Climate Change & Profit

Profiting From Climate Change - Our Political and Economic System Dooms Us.

Glenn Ashton, February 2006

Ecosystem destruction, climate change, extinction are all inevitable if we do not change our corporate political system post haste.

Global warming is a reality, this we know. The head of the International Panel on Climate Change, the worlds leading expert institution recently said, "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose." Henry Derwent, special climate change adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, recently reinforced this, saying “climate change is worse than was previously thought and we need to act now."

These are just two of hundreds of experts who agree that our global climate has been seriously put out of sync by human interference with global ecosystems. Even the many politicians are now on-side in most nations around the world, except for scattered denialists such as those in charge of the USA.

The oldest argument the climate change denialists cite is that greenhouse gas levels during the age of the dinosaurs were at far higher levels than at present. To them I say you may deem yourselves to be lizards but the rest of us are not. Beside that, even the lizards presently living on earth have adapted to the present climate and will be just as threatened as humans, or as any other of the billions of living organisms on earth by the inevitable climate change we have precipitated.

But even if there is agreement amongst politicians, academics, civic leaders, opinion makers and yes, even amongst some corporate players, our very economic system dooms us to immobility in the face of a need for ready manoeverablity. It is all a bit like those nightmares where the baddies are after you and you cannot escape because your body is moving through an amorphous goo that prevents anything more than slow motion flight. We can perceive the light of danger but are frozen in its glare.

Why is our system unable to change? Surely most nations on earth are at least nominally democratic and responsive to the will of the people? Well, yes, this may be so. This may be why politicians are beginning to respond to public pressure. But the reality is that it is no longer the masses that pay to install governments, no matter how free or democratic the nation.

Look at the USA: Here is a nation that portrays itself as the epitome of freedom, despite recent indications to the contrary. But just who pays for the process of electing the representatives of its people? The billions of dollars bet on elections emanate primarily from corporate ‘sponsors’. These are not donations; they are investments. The primary role of corporate office bearers is the fiduciary duty to return profit on investment. If they fail in this role they stand to be replaced.

So when money is donated to political causes, be they in the USA or in South Africa or anywhere else for that matter, you can safely wager that any such donation, while nominally unconditional, is burdened by expectations. A payback is not only possible but is anticipated.

Clearly this system undermines democratic ideals. Even in nations like South Africa our nascent democracy is hamstrung by the biggest single obstacle to democratic transparency – the total lack of transparency around party political sponsorship. As in the USA, this is not confined to any one single party but remains true across the board.

Corporate largesse is writ large on the democratic political landscape of South Africa; only a naïf could ignore this. After all does not the political elite have regular “imbizo’s” with corporate power-players invested in South Africa Inc.? And just what balance is there to this influence – where does the government meet the people? The logical response is that this is the role of parliament; however, anyone who has worked with and within in such structures can attest to the omnipresence of a hidden, corporate agenda, operating without let or hindrance from democratic interference. This is the way of the world, the neo-liberal world which South Africa has eagerly embraced with its GEAR, its market-friendly approach and its access to decision makers through party political funding.

This explanation is necessary to illustrate parallels between the microcosm of South African and the global macrocosm. But what has this to do with global warming, overfishing, water pollution, the push for genetically engineered crops and all the rest of the evident ills that assail our civilisation and our ecosystems?

Ever since the US led invasion of Iraq in 2002, oil prices have skyrocketed. This precipitous increase has been driven more by market perception than by reality. It still costs the same amount of money to get the oil out of the ground after all. The last 4 years have seen everyone associated with the oil industry to acquire indecent wealth. Oil producing states like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Angola have all benefited – their citizens somewhat less so perhaps - but none have benefited as much as the shareholders and boards of the large oil Multinationals.

The oil bonanza has inflated profit to obscene proportions: Exxon-Mobil, the worlds biggest oil company has recently announced profits of US$36 billion, the largest ever profit in corporate history. Shell made over US$20 billion and has been threatened with a windfall tax by parliamentarians in the UK. BP too reported record profits.

And where are these profits headed? First toward investment in making more of the same but secondly to support political parties so that the profit can be retained in the face of public outrage at such wanton profiteering at the public expense.

But it is not only profiteering we are dealing with here. What these corporations are going to do, despite all of the hot air about moving beyond petroleum, is to pump as much oil as they possibly can, in order to keep right on making money. This is not going to do the climate any good.

From this short analysis you will clearly perceive that our system appears and is unsustainable. We cannot have both endless profit and endless consumption. Something must give, the centre cannot hold. Realistically, the only thing that will bring change is a collapse of the entire economic system and all that entails. What would have to follow would be a complete reordering of the global economy to construct a sustainable system.

South Africa, while part of the global village, is in a somewhat different position. We are already struggling under severe burdens of inequality and poverty. Yet ironically our extensive resources and self-sufficiency will place us in a far better position than many other developed nations. We will be far more able to institute a sustainable system than in many other parts of the world, yet even so it will be difficult. But change we must.

And the global climate? Well, we just have to hope that the necessary beneficial alterations can be made in time to prevent catastrophic damage to the system. Change is virtually impossible under the present system but it can happen if enough of us stand up, are counted and make the changes we all want to be. Not just by making and demanding these changes ourselves but by demanding the degree of accountability and governance that is truly for the good of the systems that sustain us all, either before or after the system crashes.

This is our choice, true democracy or continued and enhanced corporate tyranny. As the hippies said, we only have one world, so let’s look after it. That, after we take it back from the usurpers!