Who or what can you trust these days? Certainly not the stock markets as many of us helplessly watch our investments dwindle away and our college tuition and retirement funds disappear. Corporate executives and accountants are rapidly losing their credibility when, every day it seems, a new scandal hits the headlines. Senators and congressmen don’t fare much better. Members of both parties, I recently read, are backing off from implicating business wrongdoers in the opposing party because they themselves cannot withstand close scrutiny. The government let us down big time when security and intelligence lapses allowed the events of September 11th to occur. How many of us trust our health insurance companies to accurately pay benefits according to the terms of our plans? Not anyone who’s recently been through a major medical event.
There is in America today a growing distrust and lack of faith in our institutions—public and private, secular and religious. The triple bottom line, a popular environmental concept espouses economy, ecology and equity as equal components in true business and government models. A fourth segment must now be added: ethics. It is sad to contemplate that our corporate, government and church leaders need to be admonished to “do the right thing,” yet the evidence shows that they must. There are thousands of examples and none more than in environmental issues.
Environmental policy should concentrate on certain priorities: conservation and protection of our natural resources, slowing the threat of global warming, rapid development of new technologies especially in the area of alternative fuels, and cleaning up the messes we’ve already made through Super-fund and other initiatives. Yet there is substantial evidence that current policy is indeed being formed to conserve and protect not us, but those who profit from pollution.
Case in point: the Clear Skies proposal recently announced by the Bush administration would permit energy companies to buy and trade pollution credits in order to eliminate emissions that cause smog and acid rain faster, it says, than the current rules of the 1970 Clean Air Act, which it aims to replace. “In the next decade alone, Clear Skies will eliminate 35 million more tons of pollution than the current Clean Air Act, bringing cleaner air to millions of Americans,” Bush said. “Clear Skies will also help save our forests, lakes and streams and do this through the use of a market-based system that guarantees results while keeping electricity prices affordable.”
Sounds good, but the proposal has been strongly denounced by environmental groups. The plan is structured to set caps at power plants for pollutants, and those that fail to remain within the caps could buy credits from other utilities that had a surplus of credits.
“The timing of this is astonishingly bad,” said Frank O’Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust. “With all the rhetoric about corporate responsibility, the proposal is an invitation for companies to avoid cleaning up their plants by resorting to the sort of deceptive bookkeeping now under scrutiny by federal regulators.”
In an article published by The New York Times, O’Donnell went on to say that this legislation was the most recent effort by the Bush administration to mollify energy producers. “America has made significant progress over the last 30 years in our quest for cleaner air, and we have learned a lot about which approaches work best,” Bush said in a statement. Yet environmentalists charge that Clear Skies places polluter profits above public health and weakens the Clean Air Act, a highly effective program that has significantly improved air quality since its enactment 32 years ago.
These strongly conflicting views offered by the administration and the environmental groups make it difficult for us citizens to figure out who or what to believe. One thing that would help is transparency, yet the Bush administration refuses to reveal the participants or the processes by which the Energy Task Force headed by Vice President Cheney formed its recommendations. The Government Accounting Office and environmental and consumer groups are demanding accountability. Consumers Union (CU), the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, chastised Cheney’s industry-dominated task force for meeting in secret and for developing a proposal for a national energy policy that fails to address consumers’ most pressing energy concerns.
“We had hoped that the task force would address the market failures that have inflated gasoline, natural gas and electricity prices far above reasonable levels,” said Adam Goldberg, a policy analyst in CU’s Wash-ington Office. “Simply adding supply to a dysfunctional market doesn’t fix the market. Instead we have a proposal that protects the oil and gas industries’ bloated profits, compromises the environment, and fails to encourage meaningful energy conservation.”
Cheney is stonewalling all efforts to get information on the meetings held by his energy task force. It shouldn’t take lawsuits to get at the workings of a White House committee whose policies will have a major impact over our daily lives and the world we live in.
Meaningful campaign finance reform would go a long way toward fixing a system where political candidates from both parties are so beholden to those who bankroll their careers that they will not, cannot “do the right thing.” In the meantime we could use a little more trust and transparency. Ray Anderson, the chairman of Interface, willingly fesses up to his environmental shortcomings. His products aren’t perfect, but he’s working to sell as many of them as he possibly can. After all, turning a profit is what his stockholders demand. At the same time he’s also throwing a ton of resources into finding solutions that will make his carpets more sustainable. I remember asking him some years ago how he reconciled Interface’s use of PVC as a carpet tile backing with his environmental beliefs. He answered by admitting how troubling this issue was to him personally and assured me that he and his colleagues are working to find a viable alternative.
How much better it would be for us all if we could find this type of disarming honesty in other quarters. Vinyl industry associations, for example, would do well to learn from Anderson’s admission—they take every opportunity to praise the virtues of vinyl with nary a mention of its troubling traits. Wouldn’t we all respond more positively to their message if they exercised some trust and transparency? Sure, PVC has some good qualities and there are vinyl products we all use everyday. Let the industry continue to promote and sell vinyl—that’s its job after all—but at the same time, work vigorously to find a substitute material that does not damage human health and natural systems.
Trust and transparency—is it too much to ask?
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By Penny Bonda. A well-known leader in the field of sustainable design, Bonda writes monthly features on environmental issues for both
Interiors & Sources and
Green@Work magazines.
