JUNE 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 6
T H E I R M A S T E R S ' V O I C E
JUNE 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 6
T H E I R M A S T E R S ' V O I C E
By day, they offer themselves as fierce defenders of the environment.
Bruce Piasecki leads the busy life of a green guru at the heart of national policy making. He chairs a group charged with "reinventing" the Environmental Protection Agency, heads the American Hazard Control Group and is always sure of a welcome on the nation's op-ed pages with his calls for a "business-based environmentalism" that stresses marketplace incentives over burdensome regulation.
Joe Browder, who worked at the Interior Department under Jimmy Carter and later at Friends of the Earth, now heads the Everglades Coalition, a group whose stated goal is to protect the Florida Everglades from pollution caused by sugar growers.
But by night, Piasecki is a flunky of the oil industry, and Browder runs a Beltway environmental consulting firm that works for some of the more noxious firms around.
Last year, Piasecki published Corporate Environmental Responsibility, a book which argued that the Bhopal disaster was "the environmental equivalent of Pearl Harbor, a violent wake-up call that shook many nations and many firms." Since then, Piasecki wrote, corporate environmental sensitivity has "matured considerably" with companies developing not only effective but profitable strategies to protect Mother Earth.
Corporate Environmental Responsibility singled out four companies for notable eco-activist achievement. Piasecki administered pats on the back to Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal chemical plant catastrophe, for overhauling its environmental auditing programs; to AT&T for seeking to reduce chlorofluorocarbons use in electronic production; to Warner-Lambert for work to develop biodegradable plastic; and to ARCO for manufacturing environmentally-sensitive reformulated gasoline.
Piasecki toured a number of major cities to promote his book. A beltway pr firm arranged the trip and ARCO secretly financed it. That firm came in for the greatest praise in Piasecki's book. ARCO chieftain Lodwrick Cook is described as "one crazy CEO," a man with "panache" who, like the Greek god Hermes, is "gifted with the ability to make others look good."
Few but Piasecki rate ARCO as a devoted friend of nature. The oil giant has extensive drilling operations in Alaska and the Rockies, and is currently eyeing an area just north of Yellowstone park for oil and gas exploration. It is also the guilty party at some of the largest Superfund sites and has been nemesis for fish along the Blackfoot River.
Piasecki's favorite oil company is also a big funder of the anti-green Wise Use Movement. People for the West!, the Colorado-based Wise Use front, has been blessed with especially generous donations from Hermes' treasury.
ARCO's reformulated gas, which Piasecki calls "the first major breakthrough in the environmental improvement of modern gasoline," is especially dangerous for people who breathe its fumes. Myron Mehlman, a toxicologist at Rutgers, found that 91 percent of workers at refineries where reformulated gas is blended suffer from headaches and roughly 50 percent have breathing problems.
In addition to ARCO, Piasecki has taken money from the Nuclear Energy Institute to tout the joys of atomic energy. He is a scientist for The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, a corporate front group set up by APCO Associates, the beltway consulting shop which specializes in concocting bogus "grassroots" campaigns on behalf of its corporate clientele.
Browder, meanwhile, claims to be a strident protector of the animal kingdom, telling a reporter last year that "Evidence of the public's caring about nature, public health and other environmental issues has never been stronger. At the same time, we see a lot of newly elected political leaders acting as if they have a compulsion to roll back environmental protection. ... That conflict is hard to reconcile."
Browder himself has little difficulty in reconciling conflict. Browder's firm, which has represented Detroit Diesel, Custom Coals and Target Energy, also has a contract to flack for BHP, the Australian mining giant which has ravaged Papua New Guinea. The company has dumped 80,000 tons of toxic mining waste in the Ok Tedi River, resulting in a 70-kilometer stretch of it being declared "biologically dead" by the Australian Conservation Foundation.
A BHP internal memorandum obtained by Multinational Monitor shows how Browder has cashed in on his apparent environmentalist credentials. The memo contains minutes of a company discussion regarding the Monitor's naming BHP one of the 10 worst corporations of 1995.
The BHP minutes show Browder eager to vaunt his government and public interest contacts. For example, asked by a company official named Roger Nelson if BHP might get funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), Browder replies that this could be a problem because of controversy over the mining company Freeport-McMoRan's plundering of huge swaths of rain forest in neighboring West Papua, Indonesian Irian Jaya. Freeport's activities, Browder laments, were "lumping all the mines in the region together in the minds of the environmental community."
Browder: "If it is true that AID funds the Irian Jaya environmental group, I think it would be pretty important for the guy who's in charge of that sort of thing for AID to understand that we do not fall under the same umbrella of problems."
Roger Nelson: "You're saying that we should take advantage of the network you have into U.S. AID so that we separate ourselves from the Freeport view ..."
Browder: "Yes."
-- Ken Silverstein