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July 25, 2000-6
Copyright © 2001 Earth Policy Institute
The Rise and Fall of the Global Climate
Coalition
Lester R. Brown
In August 1997, a few months before the Kyoto
Conference on Climate Change, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)
helped launch a massive advertising campaign designed to prevent
the United States from endorsing any meaningful agreement to reduce
global carbon emissions. This group, including in its ranks some
of the world’s most powerful corporations and trade associations
involved with fossil fuels, concentrated its efforts on a series
of television ads that attempted to confuse and frighten Americans.
Among other things, the ads indicated that “Americans
will pay the price ... 50¢ more for every gallon of gasoline,”even
though there was no proposal for such a tax. The campaign was successful.
The so-called Carbon Club had effectively undermined public support
of U.S. efforts to lead the international effort to stabilize climate.
While the public image of the GCC at the time
was that of a unified group, there was already dissent within the
ranks. John Browne, Chairman of British Petroleum, in a speech at
Stanford University on May 19, 1997, announced that “the time
to consider the policy dimensions of climate change is not when
the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is conclusively
proven, but when the possibility cannot be discounted and is taken
seriously by the society of which we are part. We in BP have reached
that point.”
Browne’s talk shocked other oil companies
and pleasantly surprised the environmental community. BP withdrew
from the Global Climate Coalition. Dupont had already left. The
following year, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it, too, was leaving.
Its corporate goals, like those of BP and Dupont, no longer meshed
with those of the GCC. Like BP, it no longer viewed itself as an
oil company, but as an energy company.
In 1999, Ford withdrew from the GCC. Its young
Chairman, William C. Ford, Jr., the great-grandson of Henry Ford,
went on record saying, “I expect to preside over the demise
of the internal combustion engine.”The company was already
working on a fuel cell engine, one where the fuel of choice was
hydrogen-not gasoline.
Ford’s decision to withdraw was yet another
sign of the changes occurring in major industries involved directly
and indirectly with fossil fuels. A company spokesman noted, “Over
the course of time, membership in the Global Climate Coalition has
become something of an impediment for Ford Motor Company to achieving
our environmental objectives.”
In rapid succession in the early months of 2000,
Daimler Chrysler, Texaco, and General Motors announced that they
too were leaving the Coalition. With the departure of GM, the world’s
largest automobile company, the die was cast. A spokesman for the
Sierra Club quipped, “Maybe it is time to ask the last one
out to turn out the lights.”
The image created by this accelerating exodus
of firms from the GCC was that of rats abandoning a sinking ship.
It reflected the conflict emerging within GCC ranks between firms
that were clinging to the past and those that were planning for
the future.
Some of the exiting companies, such as BP Amoco,
Shell, and Dupont, joined a progressive new group, the Business
Environmental Leadership Council, now an organization of some 21
corporations. This new outfit, founded by the Pew Center on Global
Climate Change, says, “We accept the views of most scientists
that enough is known about the science and environmental impacts
of climate change for us to take actions to address its consequences.”
Other leading companies that have joined the Council
are Toyota, Enron, and Boeing. Membership requires individual companies
to have their own programs for reducing carbon emissions. BP Amoco,
for example, plans to bring its carbon emissions to 10 percent below
its 1990 level by 2010, exceeding the Kyoto goal of roughly 5 percent
for industrial countries.
Dupont has one of the most ambitious goals of
any company, going far beyond that of Kyoto. It has already cut
its 1990 greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent and plans to reduce
them by a total of 65 percent by 2010, rendering hollow the claim
that lowering carbon emissions to meet the Kyoto goal is not possible.
On the supply side, BP Amoco and Shell are investing
heavily in new sources of energy. BP Amoco is now a leading manufacturer
of solar cells. Shell, already a major player in both wind and solar
cells, is also investing heavily in hydrogen and will likely open
the world’s first chain of hydrogen stations in Iceland.
To date, the net effect of the various public
and private initiatives worldwide has been to check the growth in
global carbon emissions. Since 1996, global carbon emissions have
leveled off. The burning of coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel,
dropped 5 percent in 1999. The next step is to reduce carbon emissions
across the board.
Abandonment of the Global Climate Coalition by
leading companies is partly in response to the mounting evidence
that the world is indeed getting warmer. The 15 warmest years in
the last century have occurred since 1980. Ice is melting on every
continent. The snow/ice pack in the Rockies, the Andes, the Alps,
and the Himalayas is shrinking. The volume of the ice cap covering
the Arctic Ocean has shrunk by more than 40 percent over the last
35 years. To deny that Earth is getting warmer in the face of such
compelling evidence is to risk a loss of credibility, something
that corporations cannot readily afford.
The high price paid by the tobacco industry’s
continuing denial of a link between smoking and health is all too
familiar. This loss of credibility led to a major shift in public
opinion, one that is now affecting court proceedings and the decisions
of juries considering the claims of plaintiffs against the tobacco
industry. And it figured prominently in the agreement by the industry
to pay state governments $251 billion to compensate them for the
Medicare costs of treating smoking-related illnesses.
In a thinly veiled effort to conceal the real
issue - the loss of so many key corporate members - the GCC announced
that it was restructuring and would henceforth only include trade
associations in its membership. While the companies leaving the
GCC are still represented by their trade associations, their loss
of confidence in the GCC's ability to represent their corporate
interests is all too evident.
Thoughtful corporate leaders now know that our
energy future is going to be strikingly different from our energy
past. There is a growing acceptance among the key energy players
that the world is in the early stages of the transition from a carbon-based
to a hydrogen-based energy economy. In February 1999, ARCO Chief
Executive Officer Michael Bowlin said in a talk at an energy conference
in Houston, Texas, “WeŻve embarked on the beginning of the
Last Days of the Age of Oil.” He went on to discuss the need
to convert our carbon-based energy economy into a hydrogen-based
energy economy.
Whether the GCC will survive as a collection of
trade associations or whether it will join the Tobacco Institute,
which closed its doors in January 1999, is uncertain. What is clear
is that the organization that so effectively undermined U.S. leadership
in Kyoto is no longer a dominant player in the global climate debate.
The stage is set for the United States to resume leadership of the
global climate stabilization effort.
Copyright
© 2000 Earth Policy Institute
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FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
From Worldwatch Institute
Seth Dunn, “Fossil Fuel Use in Flux” and
“Carbon Emissions Fall Again,” in Lester R. Brown, et
al., Vital Signs 2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping
Our Future (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000).
Seth Dunn, “King Coal’s Weakening Grip on Power,”
World Watch, September/October 1999.
Lisa Mastny, “Melting of Earth’s Ice Cover Reaches New
High,”Worldwatch News Alert, 6 March 2000.
LINKS
Business Environmental Leadership Council
http://www.pewclimate.org/
companies_leading_the_way_belc/
(Site includes a list of member companies.)
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
http://www.ipcc.ch/
Pew Center on Global Climate Change
http://www.pewclimate.org/
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