THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 64, April 24, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
MISGUIDED SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
AT GENERAL ELECTRIC
By Paul K. Driessen
POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM & CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: POLITICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS
EMPLOY THE IDEOLOGY, PROPAGANDA, & DISINFORMATION COMPRISING THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY TO
PRESSURE BUSINESS CORPORATIONS INTO ADOPTING & IMPLEMENTING POLICIES THAT PROMOTE THE AGENDA OF
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS -- ADHERENCE TO GLOBAL WARMING THEORY, OPPOSITION TO ENERGY DEVELOPMENT, &
ADVOCACY OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS THAT WOULD IMPOSE STRICT LIMITS ON GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS &
THEREBY SEVERELY LIMIT & SUBSTANTIALLY INCREASE THE COSTS OF ENERGY PRODUCTION & CONSUMPTION
FULL STORY:
Companies should always be honest, ethical, and devoted to the well-being of our environment and the publics they serve:
employees, investors, customers, and communities alike. It’s good business. It’s socially responsible.
Unfortunately, many companies have succumbed to a siren’s song that takes them far beyond these basic truths and into
the dangerous shoals of “corporate social responsibility.”
CSR could be a useful guide for businesses. Instead, it’s been perverted into a huge multinational business, a business
without the laws and mores that help guide the behavior of for-profit companies. More often than not, special interest social
and environmental groups employ CSR, putting forth disingenuous claims and horror-movie scripts as high-pressure tactics
to promote their narrow agendas.
CSR activists call themselves stakeholders, and demand a controlling voice in all matters corporate. But they weren’t elected.
They have little or no ownership interest in the company. And their only real “stake” is a desire to advance their ideologies.
Their agendas typically oppose energy development and emphasize distant, minor, conjectural or exaggerated risks like
global warming and “endocrine disruption.” They pay scant attention to real, immediate, even life-threatening risks that their
policies perpetrate or perpetuate in U.S. and overseas communities that lack political and financial clout. Those stakeholders
– the real ones, who will be severely impacted by the activists’ policies – rarely get an opportunity to be heard.
Even worse, some companies don’t just go along with these ethical travesties. They actively aid and abet them. A recent
example, sadly, is one of America’s most venerable and successful companies: General Electric.
GE’s new “Ecomagination” marketing initiative describes and promotes its efforts to develop more fuel-efficient,
lower-pollution technologies. We all hope it will take us as far during this century as Thomas Edison’s company and other
innovators took us during the previous hundred years.
However, GE has coupled Ecomagination with a misguided campaign to “safeguard” the planet from “catastrophic” global
warming – by lobbying for new laws that would impose mandatory greenhouse gas controls on consumers and
manufacturers. Even more incredibly, the company has joined with the alarmist Pew Center on Global Climate Change to
support its lobbying campaign and promote its New Age “ethical” principles.
Gasoline is again hitting $3 a gallon. Natural gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere. Consumers are screaming.
Editorialists and legislators are railing about “obscene” prices and profits. Scientists are poking new holes in climate change
theory and theology. Britain, Canada, and other signatory nations are colliding with the granite-hard reality that complying
with the Kyoto Protocol will hammer their economies, for no detectable environmental benefits.
And GE has teamed up with Pew to demand Kyoto clones that will send energy prices soaring even higher, destroy jobs,
batter families, and further damage the U.S. and global economies. What is CEO Jeff Immelt thinking?
Mr. Immelt is too bright a businessman, too familiar with science and engineering, to have become a true believer in climate
chaos. Perhaps he hopes this “bold initiative” will mute CSRist criticism for a time. Or maybe he “ecomagines” the expensive
new regulatory schemes will produce new customers, give GE an edge over competitors, and position his company to reap
the rewards of massive new federal spending programs. None of this equates with ethics or social responsibility, however.
Time magazine, alarmist astronomer James Hansen, and Hollywood climate “experts” George Clooney and Julia
Roberts are working overtime to convince Americans that global warming is already devastating our planet. But few
scientists buy their apocalyptic theories, no real evidence backs them up, Earth’s turbulent climate history belies the claim
that something new is afoot, and the scary “scenarios” shouted by headlines and alarmist literature are the product of only
superheated rhetoric and a couple of “outlier” computer models.
As genuine atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen has observed, the political/federal funding process rewards alarmism,
punishes skepticism, and boosts spending on “alternative” energy technologies. Meanwhile, news stories and calls for
action emphasize the impacts of theoretical catastrophic warming – “not whether it would actually happen,” which is
highly doubtful.
Moreover, even perfect compliance with Kyoto by all signatory nations would keep global temperatures from rising a
barely detectable 0.2 degrees less by 2050 than if we do nothing. Unilateral U.S. national or state schemes would
accomplish a tiny fraction of that.
But Kyoto compliance would cost $1 trillion a year – five times the price tag for providing sanitation and safe water for
everyone on the planet, says Danish analyst Bjorn Lomborg. The annual economic impact of Kyoto on the United States
could be several hundred billion dollars and over $2,000 per minority family, according to government and private studies.
None of this has kept the Pew Center from spending upwards of $5 million a year to insist that “climate change is a serious
issue that demands immediate action.” Nor has it prevented Mr. Immelt from saying, “It is time for the private sector to
assume its rightful place as a major catalyst for environmental change.”
This augurs ill for sound science and informed public policy. The effects are likely to be much worse for the poorest people
on our planet.
The GE-Pew axis would exacerbate fear and loathing against traditional electricity generation that is urgently needed in the
Third World, where 2 billion people still struggle to survive without electricity -- for lights and refrigeration, hospitals and
schools, shops and factories. As a result, 4 million people die annually from lung infections caused by breathing polluted
smoke from wood and dung fires; another 6 million perish from intestinal diseases caused by unsafe water and spoiled food.
But radical CSR and environmental activists oppose fossil fuel electrical generation (global warming), hydroelectric power
(damming rivers) and nuclear power plants (too dangerous). Poor people in developing countries should be content with a
few wind turbines or little solar panels “on their huts,” says actor Ed Begley, Jr.
Has Mr. Immelt granted full stakeholder status to Third World communities and legitimate representatives of America’s
minorities and poor? Has he discussed his proposed policies and alliances with them? Now that China has become the
world’s second-largest oil consumer and third-largest oil importer, does he plan to lobby for oil drilling in Alaska, the Rockies
and coastal USA, to ease supply-demand pressure on energy prices?
Prudence, ethics, social responsibility, and plain good business sense suggest that he should do so, before casting his lot
– and that of his company, its shareholders and customers, and the world’s poor – with alarmist special interests like the
Pew Center on Climate Change (which should be re-named the "Pew Center for Anxiety and Disinformation").
© 2006 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
Return to Top of Page
Go to the WEBSITE INDEX
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Public Issues & Political Controversies
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
Most Recent Articles
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Volume VIII, 2006
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Subject Matter Highlights
Return to POLITICAL EDUCATION Homepage
CONTACT & ACCESS INFORMATION
This is not a commercial website. The sole purpose of the website is to share with interested persons information regarding civics,
civic and social education, political science, government, politics, law, constitutional law and history, public policy, and political
philosophy and history, as well as current and recent political developments, public issues, and political controversies.
POLITICAL EDUCATION, CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS
POLITICS, SOCIETY, & THE SOVEREIGN STATE
Website of Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr.
Government, Politics, Public Policy, Legal Issues, Constitutional Law, Government & the Economy, Cultural Values, Foreign Affairs,
International Relations, Military Defense & National Security, Geopolitics, Terrorism & Homeland Security, American National Interests,
Political Systems & Processes, Political Institutions, Political Ideologies, & Political Philosophy
INDEX FOR THE ENTIRE WEBSITE
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic,
Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues