Corporations are a Cancer to Society
Tuesday 13th July 2010
TEEB launches interim report
Eminent business leaders, experts and policy makers are herding for the Global Business of Biodiversity Symposium in London today. The conference is a stepping stone for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project, which is releasing an interim report. The latest report will focus on the pivotal roll business and enterprise have to play in how natural capital is managed, safeguarded and invested in.
As a call to arms, principal author of the report, Pavan Sukhdev, launched a blistering broadside on the soulless corporation. Quoted in yesterday's Guardian, Sukhdev warned "it's up to society and its leaders and thinkers to design the checks and balances that are needed to ensure that the corporation does not simply become cancerous, and that's something that sometimes we do and sometimes we really don't."
David Pepper in his book Modern Environmentalism, claims 1992 EC regulation to direct companies to make regular cradle-to-grave evaluations of their environmental impacts for public scrutiny, was "so watered down as to be almost useless" as a result of lobbying by business and industry.
Building on Sukhdev's comments, multinational companies can have a beneficial as well as detrimental impact to the environment. Richard Black, for the BBC website, cites the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto as an example of a ‘smart company'.
"Rio Tinto has been criticised on environmental and human rights grounds (like others in the field). In 2004, the company adopted a "Net Positive Impact" (NPI) commitment on biodiversity. This sees it working with environment organisations to protect important areas from direct mining impacts and putting funds into conservation to ‘offset' damage caused."
Unilever, BT, Morrisons and Rolls-Royce recently topped an ENDS index of energy efficiency and carbon reduction. This is an area where smaller enterprises could make a constructive payback. Not all green credential should be believed. The Guardian has recently divulged that toiletries and cleaning solutions labelled as ‘eco' products lacked evidence for their claims. Off course, to buy green, we should consume less.
Ultimately, perhaps the corporation is not sustainable. David Pepper gives a Marxist critique,
"There is the contradiction of overproduction. Capital accumulation depends on selling goods and services in the marketplace for profit, that is, the surplus over what it costs to produce them. A principal item of cost is labour. It follows, therefore, that the labour force, by definition, cannot afford to buy all the things that it produces, since it is not paid the full market value. Hence there are too ‘too many' goods and services for the immediate market, so there must be a constant effort to bring more people into the market by geographical expansion...when profits are made they must be reinvested in more production to keep the process going."
So where does shortfall of capital come from? Clearly, there are other fundamental forces; there are no geographical areas where capitalism has not reached, even by their barter the peripheral are part of the system. Certainly, the capitalist system needs continual expansion. But progress does not have to leave the by-product of environmental degradation. Rather, the reform of our auditory system, as recommended by TEEB report, may be one of our best ways of going forward.
Website Links: guardian.co.uk/soulless_corporations; bbc.co.uk/business_profit_from_nature; guardian.co.uk/ENDS_carbon_index; guardian.co.uk/green_products_no_evidence and guardian.co.uk/accounting_business_environmental_impact
Would passing the crux of peak oil make you drive or travel less?
