Pluralistic: 19 Aug 2022 Business Roundtable vs Humanity

pluralist
#1

Originally published at: Pluralistic: 19 Aug 2022 Business Roundtable vs Humanity – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow


Today's links


The Earth seen from space, wreathed in flames. Atop the Earth dances a jaunty 'Rich Uncle Pennybags' from Monopoly; he has removed his face, revealing it to be a mask, and his head is a grinning skull.

The Business Roundtable's climate plan was killed by its arch-rival, the Business Roundtable (permalink)

Three years ago to the date, the Business Roundtable unveiled its "Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation" – a commitment by its 200 member-CEOs and companies to protect the environment. Then they spent three years and millions of dollars lobbying against that goal.

https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans

Writing in The Guardian, Adam Lowenstein rounds up the Business Roundtable's deep-pocketed, highly effective lobbying campaign, which has crushed numerous climate initiatives in the US, possibly dooming the human race to extinction.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/19/top-us-business-lobby-group-climate-action-business-roundtable

The Roundtable bills itself as "an association of CEOs of leading US companies working to promote a thriving economy & expanded opportunity for all Americans through sound public policy." Its members include the CEOs of the country's most politically connected corporations, including Apple, Pepsi, Walmart and Google – the most powerful people in the nation.

But while the Roundtable continues to trumped its commitment to addressing the climate emergency, it has mobilized millions of dollars to neutralize our best hopes of dealing with that emergency. The Roundtable's initiatives include spending millions lobbying against Build Back Better and its carbon reduction/clean energy provisions.

The Roundtable has gone to war against a SEC rule requiring publicly listed companies to disclose their carbon emissions and risks from climate change. Instead, the Roundtable prefers "voluntary" disclosures that allow companies to omit emissions and risks in their supply chains. The Roundtable has met with the SEC three times to oppose this rule, and Roundtable chairman Mary Barra (CEO of GM) personally met with SEC chair Gary Gensler.

In the first half of 2022, the Roundtable's lobbying budget was $9.1m, much of which went to opposing a climate disclosure rule. The Roundtable says that measuring supply chain emissions is too burdensome – the fact that the majority of emissions are in the supply chain is just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the Roundtable continues to insist that "we have to move now," and that the best way to address the climate emergency is through "market-based" solutions where investors choose "green" investments based on reliable information about companies' contribution to imminent human extinction.

The Roundtable insists that "voluntary disclosures" will provide sufficiently accurate information to allow investors to direct their money away from companies that will murder them and their children by rendering the planet unfit for human habitation. Every other stakeholder – "many investors, analysts, academics, voters and experts, even companies themselves" – disagrees vehemently.

The calls for mandatory disclosure aren't emanating from campus Maoists and Greta Thunberg's child army – they're coming from giant, institutional investors, like this group of fund managers who direct $5t in capital:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/aoa4f52ok2i4t06/Letter%20to%20SEC_Climate%20Disclosure%20Rule.pdf

The Roundtable's most powerful members, like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, have also called for mandatory disclosure. I'm sure they're frustrated that the organization won't listen to them – it's just that they're not frustrated enough to pull their funding from the Roundtable. After all, mostly the Roundtable lobbies to be sure they don't pay taxes and can abuse their workers with impunity – weighed against those advantages, the Roundtable's commitment to wiping out the human species is but a trifle.

It's not just that the Roundtable's members won't hold the organization to its environmental commitments – the Roundtable also won't hold the members to account on those commitments. Companies that signed the 2019 declaration were convicted of more environmental infractions and emitted more carbon that similar firms that didn't sign:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3609056

And since 2019, the signatories to the environmental pledge were offered many chances to "formalize the pledge in corporate governance," and virtually every time this happened, those signatories chose not to make good on their promises:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3899421

The Roundtable's opposition to climate action continues to this day. The org came out hard against the Inflation Reduction Act, which has billions in clean energy incentives – they objected to the 15% minimum corporate tax that will offset those billions in the federal budget:

https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-opposes-the-inflation-reduction-act

To be fair to them, we don't need to tax corporations – or anyone else – to pay for climate action. The US government is constrained by resources (which things are for sale in US dollars), not money (which it can create by typing into a spreadsheet).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#false-consciousness

The point of taxing companies is to constrain what their shareholders can buy – because those purchases might consume resources needed for the climate emergency; and, importantly, to prevent them from spending profits to corrupt the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/18/bipartisan-consensus/#corruption

Meanwhile, the CEOs who keep the Roundtable afloat keep declaring that time is short, action must be taken, and no price is too high for action.

And again, to be fair, there is no course of action so radical that these corporations and CEOs won't promise to take it – provided they never, ever have to lift a finger to follow through on that promise.

Hey look at this (permalink)


This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago John M. Ford’s 110 Stories about 9-11 http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html

#20yrsago Why researchers tremble before the DMCA https://web.archive.org/web/20020906224325/https://freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000020.html

#20yrsago Ed Felten, spam-vigilante martyr https://web.archive.org/web/20020821095618/https://freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000019.html

#10yrsago European Directories sends legal threat to guy who wants to make it easy to stop receiving phone books https://www.24oranges.nl/2012/08/19/phone-book-publisher-tries-to-silence-critic-with-legal-bullying/

#10yrsago Boots keeps selling quack remedies intended for babies, even after they are banned from US import over fears of broken glass https://www.quackometer.net/blog/2012/08/boots-unconcerned-about-nelsons-production-problems.html

#10yrsago Man in a coma is “fit for work,” loses disability benefits https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/2496/

#1yrago Hench: The madcap rage of life under vigilante rule https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#natalie-zina-walschots

#1yrago Machine learning's crumbling foundations: Doing 'data science' with bad data https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/19/failure-cascades/#dirty-data

#10yrsago Pussy Riot, sentenced to two years in a penal colony, release new anti-Putin single https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/17/pussy-riot-sentenced-prison-putin

#5yrsago Durham protesters turn themselves in at police station after pulling down Confederate statue https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/08/17/residents-of-durham-showed-us-what-patriotism-looks-like/

#5yrsago Mafia money-launderer listed his profession as “fraudster” with UK companies register https://www.standard.co.uk/business/occupation-fraudster-address-street-of-40-thieves-how-italians-mocked-uk-company-rules-a3589906.html

#1yrago The Sacklers threaten us all with a good time: "Give us total impunity or we won't accede to the total impunity deal" is a hell of an ultimatum https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/18/lets-make-a-deal/#art-of-the-deal


Colophon (permalink)

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#2

I wonder if the inconsistency between the stated goals of the Business Roundtable members, and the apparent goals which are inferred by observing their actions, supports Charles Stross’ hypothesis that corporations are distinct hive intelligences that in some ways use humans symbiotically to blindly perform “Chinese Room”-like algorithms.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html

So while many (or even most) of the people working for a corporation might really want to combat climate change, and almost none of them want to actively make it worse, the corporation itself could exert an influence that causes it to take actions that almost none of the individuals working for it - even the ones supposedly at the top - actually want.

I’m also reminded of the “Ant Fugue” from Gödel, Escher, Bach, where Anteater explains to Achilles and Crab how the high-level patterns of behaviour in Aunt Hillary (an anthill) signal that the colony is overpopulated and needs thinning, even while the individual ants who are performing that behaviour are unaware of it and try not to get eaten.

#3

Those are two extremely excellent and apt references!

#4

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