-Caveat Lector-
June 1, 2001
A Tiger by the Tail
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
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[ Who must have started taking LSD to produce this article. - Nurev ]
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And now for a wild prediction. Within 12 months President Bush,
Vice President Dick Cheney and all their
backers in the oil industry will be begging — begging — to revive the
Kyoto protocol on climate change, the
accord Mr. Bush yanked America out of after taking office.
Why, you ask? Well, look what's happening in England. A group of
celebrities there have joined with
environmentalists to launch a boycott against Exxon Mobil gas stations,
which in Europe go by the name Esso.
Bianca Jagger, the pop star Annie Lennox and Anita Rodrick, founder of
the Body Shop chain, helped launch the
boycott because, as Ms. Jagger said, "This is a way to tell Esso that
it's not right for them to be claiming that
there is no connection between CO2 emissions and climate change."
People connected with Exxon reportedly contributed more than $1 million
to the Bush campaign. Exxon is a key
supporter of research and advertisements that try to cast doubt on the
seriousness of global warming and its
link to fossil fuel emissions. Exxon was a big backer of President
Bush's decision to pull the U.S. out of the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, which called for industrialized nations to steadily
reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Exxon is
also a major force behind the Global Climate Coalition, a business lobby
that opposed Kyoto.
The "Stop Esso Campaign" is asking British drivers to shun Esso stations
until the company supports Kyoto (see
www.stopesso.com). The campaign recently spread to France. What's funny
is that probably none of this would
have happened had Mr. Bush not bowed to the oil companies and pulled the
U.S. out of Kyoto. That may turn out
to be his greatest gift to environmentalism.
You see, as long as everyone was discussing how to implement Kyoto, no
one wanted to take any radical steps.
Governments could say they were working on the problem, but that
negotiations were hard. Corporations could
mumble nice words about environmentalism, but not worry anything serious
was going to happen. And
environmentalists could feel their cause was being advanced, even though
implementation was far off.
"As long as Kyoto was there, everyone could avoid real accountability
and pretend that something was
happening," says Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace and now
chairman of Ecos, one of Australia's leading
environmental consulting firms. "But now George Bush, by trashing Kyoto,
has blown everyone's cover. If you care
about the environment you can't pretend anymore. Emissions are
increasing, the climate is changing and people
can now see for themselves that the world is fiddling while Rome burns."
The result: Environmentalists refuse to sit on their hands anymore.
Instead, the smart ones are mobilizing
consumers to fight multinational polluters on their own ground. You have
to admire it. It's so Republican — using
the free market.
If I were Exxon, I would be worried — especially when U.S. college
students come back to campus in the fall.
Remember Monsanto? It was going to sell genetically modified food to
Europeans. But environmentalists in Europe
— worried, rightly or wrongly, about the safety of what they were eating
— mobilized the weakest link in the
value chain: consumers. Consumers demanded "G.M.O.-free" food. So
supermarkets demanded it from their
suppliers, suppliers demanded it from farmers and farmers demanded it
from Monsanto. Goodbye, Monsanto.
This is real globalization activism. "The smart activists are now
saying, `O.K., You want to play markets — let's
play,' " says Mr. Gilding. They don't waste time throwing stones or
lobbying governments. That takes forever and
can easily be counter- lobbied by corporations. No, no, no. They start
with consumers at the pump, get them to
pressure the gas stations, get the station owners to pressure the
companies and the companies to pressure
governments. After all, consumers do have choices where they buy their
gas, and there are differences now.
Shell and BP- Amoco (which is also the world's biggest solar company)
both withdrew from the oil industry lobby
that has been dismissing climate change.
What Mr. Bush did in trashing Kyoto was to leave serious environmental
activists with nowhere else to turn but
the market. The smart ones get it. You will be hearing from them soon —
at a gas station near you.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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Friedman's explanation of what Kyoto really is is right on the money.
Kyoto was a typical ' liberal ' solution to a serious problem. That is
to say, tweaking the system is easier than fixing the system.
I guess that Friedman is using this situation to point out that " THE
MARKET " is the solution. Which is in line with his fix for everything
even though there is really no such thing as THE MARKET.
Nurev
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