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CIAO DATE: 12/03
Greenwar
On The Issues
March 2003
As Greenpeace has been trying to reinvigorate its radical environmental agenda, it has been willing to distort the facts in order to send an anti-American, anti-capitalist message. By facilely criticizing the campaign against Iraq as a war for oil and ignoring the evidence that economic progress leads to environmental progress, Greenpeace calls into question whether its true commitment is to the environment or to ideology.
In what Britain's Evening Standard newspaper called "guerrilla attacks," antiwar protesters from Greenpeace, the radical environmental group, closed 119 Esso gas stations in London and its suburbs on February 24, 2003, tying up nozzles and switching off electricity to pumps. They also used a truck to block the entrance to the company's headquarters and climbed on the building's glass roof. In all, seventy-six protestors were arrested.
The Greenpeace website gloated that its "activists in the UK severely disrupted the operation of the world's most powerful company, ExxonMobil," parent of Esso, and the company "sent its staff home in response."
The ugly demonstration was the latest effort by Greenpeace to regain the offensive after humiliating defeats at the last two global environmental conferences, the Earth Summit at Johannesburg in August and the Eighth Session of the Conference of the Parties (better known as COP-8) in New Delhi in October. At both of those UN meetings, the world's poorest countries sided with the United States in rejecting new rules and targets on energy use that would have retarded global economic growth.
Blaming Big Oil
Now, Greenpeace is trying a different approach. The group is attempting to exploit the impending conflict with Iraq by claiming that U.S. oil companies have somehow persuaded George W. Bush to go to war so that the companies can have access to Iraqi oil. The logic here is a little hard to follow, but, apparently, according to Anita Goldsmith of Greenpeace, "No company has done more to fuel the crisis than [President Bush's] paymasters at Esso. They have spent millions keeping the U.S. hooked on oil and fighting international action on climate change."
Actually, the U.S. Senate rejected the Kyoto Protocol on climate change three and a half years before Bush was elected president. It voted unanimously not to approve such a treaty, whose severe restrictions on emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, would have cost the U.S. an estimated $300 billion a year or more and severely damaged the economies of poorer countries as well. Wisely, Bill Clinton never submitted the treaty for ratification, and Bush later declared it "fatally flawed."
But the Greenpeace folks know all that. The aim of their campaign is not to change minds through rational discourse but to shift the battleground after a rout. Their mistake is that they have failed to choose a properly docile corporate target. Just last month, for instance, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit in Luxembourg seeking damages for a demonstration in which 600 Greenpeace activists chained themselves to the country's twenty-eight Esso stations, shutting them down for fourteen hours.
Greenpeace is more accustomed to dealing with corporations it can bully and coopt. When I was in Johannesburg in August, I watched with amazement as Bjorn Stigson, president of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development--an organization that includes 160 giant corporations, ranging from AOL Time Warner to BP to Zurich Financial--shared the stage with Remi Parmentier of Greenpeace in a joint press conference to urge governments to ratify and implement the Kyoto agreement.
Greenpeace is not alone, of course, in claming that oil and Iraq are closely linked. But even Greenpeace's own position paper on ExxonMobil, "The Tiger in the Tanks," admits there are subtleties involved: "Only time will tell which oil company will benefit most from a war with Iraq. U.S. oil companies are only likely to benefit if Bush secures a regime change in Iraq, whereas a peaceful resolution is likely to leave French, Russian, and Chinese oil companies as the main winners."
Of course, another way to put this is that the French, Russian, and Chinese oil companies stand to benefit if a brutal dictator, who has already invaded two of his neighbors, killed dissenters, used chemical weapons, and failed to abide by sixteen UN resolutions, remains in power.
But there is no guarantee that ExxonMobil or any other U.S.-based company will be pumping oil in Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone. In late February, according to the Washington Post, TotalFinaElf, S.A., which is France's principal oil company, said that "its knowledge of the oil fields and its contacts with Iraqi officials would overcome any hostility it might face from a new regime in Baghdad because of the French government's resistance to a U.S.-led invasion." Perhaps so. No one knows.
The postwar Iraq oil situation is complex and fluid. Consider that Iraq produced 2.9 million barrels of oil per day last year, down from a peak of 3.5 million in 1979. Iraq's oil fields are a mess, but imagine that in two years, Iraq can produce 4 million barrels or more. Would it be good for an oil company to have that extra 1.1 million barrels of supply a day on the open market? Not according to the most basic rule of economics: more supply means lower prices.
But accept the Greenpeace argument that America is hooked on oil and that Bush is a puppet of the oilmasters. Why go to war with Iraq? Why not simply drill in parts of the United States that are now off-limits, or why not simply lift the sanctions on Iraq: then America could buy as much oil as it wanted from Saddam Hussein?
Such nuances are lost on Greenpeace. The activists are not really out to limit greenhouse gas emissions or replace coal-fired plants with windmills. They are promoting a radical, anti-American, anticapitalist political agenda.
Ruled by Ideology
If Greenpeace truly places the environment over ideology, why does it coddle the worst polluter the world has ever seen? He is, of course, Saddam Hussein, who, faced with defeat in 1991, set fire to 613 oil wells in Kuwait, the country he invaded. An extensive study by Geneva-based Green Cross International found that 60 million barrels of oil were released in the desert, forming 246 oil lakes, covering a surface of forty-nine square kilometers. "The smoke and soot contaminated 953 square kilometers of desert" and soiled 800 miles of coastline. "The amount of oil released was twice as large as the previous world record oil spill"-and twenty times as large as the Valdez spill in Alaska.
One would think that Greenpeace would be leading the first armored column into Baghdad to bring history's number-one ecocriminal to justice.
Instead, Greenpeace sees the imminent war as a different kind of opportunity-to try to revive a movement that has lost its momentum. And Greenpeace is not alone. Friends of the Earth has been running a full-page newspaper ad with a photograph of a nuclear power plant and the headline, "Terrorist Target! Coming Soon to Your Neighborhood?"
The truth is that radical environmentalists have a big problem. They have been unable to respond effectively to a powerful argument that bloomed in Johannesburg eight months ago. It is that people who live in poverty are naturally focused on the day-to-day demands of food, shelter, and clothing. Environmental health is a luxury they can afford only after they have achieved those basic needs. As the late Indian leader Indira Gandhi put it, "Poverty is the worst polluter."
Academic research shows a strong correlation between medium-to-high levels of economic achievement and environmental progress. At first, economic growth degrades the environment, but a transformation starts at a per-capita income of $5,000 to $8,000. In the next few decades, most of the pollution will come from developing Asia and Africa, and the best way to speed its mitigation is by speeding economic growth. Measures like the Kyoto Protocol will retard growth and thus end up prolonging pollution.
The best way to boost an economy is to expand its use of energy. Inexpensive, abundant energy is the key to accelerating economic growth, especially for less-developed nations, because the leverage is so powerful. A little energy goes a long way.
There is no reason to be ashamed to admit that, with the liberation of Iraq from Saddam, more energy, at lower prices, will reach more people around the world. That is not the reason to fight in Iraq, but it will be one of the beneficial consequences. With the elimination of the world's greatest ecocriminal, more plentiful energy will produce a cleaner environment.
James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI.
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