Environmentalists — Are We in Bed With the Bad Guys?

There is a lot of buzz now about Michael Mann’s book The Climate War. It’s a very good book. In it, Mann chronicles 30 years of effort by the oil and gas industry to cover up science on climate change and oppose policy responses. He has compiled a strong base of evidence that, like the tobacco lobby of the same era, big oil and gas systematically funded a program of action that would first deny climate change and, to the extent that this was not successful, seek to avoid or delay and meaningful policy responses.

A friend — a fellow environmentalist — called me after having read Mann’s book. He lives in British Columbia, Canada, where they are currently experiencing the worst heat wave in history and wildfires that are tearing through communities. He was a apoplectic. Most of us in the modern environmental movement — myself included — are working with the large automakers as they introduce electric vehicles. We’re working with what we consider the progressive oil and gas companies — like Shell and BP — as they decarbonize their fossil fuel holdings and invest in renewable. We’re working with the major banks and investment houses as they draw investment away from fossil fuel and into the ‘future fit’ economy.

My friend’s beef — we’re pouring all our efforts into working with, and being funded by, these incumbent companies that have spent 30 years undermining our agenda. They promise they are reformed, yet the West Coast is burning under the intensity of global warming and our oceans are still awash in plastics waste.

The question — have all of us supposed environmentalists been duped by these big companies? Are we their pawns, legitimizing their greenwashing and providing them with a shield against further government regulation and consumer pressure?

I’m going to answer with a qualifies maybe. Without a doubt, the large oil and gas and chemical companies are working to protect their profitability and their competitive position. And to do that, they need changes to be slow. So, to some extent, we the environmentalists are complicit in the slowness. But what is the alternative?

The zero carbon, zero waste economy will not be built by a bunch of tiny companies with no links to major research and development funding and scale up capital. We need these large companies because we need their heft in the market, their research capacity, their placement in global supply chains and their ability to scale up quickly.

We may be in the bed with the bad guys, but we need them. They own the bed. And as environmentalists we need to work with them and push them — hard — to use all of those assets they have to make the economy we need.

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This post was previously published on Greener Together.

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