Exxon plays NGO's for fools again

international | environment | opinion/analysis Monday October 13, 2003 18:21 by max broker - Karmabanque

Carbon-trading saga continues....

The World Wildlife Fund, and Stop Esso need to be pushing a new strategy, one in which they are coordinating financial types around the world to be buyers of carbon credits, thereby removing them from circulation for good.

ExxonMobil is jerking NGO's around and trying to divert attention from the real issues. As The Guardian reports today, ExxonMobil (XOM) is afraid that Russia might support the Kyoto protocol and so they are trying to greenwash themselves a bit this month, inviting the World Wildlife Fund over for a spot of tea, but excluding Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and other groups that support the Stop Esso campaign; flaming some inter-NGO rivalry undoubtedly as the Fortune 500 likes to do, knowing full well that there is no NGO solidarity among the world's 16,000, and there is no possible way, under the current NGO-preferred operating methodologies of these groups ever developing franchise threatening leverage... Financial leverage, the kind that people listen to.

But maybe, just maybe they, (the NGO's) and their kind might have an impact on Putin of Russia as he weighs the pluses and minuses of whether to sign Kyoto, so Exxon spends the $30 is costs to appease the World Wildlife Fund for a month, and ensures that NGO's take their attention away from the only real issue here; carbon trading and how it relates to Russia, NGO's, ExxonMobil and long term sustainable development.

The World Wildlife Fund, and Stop Esso need to be pushing a new strategy, one in which they are coordinating financial types around the world to be buyers of carbon credits.

This is what Russia wants, they are afraid that nobody will buy the carbon credits they've accumulated since 1990. The U.S., ExxonMobil, and other environmental terrorists have huge amounts of carbon liability to offset (i.e., buy credits) Russia is the biggest supplier of these credits.

Stop Esso and the whole enviro. community should be banging the drum and doing whatever it takes to ensure that there are buyers of these credits...

Look at the situation this way; instead of raising 150 million to run your NGO this year to wage a campaign to convince indifferent CEO's to give a flying fcuk about the environment, spend that money hiring bankers and advisors to help set up a fund whose sole aim is to buy into these credits... And then put the word out to your constituencies that they should be calling their brokers and financial advisors to buy into these funds as well...

Hundreds of millions of credits can be bought up in this way and this would take hundreds of millions of tons of carbon out of the atmospere; plus challenge ExxonMobil's business model of practicing the unchallenged American Business Model of environmental rape-for-profit with something that they can't dismiss because it's pressuring their stock price, not their attitudes.