ENVIRONMENT: Companies Split on Global Climate Treaty

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Danielle Knight

WASHINGTON, May 14 1998 (IPS) - Battle lines in the fight over global warming are being redrawn as powerful companies change sides and embrace the need to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions – even as their former comrades rearm for a fresh assault on the Kyoto Protocol.

The international accord, agreed last December in Kyoto, Japan but so far ratified by too few countries to bring it into force, for the first time lays out binding commitments to reduce emissions. As the list of signatories begins to grow, a leading group of oil, gas, and manufacturing companies is intensifying its opposition.

Members of the Global Climate Coalition, a multinational business bloc that spent 13 million dollars in anti-Kyoto advertising before last December’s conference, now is gearing up to launch a new campaign to strip the accord of its scientific basis.

Yet, at the same time, the Coalition is losing some of its biggest members. These include the world’s largest oil company, Royal Dutch Shell Group, which announced last month it would break ranks.

“I find myself increasingly persuaded that a climate effect may be occurring,” as a result of greenhouse-gas emissions, says Shell executive Mark Moody-Stuart in a statement.

The Exxon and Chevron oil companies, and other of Shell’s erstwhile allies from the Coalition, have drawn up plans for a five-million-dollar, two-year campaign to recruit and sponsor research by scientists sympathetic to industry views and to advertise their findings, according to an internal memo leaked to the press by the National Environmental Trust, a Washington-based advocacy group.

The plan, devised by the American Petroleum Institute, aims to develop “a sound scientific alternative” to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the memo states. The Panel is an international body of scientists that advises the United Nations on the issue.

Greenhouse emissions include carbon dioxide. They are released by the burning of coal, gas, and oil and are believed by most atmospheric scientists to result in the warming of Earth’s surface and changes in the global climate. The Intergovernmental Panel predicted in 1995 that average global temperatures could heat up by between 1 and 3.5 degrees Celsius during the next century.

Climatologists also say that 1997 was the warmest year on record and that nine of the past 11 years have set new records for warm temperatures. Over time, these increases can cause changes in climate – including increasingly frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, and droughts.

To deal with this threat, industrialised countries agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to try to reduce their greenhouse emissions by the year 2000 to 10 percent below 1990 levels. The agreement was non-binding, however, and many parties to it – including the United States – have instead increased emissions, according to official reports.

Signatories to the Kyoto Protocol would promise to reduce their emissions of six greenhouse gases by an average of six percent from 1990 levels, and to complete the reductions between 2008 and 2012.

The United States has not ratified the agreement and the Business Roundtable on Tuesday wrote an open letter urging President Bill Clinton not to sign. The Roundtable is a powerful trade group to which many Global Climate Coalition members belong.

“The most vexing problem with the agreement is the absence of emissions limitations for developing countries,” the letter says.

The treaty also faces stiff opposition from Republicans in the U.S. Congress who echo corporate demands for developing countries to formally commit to emission reduction targets.

Corporations have argued the treaty is unfair to them because it would force them to take costly pollution-control measures while exempting competitors in developing nations. But governments there have demanded to know why they should commit to binding limits when industrialised nations – responsible for most of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere – have not proven that they will comply.

Meanwhile, the private Pew Charitable Trusts are matching the latest anti-Kyoto campaign with an initial five million dollars for nationwide advertising over the next year. Ads warning that “Climate Change is a Serious Business” began to appear this week and featured 13 major corporations. The campaign is being run by Eileen Claussen, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for environmental affairs.

Corporations lending their names to the effort include military contractors Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, Japanese auto maker Toyota, appliance manufacturers Maytag and Whirlpool, and several big energy companies: British Petroleum America, Sun Oil, American Electric Power, U.S. Generating Company and Enron.

The advertisements say that these companies “accept the views of most scientists that enough is known about the science and environmental impacts of climate change for us to take actions to address its consequences.”

John Browne, head of British Petroleum America, concurs. “It would be unwise and potentially dangerous to ignore the mounting concern over global warming,” he says. “Climate change is a long- term problem, and what matters is that we begin to take precautionary steps.”