This potential for profit-making from climate change gained the avid attention of investment bankers, some of whom were central participants in the PCA through their connections with the boards of the Pew Center and Environmental Defense. Goldman Sachs became the leader of the pack; with its ownership of power plants through Cogentrix and clients like BP and Shell, the Wall Street firm was most attuned to the opportunities. In 2004 the company began to explore the “market-making” possibilities and the following year established its Center for Environmental Markets, with the announcement that “Goldman Sachs will aggressively seek market-making and investment opportunities in environmental markets.” The firm indicated that the Center would engage in research to develop public policy options for establishing markets around climate change, Including the design and promotion of regulatory solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The firm also indicated that Goldman Sachs would “take the lead in identifying investment opportunities in renewable energy;” that year the investment banking firm acquired Horizon Wind Energy, invested in photovoltaics with Sun Edison, arranged financing for Northeast Biofuels, and purchased a stake in logen Corporation, which pioneered the conversion of straw, corn stalks, and switchgrass into ethanol. The company also dedicated itself “to act as a market maker in emissions trading” of CO2 (and S02) as well as in such areas as “weather derivatives,” “renewable energy credits,” and other “climate-related commodities.” “We believe,” Goldman Sachs proclaimed, “that the management of risks and opportunities arising from climate change and its regulation will be particularly significant and will garner increasing attention from capital market participants.”
Among those capital market participants was former U.S. Vice President AI Gore. Gore had a long-standing interest in environmental issues and had represented the U.S. in Kyoto. He also had equally long-standing family ties with the energy industry through his father’s friendship with Armand Hammer and his financial interest in Hammer’s company Occidental Petroleum, which the son inherited. In 2004, as Goldman Sachs was gearing up its climate-change market-making initiatives in quest of green profits, Gore teamed up with Goldman Sachs executives David Blood, Peter Harris, and Mark Ferguson to establish the London-based environment investment firm Generation Investment Management (GIM), with Gore and Blood at its helm. In May, 2005 Gore, representing GIM, addressed the Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk and emphasized the need for investors to think in the long term and to integrate environmental issues into their equity analyses. “I believe that integrating the issues relating to climate change into your analysis of what stocks are worth investing in, how much, and for how long, is simply good business,” Gore explained to the assembled Investors. Applauding a decision to move in this direction announced the day before by General Electric’s CEO Jeff Immelt, Gore declared that “We are here at an extraordinarily hopeful moment. . .when the leaders in the business sector begin to make their moves.” By that time Gore was already at work on his book about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, and that same spring he began preparations to make a film about it.
The book and the film of the same name both appeared in 2006, with enormous promotion and immediate success in the corporate entertainment Industry (the film eventually garnering an Academy Award). Both vehicles vastly extended the reach of the climate change market-makers, whose efforts they explicitly extolled. “More and more U.S. business executives are beginning to lead us in the right direction,” Gore exulted, adding “there is also a big change underway in the investment community.” The book and film faithfully reflected and magnified the central messages of the corporate campaign. Like his colleagues at the Pew Center and the Partnership for Climate Action, Gore stressed the importance of using market mechanisms to meet the challenge of global warming. “One of the keys to solving the climate crisis,” he wrote, “involves finding ways to use the powerful force of market capitalism as an ally.” Gore repeated his admonition to investors about the need for long-term investment strategies and for integrating environmental factors into business calculations, proudly pointing out how business leaders had begun “taking a broader view of how business can sustain their profitability over time.” The one corporate executive actually quoted in the book, in a two-page spread, was General Electric’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who succinctly explained the timing and overriding purpose of the exercise: “This is a time period where environmental improvement is going to lead to profitability.”
By the beginning of 2007 the corporate campaign had significantly scaled up its activity, with the creation of several new organizations. The Pew Center and Partnership for Climate Action now created a political lobbying entity, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP). USCAP membership included the key players in the initial effort, such as BP, Dupont, the Pew Center, and Environmental Defense, and added others, including GE, Alcoa, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, Florida Power and Light, and PNM, the New Mexico and Texas utilities holding company. PNM had recently joined with Microsoft’s BUI Gates’ Cascade Investments to form a new unregulated energy company focused on growth opportunities in Texas and the western U.S. PNM’s CEO Jeff Sterba also chaired the Climate Change Task Force of the Edison Electric Institute. Also joining USCAP was the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute, and the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers whose managing director Theodore Roosevelt IV chaired the board of the Pew Center and was soon also to chair Lehman’s new Global Center on Climate Change. As Newsweek now noted (March 12, 2007), “Wall Street is experiencing a climate change”, with the recognition that “the way to get the green is to go green.”
In January, 2007, USCAP issued “A Call for Action,” a “non-partisan effort driven by the top executives from member organizations.” The “Call” declared the “urgent need for a policy framework on climate change;” stressing that “a mandatory system is needed that sets clear, predictable, market-based requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” USCAP laved out a “blueprint for a mandatory economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection,” which recommended a “cap and trade” program as its “cornerstone,” combining the setting of targets with a global carbon market for trading emission allowances and credits. Long condemned by developing countries as “carbon colonialism,” carbon trading had become the new orthodoxy. The blueprint also called for a “national program to accelerate technology, research, development, and deployment and measures to encourage the participation of developing countries Iike China, India, and Brazil, insisting that “ultimately the solution must be global.” According to USCAP spokesperson General Electric’s CEO Jeff Immelt, “these recommendations should catalyze legislative action that encourages innovation and fosters economic growth while enhancing energy security and balance of trade.”
The following month yet another corporate climate organization made its appearance, this one specifically dedicated to spreading the new global warming gospel. Chaired by AI Gore of Generation Investment Management, the Alliance for Climate Protection included among its members the now familiar Theodore Roosevelt IV from Lehman Brothers and the Pew Center, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, Owen Kramer from Boston Provident, representatives from Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the National Wildlife Federation, and three former Environmental Protection Agency Administrators. Using “innovative and far-reaching communication techniques,” Gore explained, “the Alliance for Climate Protection is undertaking an unprecedented mass persuasion exercise” – the multi-media campaign against global warming now saturating our senses. Don’t breathe.
If the corporate climate change campaign has fuelled a fevered popular preoccupation with global warming, it has also accomplished much more. Having arisen in the midst of the world-wide global justice movement, it has restored confidence In those very faiths and forces which that movement had worked so hard to expose and challenge: globe-straddling profit-maximizing corporations and their myriad agencies and agendas; the unquestioned authority of science and the corollary belief in deliverance through technology, and the beneficence of the self-regulating market with its panacea of prosperity through free trade, and its magical powers which transforms into commodities all that it touches, even life. All the glaring truths revealed by that movement about the injustices, injuries, and inequalities sowed and sustained by these powers and beliefs have now been buried, brushed aside in the apocalyptic rush to fight global warming. Explicitly likened to a war, this epic challenge requires single-minded attention and total commitment, without any such distractions. Now is not the time, nor is there any need, to question a deformed society or re-examine its underlying myths. The blame and the burden has been shifted back again to the individual, awash in primordial guilt, the familiar sinner facing punishment for his sins, his excesses, predisposed by his pious culture and primed now for discipline and sacrifice. On opening day of the 2007 baseball season, the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays stood in front of the giant jumbotron, an electronic extravaganza, encircled by a ring of dancing corporate logos and advertising, and exhorted every person In the crowd, preposterously, to go out and buy an energy-efficient light bulb. They applauded.
In his bestselling 2005 book the Weather Makers, Tim Flannery called his readers to battle in “our war on climate change.” With a forward for the Canadian edition written by Mike Russill, former CEO of the energy giant Suncor and now head of World Wildlife Fund/Canada, the book well reflected the corporate campaign. Each of us “must believe that the fight is winnable in social and economic terms,” Russill insists, “and that we do not have to dramatically change the way we live.” “The most important thing to realize,” Flannery echoes, “is that we can all make a difference and help combat climate change at almost no cost to our lifestyle.” “The transition to a carbon-free economy is eminently achievable,” he exults, “because we have all the technology we need to do so.” “One great potential pitfall on the road to climate stability,” he warns, however, “is the propensity for groups to hitch their ideological wagon to the push for sustainability.” “When facing a grave emergency,” he advises, “it’s best to be single-minded.” The book is inspiring, rallying the reader to battle against this global threat with ingenuity, enthusiasm, and hopefulness, except for one small aside, buried in the text, that gnaws at the attentive reader: “Because concern about climate change is so new, and the issue is so multi-disciplinary,” Flannery notes, “there are few true experts in the field and even fewer who can articulate what the problem might mean to the general public and what we should do about it.”
The corporate campaign has done more than merely create market opportunities for mainstream popular science writers like Flannery. By constructing an exclusively Manichean contest between mean and mindless deniers, on the one hand, and enlightened global warming advocates, on the other, it has also disposed otherwise politically-astute journalists on the left to uncharacteristic credulity. Heat, George Monbiot’s impassioned 2006 manifesto on the matter, is embarrassing in its funneled focus and its naive deference to the authority of science. “Curtailing climate change,” he declaims, “must become the project we put before all others. If we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.” “We need a cut of the magnitude science demands,” he declares; we must adopt “the position determined by science rather than the position determined by politics,” as if there was such a thing as science that was not also politics.
Monbiot pulls no punches against the “denial industry,” excoriating the negative corporate campaigners for their “idiocy” and bitingly suggesting that some day soon “climate-change denial will look as stupid as Holocaust denial, or the insistence that AIDS can be cured with beetroot.” Yet he has not a word of acknowledgement much less criticism for the campaigners on the other side whose message he perhaps unwittingly peddles with such passion. And here too, oddly, a brief paragraph buried in the text, seemingly unconnected to the rest, disturbs the otherwise inspired reader. “None of this is to suggest,” Monbiot notes in passing, “that the science should not be subject to constant skepticism and review, or that environmentalists should not be held to account. . . .
Climate change campaigners have no greater right to be wrong than anyone else. “If we mislead the public,” he allows, “we should expect to be exposed,” adding that “we also need to know that we are not wasting our time: there is no point in devoting your life to fighting a problem that does not exist.” Here perhaps some remnants of truth seep between the managed lines, hinting yet at the opening of another space and another moment.
Historian David Noble teaches at York University in Toronto. Canada. He is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Promised Land (2005)
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