UNFCCC’s COP and the Corporations

Arief Wicaksono

Out of the hubbub in Copenhagen’s COP15, it reminds me a book, as well as the documentary, the Corporation. The Corporation provides me argument to see how UNFCCC’s COP uses intensively political-economic engineering to make people in the planet believe that UNFCCC is the only game in town. Furthermore, it has successfully created a chronic perception that COP is a just and equal transaction platform among nations. Like the Corporation, UNFCCC’s COP is basically about an endless endeavor to seek grandeur tactics to externalise socio-ecological costs out of the balance sheet of the creative destruction employed by global industrial production system.

“The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine.” — Robert Monks, corporate governance advisor and former Republican candidate for the US’ Senate from Maine

The way UNFCCC externalises the socio-ecological costs of the fossil fuel-addicted production system of the industrialised “rich” countries is demonstrated by the Kyoto Protocol’s flexible mechanisms: Joint Implementation (JI), Emission Trading (ET) and Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The mechanisms have provided a “soft landing ground” for the industrialised “rich” countries to progress with changes symbolised with figures of the emission reduction target.

What make people believe that such mechanisms are the solution is, widely understood, engendered through extensive global campaign with consistent, continuous and compelling messages. This involves the UN, global media corporations, the industrialised “rich” countries in their role as the donor to the “poor” countries, and the international non-government organisations (NGOs) as a trend-setter of “community solution” to climate change issues.

Before COP13 in Bali (2007), climate change was limitedly seen as atmospheric phenomenon combined with the naturally aging Earth, that altered by the fossil fuels consumption in the modern-day modality of the global industry. The IPCC report released prior to COP13 then admitted that post-Industrial Revolution civilisation growth plays major role in causing climate change. But, still people has comfortably entrapped themselves only to care of the superficial symptoms of climate change, instead of looking thoroughly at the global development system imposed by the industrial “rich” countries to the rest of the world.

The global climate change campaign by the mainstream media has successfully shifted the state’s responsibility to the household level through lifestyle-linked global warming solutions. This is exactly the issue the Corporation conveys:

“So the internet and in particular activist organizations, non-government organizations, NGOs, activist organizations are very, very proficient, very skilled, very sophisticated at using all of the public relations techniques. All of the techniques for communicating on the internet to express a point of view. Gain support, and actually make sure that corporations are under the microscope.” - Chris Komisarjevsky, CEO, Burson Marsteller Worldwide

The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. The film is in vignettes examining and criticizing corporate business practices, to establish parallels, between corporate legal misbehavior (malfeasance) and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.

Russell Mokhiber, the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter, a legal weekly, and the author of Corporate Crime and Violence: Big Business Power and the Abuse of the Public Trust, and Robert Weissman, the editor of Multinational Monitor, the leading source of critical reporting on corporate power, clearly pin pointed the destructiveness of global corporations in the Focus on the Corporation, that are exactly representing the issues in climate change:

• The double standards which excuse corporations for behavior (e.g., causing injury, accepting welfare) widely considered criminal or shameful when done by individuals;
• Globalization and corporate power;
• Trends in corporate economic blackmail, political influence and workplace organization;
• Industry-wide efforts to escape regulation, silence critics, employ new technologies or consolidate business among a few companies;
• Specific, extreme examples of corporate abuses: destruction of communities, trampling of democracy, poisoning of air and water;
• Particular issues, such as tort reform, of across-the-board interest to business; and
• The corporatization of our culture.

Unfortunately, such corporatism destructiveness has long been taken for granted and smoothly incorporating the UNFCCC’s machineries. Law had long been used sophisticatedly in UNFCCC simply as language instead of the global norm that should be put all nations equal before it. The glossy poster displaying horror picture of poverty and famine children in Africa, as one of the climate change campaign, has successfully mobilised thousand of dollars of donations to many international organisations, where the expenses have never been transparent for the sake of proper financial accountability.

The easy way to reverse climate change, to reduce addiction to fossil fuels among others, is too expensive to those with privileges. Those with privileges will continue to seek loopholes to avoid loss, even a penny, out of their profit margins.

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