Too Many People?

In 2000, the world’s two hundred largest corporations employed less than 1 percent of the world’s population, but their sales equaled 27.5 percent of the world’s GDP.² In 2008, there were 166 entities in the world with annual sales or GDP of $50 billion or more: only 60 of them were countries; 106 were corporations.³

And yet most books that attribute the environmental crisis to over-population have little or nothing to say about the role of corporations. Even the word corporation appears only three times in passing (once in a footnote) in the Ehrlichs’ The Population Explosion; only twice, both times as part of an organization’s name, in Brian O’Neill’s Population and Climate Change; and not at all in James Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia.

Focusing on the abstraction of “population” draws attention away from the social and institutional causes of the global crisis. The impact of the super-rich on the environment results not primarily from their individual greedy gluttony but from their ownership and control of organizations and institutions whose ecocidal activities far exceed those of any individual or group of individuals.

The total area of the buildings at Fair Field is over 100,000 square feet, 40 percent larger than Bill Gates’s more famous home in Washington State and almost twice as big as the White House.

Rennert travels in a private Gulfstream 5 jet, perhaps to save time commuting to his other homes. He owns one of the most expensive private homes in Jerusalem, a palatial property he bought for a rumored $4 million in 1996 and then had completely renovated, including installing what are said to be the most advanced electrical, climate-control, and water-filtration systems in Israel. That’s in addition to his luxurious duplex apartment on Park Avenue in New York City, which is near the twin $30 million apartments he bought for his daughters as gifts.⁵

Rennert’s wealth comes from his 95 percent ownership of Renco Group, a private holding company whose principal subsidiaries are the only primary magnesium producer in the United States—US Magnesium LLC (MagCorp)—and the largest primary lead producer in the Western world, Doe Run Resources Corporation.

In 1996 the Environmental Protection Agency named MagCorp the number one polluting industrial facility in the United States. As recently as April 2010, the EPA said that investigations on the company’s Utah site found

high levels of environmental contamination . . . [including] arsenic, chromium, mercury, copper, and zinc; acidic waste water; chlorinated organics; polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); dioxins/furans, hexachlorobenzene (HCB); and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These wastes are being released into the environment and are largely uncontrolled.

Wastewater ditches around MagCorp’s plant are reported to be contaminated with dioxin at levels as high as 170 parts per billion: EPA rules require immediate cleanup action at one part per billion.⁶

Doe Run has frequently been cited by the EPA for exceeding legal emission limits, as well as polluting roads and soils around its facilities in Missouri. In February 2002, health officials found that 56 percent of children living near the Doe Run smelter had high blood-lead levels. An October 2009 EPA report says that soil on one-third of properties situated within a mile of the company’s lead smelter contains lead at levels exceeding the legal threshold for mandatory removal and replacement. An EPA administrator said that Doe Run’s emission reduction efforts “clearly fall short of what was necessary.”⁷

Like many polluters in the North, Renco has in recent years shifted its focus to countries where there are fewer regulations, weak enforcement, and many poor people who desperately need jobs. In 1997 it bought a lead, silver, gold, copper, and zinc operation in the Andean city of La Oroya from the Peruvian government for $126 million; as part of the deal, Doe Run Peru was required to lend $126 million to Renco, interest free, which means that Rennert bought the operation with its own money.

That cash could have been used to live up to another part of the deal: Rennert promised to modernize the smelter and clean up the environment, but an environmental study six years later found that concentrations of lead, sulfur dioxide, and arsenic in the air had increased since the takeover. Renco says it can’t afford the promised upgrades.

The quality of air sampled in the neighborhood by three Peruvian voluntary agencies showed 85 times more arsenic, 41 times more cadmium and 13 times more lead than is safe. In parts of the town the water supply contains 50 per cent more lead than levels recommended by the World Health Organization. The untreated waters of the Mantaro river are contaminated with copper, iron, manganese, lead and zinc and are not suitable for irrigation or consumption by animals, according to the standards supposed to be legally enforced in Peru. The water coming out of the nearby Huascacocha lake contains more than four times the legal limit of manganese.⁸

In August 2009, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights agreed to hear a case that accuses Peru’s pro-business government of “violating the rights to life, personal integrity, and to information and access to justice, due to toxic pollution from Doe Run Peru’s multi-metal smelter in La Oroya, Peru.”⁹

One is the cruel absurdity of using “per capita” averages to determine the impact that individuals have on the environment. None of the poisons in Oroya, none of the lead dust in Missouri or the dioxins in Utah were caused by Peruvian or American working people, or by consumers anywhere. Ira Rennert and a handful of high-paid executives made all of the polluting decisions, and only they should be held responsible.

As an individual consumer, Rennert represents hyperconsump-tion at its worst. His way of living is a gross insult to the earth. But as the owner of the Renco Group Inc., he has shortened the lives of tens of thousands of people and laid waste to entire ecosystems.

While individual consumers may be the ultimate purchasers of some of the products of the new technologies, decisions about the allocation of technologies is the realm of production managers and owners . . . [I]t is within the production process where the initial interaction of social systems with ecosystems occurs and where the key decisions about the nature of social system-ecosystem relationships are made . . .

The decision of which alternative forms of production will be offered consumers is not in their hands. It remains in the hands of a small minority of powerful individuals . . . who are empowered by their access to production capital. It is in those decisions where social systems (the producers’ access to capital and labor, and their assessment of potential liability, profitability, and marketability) and ecosystems (the producers’ access to natural resource inputs and ecosystem waste sinks) first interact.¹¹

Michael Dawson makes a similar point: “Ordinary product users remain shut out of major economic decisions. Corporations plan, design, and sell goods and services according to their own profit requirements, without providing any means of subjecting basic productive priorities to popular debate and vote.”¹²

As David Coleman commented on the Greenpeace ads that blamed consumers for the Exxon Valdez disaster: “This perspective completely overlooks the fact that it was Exxon that chose to use single-hulled ships, that failed to manage the drinking habits of its ship captain, that has worked and lobbied persistently to maintain America’s need for a large supply of petroleum, and that pressed to open up the Alaskan oil fields in the first place against the protests of environmentalists.”¹³

Similarly, we can reply to those who blamed BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster on our supposed addiction to oil: even if we accept the farfetched idea that oil companies drill new wells only to please consumers, no one can reasonably suggest that consumers somehow forced BP to cut every possible corner, suborn regulators, or violate safety guidelines. Those decisions were made in BP’s executive offices, and consumers had no say.

BP is not an exceptional case. Brian Wolf, an expert on environmental crime, tells us:

The most widespread perpetrators of environmental crimes are corporations. As most pollution and toxics are emitted at the point of production for private gain, most environmental crimes are committed on behalf of corporations. A recent study found that nearly two-thirds of a sampling of manufacturing corporations had committed some kind of serious environmental offense over a six-year period.¹⁴

Wolf cites a number of well-known cases of corporate environmental crimes, including Hooker Chemical dumping toxic chemicals into Love Canal for thirty years, the Union Carbide chemical explosion that killed thousands in Bhopal, India, in 1984, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the conviction of Carnival Cruise Lines for repeatedly dumping waste at sea in the 1990s. “Nothing about any of these incidents suggests that they were accidental events; instead, each of these crimes was the result of premeditated cost-cutting measures that circumvented both environmental laws and common sense.”¹⁵

Outrageously large as that figure is—only six countries have a GDP greater than $2.15 trillion—the study substantially understates the damage these companies cause. Trucost’s calculations exclude costs that would result from “potential high impact events such as fishery or ecosystem collapse,” nor do they include “external costs caused by product use and disposal, as well as companies’ use of other natural resources and release of further pollutants through their operations and suppliers.”¹⁷

In the case of BP, for example, the damages would include direct harm, emissions, and the like, caused by normal operations, but not the deaths and destruction caused by global warming, not the damage caused by worldwide use of its products, and not the multibillions of dollars in cleanup and legal costs resulting from oil spills. Nor would it include Shell’s massive destruction of ecosystems in the Niger River Delta, or the immeasurable damage that Chevron has caused to Ecuador’s rainforests.

So the environmental damages caused by just three thousand corporations engaging in business as usual are certainly much higher than $2.15 trillion a year—probably many times that amount.

Looking just at global warming, another Trucost report examined “Carbon Risks and Opportunities in the S&P 500”—the potential financial impact of a mandatory carbon cap-and-trade program on the five hundred largest companies whose shares are traded on the two largest US stock exchanges. Such a program would require corporations to purchase permits for each ton of greenhouse gas emissions their operations produce. The study found that the permits would cost those companies, on average, between 5.5 percent and 20 percent of their pretax profits¹⁸—the lower figure if permits sell for $28.24/ton, as provided in a bill then before the US Congress, the higher figure if they sell for $105/ton, the “social cost of carbon” calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency.¹⁹

Emissions, however, aren’t evenly distributed through the five hundred biggest companies: just five companies (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, American Electric Power, Southern Company, and ConocoPhillips) account for 22 percent of them. Even using Trucost’s lowest estimate for the price of permits, seventy-one big emitters, mainly electrical utilities and oil and gas producers, would see their earnings fall by 10 percent or more if they had to pay to emit greenhouse gases.

As well, the Trucost report notes, permit prices might have to be as high as $200 to $500 a ton—two to five times as high as the highest permit price Trucost analyzed—to produce the investments in low-carbon technology that cap-and-trade is supposed to cause. In fact, many observers, including us, don’t think cap-and-trade will work at any price, but let’s leave that aside: the point is that actually paying for emissions could wipe out the profits of many of the largest US companies.

We draw attention to these Trucost studies not because they accurately measure the environmental damage routinely caused by large corporations—they likely don’t even come close—but because they highlight the emptiness of any environmental analysis that focuses on counting people rather than investigating the impact of the corporate destroyers. Fossil fuels aren’t a side issue in the corporate world; they are the very basis of its power.

High levels of carbon-based energy are central to virtually every productive and reproductive process within the system—not just to manufacturing industry, but to food production and distribution, the heating and functioning of office blocks, getting labor power to and from workplaces, providing it with what it needs to replenish itself and reproduce. To break with the oil-coal economy means a massive transformation of these structures, a profound reshaping of the forces of production and the immediate relations of production that flow out of them.²⁰

That’s why the United States, the richest country on earth, has systematically sabotaged every attempt to reach a binding agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while simultaneously spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to ensure its continuing access to the world’s oil.

Every war in history has left devastated environments in its wake, and no military organization is a force for sustainability or ecological good. The toxic horrors left behind by the armed forces of the Soviet Union have been well documented. But those disasters, appalling as they are, pale beside the ecocidal record of the US Department of Defense.

As Barry Sanders found when researching his book on the environmental costs of militarism,²² it is impossible to get comprehensive data on US military pollution: the Pentagon treats even the most elementary statistics as top secret, and US negotiators prevented inclusion of overseas military emissions in the greenhouse gas inventory reports that all industrialized nations are supposed to publish. Any estimates are at least partly speculative, and as Sanders found, they usually understate the case. Nevertheless, there are a few broadly reliable studies.

For example, a report published in 2008 focused on the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the US war in Iraq between 2003 and 2007.²³ Among other things, the researchers found:

• The war had been responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions. That’s equivalent to 25 million cars.

• Between March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel. Burning these fuels has directly produced nearly 39 million metric tons of CO₂.

• If the war were ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would rank ahead of 139 countries.

• US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.

The US military is the largest user of petroleum in the world and thus is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It produces more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined. It has rained down tons of radioactive waste in the form of “depleted uranium” on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The military’s environmental impacts are also felt within the United States, where the commanders of military bases have ignored environmental regulations for decades. In 2004, the newspaper USA Today reported that “about one in 10 Americans—nearly 29 million—live within 10 miles of a military site that is listed as a national priority for hazardous-waste cleanup under the federal Superfund program.” Over 10 percent of all Superfund sites are on military bases.²⁴

It’s been estimated that storing and disposing of the hazardous wastes left behind in the United States by nuclear weapons programs alone will cost between $300 and $400 billion—and that’s assuming no cost overruns, which typically average 60 percent on military cleanup projects.²⁵

McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.²⁶

What US president Eisenhower famously dubbed the “military-industrial complex” isn’t an alliance—it is a single system. Military destruction and corporate production/destruction are two sides of one coin, of an economic, social, and political system that for more than half a century has been dependent on military spending to maintain profits and growth, and on massive military force to maintain its global dominance.

Those who claim slowing population growth will stop or slow environmental destruction are ignoring these real and immediate threats to life on our planet. Corporations and armies aren’t polluting the world and destroying ecosystems because there are “too many people,” and they won’t stop if the birth rate is reduced.

If Afghan women have fewer babies, the US military won’t stop firing shells made of depleted uranium into their villages. Nor will military bases in Afghanistan stop dumping toxic wastes into open burn pits.

If the world’s population growth stops tomorrow, Ira Rennert’s companies will still poison indigenous children in Peru, Shell will continue killing people in the Niger Delta, and Alberta’s tar sands will still be the worst ecological crime on earth.

If we want an ecologically sound society, we must confront the real environmental criminals. We can’t stop them unless we understand and address the real causes of the environmental crisis.

The case of Ira Rennert

A question of power

Business as usual

The world’s worst polluter