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The New York Times, the newspaper of broken record, in a title darkly hinting at a news story of revelatory importance on Climate Change, conspiratorially asked this morning,
What’s Really Behind Corporate Promises on Climate Change?
As though the authors, Clifford Krauss and Peter Eavis, were about to, in this one article, explain evry you need to know about Corporate intransigence on doing a single thing to mitigate the accelerating accumulation of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere from the excessive burning of fossil fuels, which is directly related to the explosive use of motorized transport and electric generation via fossil fuel combustion that mankind has indulged in for the last 80 years or so, starting with the advent of WW2, and, in order to then keep the worlds' economies from sinking back into a 1930's-style Depression, have continued ever since.
Perhaps to no one's surprise, that wasn't even close to being the case.
Instead we get an anodyne list of companies who are not keeping their targets, or making any targets at all, ending with the statement by Microsoft’s chief environmental officer, Lucas Joppa, that,
“If we are going to achieve a net-zero carbon economy for real, we will need everyone to act.”
Which is an outright lie, as it is exactly because everyone is simply acting, but in actuality doing nothing, on emissions reduction, that they have continued. What we really need is for everyone to stop acting, even in the face of the largest economic downturn in economic activity since the afore-mentioned Great Depression, since, because that's all we're doing, we are still venting increasingly larger amounts of CO2 into the air. From the NOAA:
January 2021: 415.52 ppm
January 2020: 413.61 ppm
But not to worry,
'"BlackRock will continue to focus on this important issue,” Mr. Sweeney said in an email'.
Whew! Now isn't that a relief? Of course, focusing on something always helps, doesn't it? Especially when done with a magnifying glass.
Our intrepid reporters (one of whom is based in Houston (Lol) so that should give you a clue right there as to how lame this "Expose" is going to be) then bravely confront Levi Strauss, as their jean therapy is such an outlier in CO2 emissions:
"Consider the apparel industry. Much of its contribution to climate change comes from its supply chain. The clothes that Levi Strauss and others put their labels on are often made in factories in places like China, Pakistan and India that remain reliant on coal-fired power plants. The clothes are transported on ships and planes that burn diesel and jet fuel."
Each one of the "sins" they attribute to Levi's are the result of Globalization, a phenomenon for which the NYT has been an unstinting cheerleader for decades, as though it were a gift from God, none more so than that, "Conscience of a Liberal", Paula Krugman. Levi's is based in San Francisco, and as a network tech in the 90's they were one of my customers, and no one fought the relocation of their manufacturing sites overseas as desperately as Levi's, hoping that brand loyalty (remember that?) to their name would help justify the higher prices they needed to charge in order to keep their factories in the good ole USA. But their jean therapy didn't work, so to remain competitive (ie stay in business) with manufacturers that did move their plants to China, Pakistan and India, all able to do so because of the ridiculously low price of shipping their products thousands of miles to the markets of the US. Free trade: they had to get on board the Free Trade bandwagon. That was the only path to the glorious future, and one had best not question it, or else, get lambasted by Krugman (just ask William Greider:
"It makes no sense for American taxpayers to subsidize the dismantling of their own industrial base to support the balance sheets of companies determined to globalize their employment base. If the MNC's (multinational firms ... (which they are not ... they are Transnational firms ...) feel they are unable to make concrete commitments to the country, they should also be freed of the generous financial support they draw from the government and taxpayers.")
Exactly the opposite position of the NYT's Paula Krugman. Even while so-called Entrepreneurs, such as Enron Musk, rake in that same "generous financial support they draw from the government and taxpayers" to this day, only now sans even the slightest "concrete commitments to the country."
The authors also mention Netflix (but not Bitcoin which, as we all know, don't we?, emits more carbon dioxide than entire industrialized economies) and Cargill, which they lambast because it has "has extended its target to 2030." Yet, the climate conference referred to as Cop(out)27, which was cancelled in 2020, is now scheduled to occur in 2021 in Glasgow. So whereas the World Economic Forum, a conference that assembles the world's dictators, billionaires, and oligarchs to discuss how to further concentrate the reins of power and economic control into fewer and fewer hands, opts to not assemble in Davos in 2021, the so-called "Climate Conference" has no problem with jetting its participants around the globe and providing them with fossil-fueled lavish accommodations instead of Zooming, even as a pandemic continues to ravage the globe. Well, since "optics" has become the media's latest meme, and that same media had no trouble pointing out dumpy Trumpy's not wearing a mask as being conducive to his followers not doing the same, a gang of Climate-change stalwarts eagerly hopping into jets to burn their way to a conference on reducing the number of people hopping into jets, on an issue far more devastating than the current pandemic has been, is far more conducive to demonstrating that the conference itself is but an optic'al illusion: held more to stoke the egos and provide a luxury junket for its politically well-connected participants than to do a damn thing to ameliorate the gung-ho stoking of the Globalized economy whose untrammeled release of deleterious emissions those junkets depend on.
Now, that's not to say that Levi's and Cargill's couldn't "Do more", but similarly to how what the NYT didn't print in its pages running up to the financial crisis was far more important than what it did, the same holds true here. I see, since I live in San Francisco, a veritable tidal wave of bicyclists flowing through its streets during rush hour commute that was never apparent, well, was non-existent, when I moved here in the seventies. On most of my pedaling outings, I was the lone cyclist wending my way through the Streets of San Francisco. The purported reasoning of a lot of these modern young men and women is that they are "doing something" to help in emissions reduction (although the fact that their jobs don't pay them enough to actually afford to buy a car, never mind insure and fuel one may play a tiny role in their decision-making process) . Which for the city of San Francisco, is true, despite the steady stream composed of shiny metal rolling boxes that daily brings its own cloud of carbon particles with it. However, one can look at any picture of China from the year 1989, the year of their infamous Tiananmen Square massacre of its own citizens, and see a steady stream of bicyclists wending their way through its thoroughfares. A stream that is now a river of enshrouded metal boxes, barely visible in the thick haze of carbon, ozone and nitrous oxide befouling the atmosphere and creating a cloud of noxious gas that dwarfs that of any American city; Americans can cut down on their greenhouse gas emissions all that they want, but America is a country of but 330 million people. If it released not a single carbon molecule into the air, the billions and billions of Asian drivers would more than compensate for our own reduction in Greenhouse gases vented into the atmosphere, by following Beijing's lead and changing from bicycles and rickshaws to multi-ton SUV's fueled by subsidized low gas prices.
Similarly, Netflix and Levi's can reduce their carbon footprint all they want, but as long as the largest emitter (by far, on the same scale of Asian emissions vs. American), the War Department and its multiple ancillary MNC's, continue to accelerate theirs, it won't do a bit of good toward getting the USA, or the world, closer to the emissions target agreed upon in the Paris accords. But because the newspaper of broken record is the propaganda arm of the War Machine, there is nary a mention of Lockheed Martin, nor a word about Boeing. Somehow Raytheon is missing from their list of CO2 transgressors, and General Dynamics? Well who cares about their emissions? Certainly not the Pentagon. Northrop Grumman, the Harris Corp. and Texton? Well, why bother to mention them as go-to vendors for the US war machine? As for Huntington Ingalls, well, they couldn't have an outsized contribution to the country's outsized CO2 venting, now could they? Honeywell, well honey, c'mon. GE? Gee, e-commerce is swell, so what the hell?.
None of these War Department entities are called out by the Times article, despite being the top providers of the corporatized US Dept. of War, one of the globe's worst polluters and prodigious burners of fossil fuels, putting the torch to more gasoline and diesel fuel than entire countries and yet, unlike Levi's and Cargill's, which supply us with clothes to wear and food to eat, do not cater to the needs of a single US citizen, but exist solely to feed the insatiable hunger for profits of the corporate behemoths that comprise our War Machine, only a few of which I've listed above, (which I gleaned from Christian Sorensen's Understanding the War Industry, a tome that exposes the squalid underbelly of the US War Machine's control of the economy, that is as well-written and documented as Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon, and brings up to date many of the dynamics of centralized control of the economy by the military-industrial complex documented by Seymour Melman's, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, which Sorensen cites in his introduction).
As if to demonstrate their cynicism, at end of their puff-piece are listed four additional articles that feature other carbon boondoggles of our Carbonaceous error as though they were hopeful signs of an emissions-reduced future:
Oil Giants Win Offshore Wind Leases in Britain
Feb. 8, 2021
G.M. Announcement Shakes Up U.S. Automakers’ Transition to Electric Cars
Jan. 29, 2021
G.M. Will Sell Only Zero-Emission Vehicles by 2035
Jan. 28, 2021
Businesses Aim to Pull Greenhouse Gases From the Air. It’s a Gamble.
Jan. 18, 2021
Each of these endeavors will pay it forward. They will all add, by virtue of the enormous expenditure of fossil-fuel-derived energy needed in order to bring them to pass, their own carbon contribution to the current carbon emissions an increased amount such that their sum total will guarantee that none of the Climate Conference's goals will be met. Copout will then instead "extend its target to 2030," and then 2040, 2050, etc, never to be met. But by that time (2050 = 3 decades hence), the current 415ppm's will be, following the current trajectory of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere the more we keep on literally "acting" to reduce those emissions (the world has gone from ~2.0/annum to ~3.0/annum since the Kyoto protocols were fist signed in 1992 or so), be higher than (415 + (3 x 30) 90 = ) 505ppm. And that is of CO2 alone. No methane is taken into account, which is increasing at a far faster clip, and is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, and its rapid accumulation is concentrated in the USA and Russia, the two countries fracturing the earth at a frenetic pace and building the energy-intensive infrastructure needed to sustain its blistering depletion rate, such that the world is now crowing already, as early as 2021, of history's first February Arctic shipment from Russia to China through the usually frozen waters of the Arctic Ocean ... as though that were something to be as celebrated as the Perseverance's landing on Mars. They are, after all, related. Earth's mission to Mars: change Earth's atmosphere until it is as unsuitable to life as the atmosphere on Mars. It proceeds apace. And Enron Musk will sell you the means to be a partner in both.
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