New GOP Environmental Strategy: Recommend Market Solutions, Consult Wall Street, Rebrand!

[hatrack]

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With the national party largely silent on the issue, conservative environmental groups like ConservAmerica are stepping up efforts to sharpen the Republican message. In recent months they have held meetings for like-minded conservatives and met with lawmakers and aides in a bid to help craft a new Republican environmental platform.

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ConservAmerica has a similar aim. The group wants the Republican Party to embrace its history of conservation established by President Teddy Roosevelt at the beginning of last century. ConservAmerica dropped "environmental" from its name, stocked its board with market-minded business leaders and recently brought on a Washington strategist to coordinate conversations with dozens of congressional offices.

In a full-colour brochure it takes to meetings, ConservAmerica urges Republicans to consider crafting "market-based solutions" to climate change. The domestic production of natural gas, nuclear energy and vehicle efficiency standards are among suggested steps. Many have been privately receptive, the group said.

Board member Paul Walker, who advises utilities and investment firms on regulatory risk, said it was important that Republicans not cede the issue to Democrats and take into account Wall Street’s perspective.

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http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/01/27/uk-usa-politics-climatechange-insight-idINKBN0L00D220150127

[DetlefK]

1. Wall Street's perspective would be to make money from a new eco-friendly economy sector.

Solar-panels on every roof, wind-farms, electric cars and a network of recharging stations, divesting away from mass-production of meat, divesting away from one-use plastic to recycling, new products with higher quality and higher efficiencies, new electricity landlines to support a decentralized energy-production...

[hatrack]

2. No, Wall Street would devise a rat's nest of carbon derivatives, timber credits, climate futures . .

And then game the FUCK out of it to make BiGG BUXX while the planet went down in flames.

If it got bad enough, they might look up from their gold-foil-wrapped Kobe beef burgers, but only if the tidal surge was heading directly towards the restaurant window, with flaming cars on top of it.

[raouldukelives]

3. .

[bemildred]

4. Wall Street would make it into a Ponzi scheme based on lots of debt and derivatives. nt

[hatrack]

5. Davos - From Last Year, But Just As Apropos Today

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Here, for example, is the WEF mission statement:

The World Economic Forum encourages businesses, governments and civil society to commit together to improving the state of the world. Our Strategic and Industry Partners are instrumental in helping stakeholders meet key challenges such as building sustained economic growth, mitigating global risks, promoting health for all, improving social welfare and fostering environmental sustainability.

Rather than getting bogged down in a detailed evaluation of WEF’s high-minded claims and eco-populist rhetoric, it may be more efficient to consider the behavior of those corporations and banks that comprise the Forum’s list of Industry Partners – described as “select Member companies of the World Economic Forum that are actively involved in the Forum’s mission. Among them are Shell, Nike, Syngenta, Nestlé, and SNC Lavalin – companies you’ll also find on Global Exchange’s list of the Top 10 Corporate Criminals of 2013, based on offenses like unlivable working conditions, corporate seizures of indigenous lands, contaminating the environment, and similar transgressions. At least seven other companies “actively involved in the Forum’s mission” are recent alumni of the Corporate Criminal list.

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These are just a few of innumerable possible examples. The corporations represented by the World Economic Forum are the agents principally responsible for destroying the planet, ravaging livelihoods, and literally starving people, all while aggrandizing unprecedented profits into the hands of an ever-tinier super elite. Seen in this light, all the burnished social and environmental concern-speak of the WEF is so much vacuous corporate swagger, the crudest sort of greenwash. Even though these companies actually spend huge amounts of capital and energy fighting environmental regulation and the citizen’s groups who are suffering their abuses, they simultaneously pursue a strategic embrace of environmental discourse and narratives; they accept the existence of the problems while promoting privatized, technocratic strategies for addressing them. These strategies pivot between those that assign responsibility for causing and fixing the problems to individual consumers, and those that position the corporations themselves as crucial players in the common cause of “improving”/”cleaning” the environment – the same one, incidentally, that they destroyed.

The absurdity of this schizophrenia reaches extreme limits: the WEF is solemnly concerned about global warming because – get ready for it – it represents one of the biggest threats ever to global trade and corporate capitalism! The primary perpetrator of global warming is now portraying itself as a victim. In WEF-land, global warming is like a mysterious, autonomous, alien force invading from afar, without cause or explanation. It “affects us all”, so we must all roll up our sleeves and unite – fossil fuel corporations included – in the battle against a common external foe.

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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-01-22/davos-peeling-back-the-veneer