December 4, 2002

The politics of hype

SO, WHAT'S up with the biggest of the big oil companies – Exxon Corp., B.P. Amoco, and Royal Dutch Shell?

–Last week B.P. Amoco said it was pulling out of a major lobbying effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. B.P. wants people to believe that the company is moving "beyond petroleum" – B.P., get it? – into the solar age.

Last month ExxonMobil announced it was donating $5 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in an effort to save the tiger.

In May 2000 Royal Dutch Shell set up a $30 million foundation to push for sustainable energy and social investment projects around the world.

Last week the Shell Foundation announced it was spending $3 million on a campaign to raise awareness on how the loss of Louisiana's wetlands will affect the state and to gain support for efforts to save coastal Louisiana. Shell has even called on environmentalist Amory Lovins to do an energy audit of one of its petrochemical facilities in Denmark.

Shell has also pledged $7 million to the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., to find environmentally sound solutions to the problems of urban transport. And earlier this year, Shell donated $3.5 million to form the Shell Center for Sustainability at Rice University.

Why are the oil companies doing this? Are they doing it because they want to move us away from this fossil-fuel economy that is destroying the environment? Are they doing it because they actually want to move us to a solar energy economy? Or are they doing it to greenwash their image and buy silence from their environmental critics?

Are they doing it to cover up their history of oil spills, workers injured and killed on the job, and the spewing of cancer-causing pollutants into the environment?

For an answer, consider the work of Jack Doyle, who has just completed a remarkable corporate history of Shell titled Riding the Dragon: Royal Dutch Shell and the Fossil Fire. The book was published by the Boston-based Environmental Health Fund and is also available online on www.shellfacts.org.

Documenting hundreds of cases of human rights abuses, oil pollution, worker injuries and deaths, and the manufacture of cancer-causing chemicals, Doyle makes the point that Shell and the big oil companies have a lot to hide.

And yet, despite all the rhetoric of moving "beyond petroleum," they continue to secure long-term contracts that tie them to the fossil-fuel economy, with all of its geopolitical hazards, its human right abuses, and its environmental destruction.

Doyle argues that while Shell, the world's second-largest oil company, is spending millions of dollars to create the impression that it is socially responsible, it remains one of the world's biggest environmental violators. For example, the new Shell refuses to clean up what is now the worlds' largest urban underground oil spill in Durban, South Africa, where, Doyle reports, more than one million liters of oil have been dumped so far.

The book documents a concerted campaign by Shell to halt critical government reports, rewrite history, and cover up its misdeeds.

Since Shell's alleged involvement in the execution of its highest-profile critic, Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria, the company has claimed to adopt a new set of principles aimed at reforming internal practices and remaking its image.

"Despite an ongoing civil trial in New York on Shell's alleged role in the execution of Saro-Wiwa and other activists, Shell has the temerity to advertise itself as a new company committed to human rights, environmental protection and sustainable development," Doyle says.

"There is ample reason to be skeptical about this manufactured image, which is wildly at odds with the facts."

Don't believe the hype. There's nothing new about the new Shell, Exxon, and BP. They have bought into the fossil-fuel economy. We need to get out.