems cannot possibly electrify modern hospitals, offices, or manufacturing centers.
The radicals’ even more strident opposition to biotechnology and pesticides helps perpetuate the rampant malnutrition and
disease that these modern marvels could help prevent, saving millions of lives every year in developing countries.
The ExxposeExxon coalition’s perverse ethics might in some way foster “a more healthy and just world” for them, but only at a
huge cost to billions of the Earth’s poorest people. That’s why, as a former Sierra Club member, I agree with Greenpeace
Co-Founder Patrick Moore: “the environmental movement has lost its objectivity, morality, and humanity.”
Perhaps the day will come when Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Barbra Streisand, Leonardo
DeCaprio, Al Gore, Cameron Diaz, Ted Turner, and their compatriots will “go native” and actually live, for even a week, in the
squalid “indigenous” conditions they extol and perpetuate: live in Africans’ mud huts, drink their contaminated water, breathe
smoke from their wood and dung fires, endure their swarms of tsetse flies and mosquitoes, with no bug repellant – and walk 40
miles to the nearest clinic when they inevitably start convulsing and vomiting with malaria, in hope that a nurse can treat them
with medicines that actually work.
Until then, they are simply in no position to lecture ExxonMobil or anyone else about ethics or social responsibility.
© 2005 Paul K. Driessen
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Paul K. Driessen is Senior Policy Advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality, the Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow, and the
Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, which can be
obtained at www.Eco-Imperialism.com. Email: pdriessen@cox.net --- Telephone:
(703) 698-6171
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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