10-2-08 by dugan
OilWatchdog loathes greenwash P.R. by oil companies pretending to be good green citizens. But a revelatory new book points to major environmental groups as enablers of this corporate greenwash. Christine MacDonald, author of the newly published “Green, Inc., An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad,” finds that big environmental groups keep their mouths shut about corporate misdeeds to keep the corporate bucks flowing. She recently tipped OilWatchdog to a case involving Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. And below is McDonald’s take, for OilWatchdog, on why groups including the huge Nature Conservancy are silent about the vile "Drill, baby, drill" campaign and other oil industry misdeeds.
"Green” groups, greenwashing and the offshore drilling debate.
By Christine MacDonald
With debate raging over whether we should open more of the country to oil drilling, some of the nation’s largest environmental groups have remained on the sidelines.
It might seem natural for groups like The Nature Conservancy, the country’s richest environmental nonprofit with assets of $5.4 billion; The Conservation Fund, which calls itself “the nation’s foremost environmental nonprofit;” and Conservation International to speak up about the potential environmental harm of opening up delicate Alaskan ecosystems and offshore fishing grounds along country’s Pacific and Atlantic coastlines. But these groups – and others that count on energy companies for donations – have studiously avoided comment.
In fact, The Nature Conservancy named a Texas nature center after its donor ExxonMobil. And it has awarded Exxon, Occidental Petroleum Corp. and Shell Oil “conservation steward” awards. BP donates a few pennies to The Conservation Fund each time its BP credit card holders fill up their gas tanks. Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips are also generous donors to environmental causes in exchange for priceless public relations dividends.
The leaders of the nonprofit organizations, for their part, say they are influencing the companies to change their polluting ways. There is little evidence to back up that claim, however. In fact, the big oil companies are facing setbacks in their quests to convince a skeptical public that they are “greening” their operations and becoming “good corporate citizens.”
In August, a federal judge in Washington denied ExxonMobil’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging its liability for kidnappings, torture and murders committed by Indonesian soldiers guarding its natural gas refinery in Aceh province. In October, Chevron goes to trial in federal court in San Francisco to face allegations of human rights abuses committed by Nigeria’s ruling military regime in defense of the its drilling operations in that West African country. Occidental Petroleum is also being sued in San Francisco for allegedly dumping toxic waste from oil drilling operations into rivers and streams in the Peruvian jungle, wreaking environmental havoc and causing deaths and serious health problems in downriver indigenous villages.
And there are cases where companies claim corporate “greening” but government regulators see greenwashing.
In August, the British Advertising Standards Authority chastised Shell Oil for an ad in the Financial Times that described the company’s oil sands operations as a “sustainable energy source.” The U.K. authority ruled the statement was misleading since oil sands require more water and petroleum than conventional oil drilling, not to mention the forests ripped out to strip mine the molasses-like heavy crude oil underneath. Last year both the British and Dutch advertising authorities banned a Shell ad depicting flowers blowing like exhaust out of a refinery smokestack.
BP has done better at branding itself “sustainable,” spending millions of dollars on donations to green groups and hundreds of millions more on its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign, often lauded as the most successful green marketing effort ever. Its billboards trumpet: "BP provides oil, natural gas, solar, wind, biofuels and options." But the company invested a mere 4 percent of total expenditures on all of its eco-friendly business operations in 2007. It spent 16 times as much on oil exploration and production. And it’s track record for environmental stewardship is bleaker: In Whiting, Indiana, BP’s plans to significantly increase ammonia and industrial sludge discharges into Lake Michigan would have undermined efforts to clean up the Great Lakes. Only after public outcry did BP agree to improve environmental safeguards. In this decade alone, the British energy company has spent hundreds of million of dollars to settle felony violations of the Clean Air Act and other laws. It’s on probation until 2010.
Christine MacDonald is the former media capacity building manager at Conservation International. Her book “Green, Inc., An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad” was published this month by Lyons Press.