Global Policy Forum

By Ian Willmore

Close your eyes and imagine for a moment that you are the boss of a great big US oil company - Exxon Mobil perhaps.

There's an Earth Summit coming up. World leaders are meeting in Johannesburg at the end of August to talk about what's happening to the planet. There will be discussions about corporate behaviour and about climate change. This could be bad news for one of the world's great polluters, particularly if any international action is actually agreed. So, you really would prefer the whole thing to be a useless talking shop.

Fortunately you and your company have friends in high places, and particularly in the White House. So you could just pick up the phone and make your views known. But that's not very subtle, is it? And there are loads of annoying little campaigners running around out there trying to organise a boycott of your company's products because of your previous attempts to scupper the Kyoto climate treaty. You've also been denying that you do anything as sordid as direct political funding of Presidential candidates. So let's have a little finesse.

What to do? Well, it's a much easier problem to solve than you might first think. There are dozens of right-wing, gun-slinging, free enterprise, Republican think tanks and pressure groups out there. So let's fund them. And then let's leave them to give George W Bush his marching orders.

Last week, Friends of the Earth was sent a copy of a letter to Bush from no less than 31 groups and individuals, demanding that he not attend the Earth Summit, and calling on him to ensure that his negotiators prevent any progress on climate change. Most of the groups are leading national conservative pressure groups. Others are key Texas political lobbies - the "Young Conservatives of Texas" for example.

The letter, dated August 2nd, says "we applaud your decision not to attend the Summit in person... Even more than the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the Johannesburg Summit will provide a global media stage for many of the most irresponsible and destructive elements involved in critical international economic and environmental issues. Your presence would only help to publicize and make more credible various anti-freedom, anti-people, anti-globalization, and anti-Western agendas."

It also claims that "the least important global environmental issue is potential global warming and we hope that your negotiators at Johannesburg can keep it off the table and out of the spotlight."

Are these groups all funded by eager US citizens, determined to keep the world warming and the oil companies in hog heaven? Well, no. We need to look a little deeper into where these groups get their money. So we go to Exxon Mobil's very own website which helpfully the company's donations to "public information and policy research" in 2001.

There we find seven of the groups listed in the Bush letter. The Competitive Enterprise Institute - $280,000. The American Enterprise Institute - $230,000. The Heartland Institute - $90,000. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation - $150,000. The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow - $35,000. The Capital Research Center - $25,000. The National Center for Policy Analysis - $20,000. Many of these groups have long been active in trying to frustrate progress on tackling man-made climate change and other global environmental crises. For example, the CFACT sent fifty "trained" Republican students to the Bonn climate talks in 2001 to demonstrate against the Kyoto Treaty. The AERF promotes and supports the work of leading US climate sceptic S Fred Singer.

So you've splashed out $830,000, but in return you have an Administration determined to prevent any real progress at the Earth Summit, which given that you are Exxon has got to be a good deal. And provided no-one puts two and two together it's all been done without the public ever catching on. Corporate accountability, not.

Meanwhile the UK Government has also spun itself in ever diminishing circles over the Summit. Tony Blair and John Prescott want to be seen as world leaders on sustainable development. And to be fair, the UK has played a useful role in past talks on climate change and debt relief. But on the other hand, the Summit doesn't seem to be headed for success. And Mr Blair is highly allergic to any association with failure - it brings him out in a rash of sentences without any verbs.

So daft political games are played with the UK delegation. The best informed and most effective minister on these issues - Michael Meacher - is first chopped off the list and then put back on when the green lobby begins to make powerful squawking noises. First it seems that this dastardly act was done by the real Deputy Prime Minister - Alistair Campbell. Then it emerges that it was actually Mr Blair all along. Meanwhile, Clare Short seizes the moment to proclaim that the Summit is not about the environment at all (!) but about sustainable development, obviously believing that this is something completely different. And Mr Blair, apparently anxious to spend as little time with Mr Meacher as he can, decides to jet in, make a quick speech, pose for a photo, and then leave as fast as possible.

The problem with the Earth Summit, apart from the utter inadequacy of many of the leading politicians involved, is the sheer range and scale of the issues.

Start with poverty and inequality. In 1960, the top 20 per cent of the world's population were 30 times richer than the poorest 20 per cent. By 1997, they were 74 times richer. 2.8 billion people - nearly half the world's population - live on less than two dollars a day. Then there is corporate power - in 1997, the five largest companies in the world had combined sales that were greater than the combined incomes of the world's 46 poorest countries.

Add in forestry - between 1980 and 1995 the extent of the world's forests decreased by an area roughly the size of Mexico; water - up to 30,000 people die each day from water-related diseases and more than a billion people lack adequate clean water supplies; AIDS - which is ravaging the entire continent of Africa; and of course international debt and the destructive behaviour of the IMF and World Bank. The world's economy has outrun the capacity of states and international institutions to regulate it. That's bad news for all of us.

It's easy to see why two weeks of a Summit might not be enough to make real progress, even if George Bush's lack of heart, brain and courage did not make him resemble a genetically modified amalgam of the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion from the Wizard of Oz. And it's easy to see why the media may simply decide that the whole thing is a giant and pointless waste of air. But remember, that's what Exxon want us to think. They paid good money to wreck the Earth Summit and they don't want ordinary punters like us demanding that our politicians stop posturing and start tackling some of the greatest threats to our common home.

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