5/21/10, "Polluted by profit: Johann Hari on the real Climategate," Johann Hari, UK Independent, The Nation
"US environmental groups used to be funded largely by their members and wealthy individual supporters. They had only one goal: to prevent environmental destruction. Their funds were small, but they played a crucial role in saving vast tracts of wilderness and in pushing into law strict rules forbidding air and water pollution. But Jay Hair – the president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995 – was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters.
Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world's pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s, it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilising the climate – the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn't make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve the environment.
He began to suck millions from them, and his organisation and others gave them awards for
"environmental stewardship".
Companies such as Shell and BP were delighted. They saw it as valuable
"reputation insurance":
every time they are criticised for their massive emissions of warming gases, or for events such as the massive oil spill that has just turned the Gulf of Mexico into the "Gulf of Texaco", they wheel out their shiny green awards to ward off the prospect of government regulation and to reassure the public that
they Really Care.
At first, this behaviour scandalised the environmental community.
Hair was vehemently condemned as a sell-out and a charlatan. But slowly, the other groups saw themselves shrink while the corporate-fattened groups swelled – so they, too, started to take the cheques. Christine MacDonald, an idealistic young environmentalist, discovered
how deeply this cash had transformed these institutions when she started to work for CI in 2006. She told me: "About a week or two after I started, I went to the big planning meeting of all the organisation's media teams, and they started talking about this supposedly great new project they were running with BP. But I had read in the newspaper the day before that the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] had condemned BP for running the most polluting plant in the whole country... But nobody in that meeting, or anywhere else in the organisation, wanted to talk about it. It was a taboo.
You weren't supposed to ask if BP was really green.
They were 'helping' us, and that was it."
She soon began to see how this behaviour had pervaded almost all of the mainstream green organisations. They take money, and they offer praise, even when the money comes from the companies causing environmental devastation. To take just one example, when it was revealed that many of Ikea's dining room sets were made from trees ripped from endangered forests, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) leapt to the company's defence, saying that Ikea "can never guarantee" this won't happen; many environmental groups strongly disagree. Is it a coincidence that the
WWF is a "marketing partner" with Ikea, and takes cash from the company?
Likewise, the Sierra Club – the biggest green group in the US – was approached in 2008 by the makers of Clorox bleach, who said that if the club endorsed their new range of "green" household cleaners, they would give it a percentage of the sales....
But as these stories show, the pressure flows the other way: the addiction to corporate cash has changed the green groups at their core."...
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7/21/11, "Why did Bloomberg Tap the Sierra Club for his $50 Million Donation?" WNYC.org
"Why the Sierra Club? They were the lucky environmental group to get $50 million pledged from Bloomberg Philanthropies Thursday. Turns out that Mayor Bloomberg, who was the nation's second largest donor in 2010, has been chummy with the senior leadership of the Sierra Club since 2007. Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Cub, was present at the launch of the city's Greener Greater Buildings Plan in 2009, one of the mayor's signature environmental achievements."...
2/10/11, "How Bloomberg Does Business," The Nation, Aram Roston
"Though Bloomberg doesn’t run the day-to-day affairs of Bloomberg LP, he still owns almost all the shares, handpicks the firm’s managers, talks with them as much as he feels he needs to, and therefore imposes his own will on the firm when he likes. (New York’s ineffectual Conflicts of Interest Board limited but never fully defined the mayor’s role at the company he founded: the board allows him to “maintain the type of involvement that he believes is consistent with his being the majority shareholder.”)...
Given Bloomberg’s push for a national platform, any intersections between his corporation’s interests and the government warrant scrutiny. And Bloomberg LP runs an effective and sophisticated lobbying shop to promote the firm’s interests with federal agencies and Congress.
It’s striking how, in a fully synergistic Bloomberg style,
a news organization,
a financial information company and
a team of lobbyists
often seem to be working in smooth concert."...
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With "reputation insurance" purchased from the Sierra Club, Mayor Bloomberg is seen as a planetary savior rather than the single biggest polluter in New York City:
2/14/11, “Flight records uncover elusive Mayor’s tracks,” WSJ, Maremont, McGinty, Saul
"The records also show that the Bloomberg fleet has been the single largest user of scarce slots allocated to private aircraft at La Guardia airport. The flights continued apace even after the mayor two years ago called for curbs on small commercial planes at La Guardia and other area airports to reduce congestion. ...
A billionaire, Mr. Bloomberg also owns vacation homes in London and Vail, Colo., and enjoys playing golf in various locales....
Bloomberg planes departed or landed 853 times between August 2008 and the end of 2010. That is 8% of all general aviation movements at La Guardia during that period....
Mr. Loeser declined to comment on any conflict between Mr. Bloomberg’s public stance on airport congestion and the number of Bloomberg Services flights at La Guardia.“
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