As Anglo American Plc's chairman designate, Mark Moody-Stuart, speaks at the World Summit for Sustainable Development next week, he will count on the support of former foe Steve Sawyer, a Greenpeace activist.
The alliance between an environmentalist who usually commands ships trying to prevent oil drilling in the arctic and the executive he tussled with when Moody-Stuart was chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell Group from 1998 to 2001 signals a change in strategy by some of the world's biggest corporations.
"If you had told me 10 years ago I'd be standing alongside Moody-Stuart, I would have accused you of having imbibed some hallucinogenic substance," said Sawyer. "We are finding ourselves having more to agree about than disagree." Whereas only a few companies sent officials to the previous summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago, more than 40 chief executives of companies including BHP Billiton Plc, Rio Tinto Plc, Phelps Dodge Corp and ABB Ltd will be in Johannesburg .
"It's a corporate takeover of the summit," said Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo," a critique of globalization. "These companies saw regulations coming at them at a blinding speed." The 50,000 delegates attending the conference, including about 100 heads of state and government, will discuss increased development aid, water resources, greenhouse gas emissions and the reduction of trade barriers.
If the executives fail to convince government leaders they can be trusted to protect the environment, they may face regulations forcing companies to cut carbon emissions, pay higher taxes and forego energy subsidies worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
"We need to get across the constructive part that business has to play in sustainable development," Moody-Stuart said.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he wants the summit to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets on cutting carbon-dioxide emissions. US President George W. Bush, who will not attend the Johannesburg conference, has rejected the agreement, saying it would harm the US economy.
Ratification of the treaty would have cost the 30 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation (OECD) and Development US$56 billion a year, or 0.22 percent of their total economic output by 2010, an OECD study found.
Environmental groups also will be calling for a cut in subsidies to oil, coal and gas producers, which two studies commissioned by Greenpeace estimated at US$300 billion.
Friends of the Earth and other groups want industry's environmental actions to be regulated by an international body similar to the WTO. Moody-Stuart's Business Action for Sustainable Development, a group set up to represent business interests at the summit, rejects that proposal.
Many of the companies in the Business Action group have been targeted by environmentalists. Shell counters by saying it protects biodiversity in Gabon, and helps provide schools, clean water and electricity in Nigeria.
"We look forward to the World Summit on Sustainable Development," Shell said in a glossy brochure outlining some of its projects. "The challenge of achieving a sustainable world is huge and daunting, but there is no alternative." Critics say that's only part of the story. Earlier this year, the second-biggest publicly traded oil company lost a bid in New York federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges it aided in the torture and murder of critics in Nigeria, including playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa.
RSS