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If it’s an exaggeration to say that the political left has captured corporate America, it’s not much of one. Employees of Fortune 500 companies give money to Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal measure, but corporate support for nonprofits and causes tilts overwhelmingly to the left.
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In the age of “stakeholder capitalism” and a collection of multitermed, anodyne-sounding ideologies—ESG (environmental, social and governance), DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)—the goal is as much to appear righteous as it is to earn money.
Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue on which almost everybody purports to agree: climate. The average letter to shareholders contains obligatory references to the climate “crisis,” claiming the company is doing all it can to stave off doom.
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Almost all the governments and corporations of North America and Europe cheerfully endorse some version of the net-zero-by-2050 commitment. Even companies for which that would mean emasculation by governments—ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical—have joined the club.
Two questions seem pertinent. First, why do corporate managers and their spokesmen praise objectives they know to be impossible and, if followed in earnest, deadly to their industries? Second, will anyone in corporate America stand against this crowd?
Peter Huntsman will. He is president, CEO and chairman of Huntsman Corp., a multinational chemical manufacturing company. He has adopted a policy of brutal honesty about climate alarmism and its destructive potential. Mr. Huntsman, 60, has ample reason to worry about the acquiescence of corporate boardrooms to the mental pathologies of 21st-century American politics.
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“Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”
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Mr. Huntsman holds up a plastic water bottle: “We can make 10 of these for the amount of plastic we used in one of them a decade ago. . . . I don’t know why we don’t celebrate these accomplishments.”
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“Most CEOs I work with are so preoccupied doing their jobs. They’re a few years away from retirement; they’ve got two or three years left to go, and they don’t want to go out and cause a big ruckus that might get them fired, risk their pensions.”
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He softens it a little. “I’m not saying that’s bad—that’s human nature. And I think if they were asked and they were put on the spot, they’d say what they honestly believe. But I don’t think most CEOs seek a forum to proudly declare it. They don’t talk about American exceptionalism, American free markets,” he says. “America’s not perfect, we have big problems—I get all that. But the more you travel around the world, you see the progress we’ve made here. No place has come remotely close to what we’ve done in this country, and it seems like people almost want to avoid talking about that.”
Mr. Huntsman first began to entertain doubts about climate orthodoxy in the years after he saw Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” “His story was so well laid out, so precise,” Mr. Huntsman says. “At certain times, certain events would happen, certain measurements would be reached.” They didn’t and weren’t.
It wasn’t a sudden “Aha” moment, he says, but he began to think about other dire predictions that had people panicked not long ago. “In the ’70s we were going into an ice age. Then we went to acid rain—in six or seven years that was going to destroy all the oak trees and pine trees, and New England would be this deforested area. Then the ozone was going to disappear. And then we got to global warming, and we were all going to fry to death.”
...............................
None of that jibed with the real world: “I grew up in Los Angeles. I went back many years later, and I could see the San Gabriel Mountains from the home I grew up in. I don’t remember ever seeing mountains in the home I grew up in. You start thinking. In the early 1970s I lived in Washington, D.C. The Potomac River stunk, it was disgusting. Now the air is cleaner, the rivers are cleaner.”
..........................
“I speak from time to time in colleges,” Mr. Huntsman says. “I occasionally get students who say to me, ‘We’re boycotting your industry.’ I tell them, ‘Well, everything from your skateboard to your iPhone, to your clothes, to all those earrings, the makeup you’re wearing, everything—you are a customer. Thank you.’ They think the chemical industry is just plastic bags.”
Mr. Huntsman gestures around the office. “Everything—from the lighting to the paint to the glass, the furniture, the ink on this paper—everything in here comes from petroleum or is tempered by petroleum or powered by it. And look, I’m anxious to get beyond petroleum, but how are we going to do it? What’s the game plan? And how do we do it without screwing the bottom 80% of the world, who just try to make it day to day?”
.......................
www.wsj.com
"
If it’s an exaggeration to say that the political left has captured corporate America, it’s not much of one. Employees of Fortune 500 companies give money to Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal measure, but corporate support for nonprofits and causes tilts overwhelmingly to the left.
...............
In the age of “stakeholder capitalism” and a collection of multitermed, anodyne-sounding ideologies—ESG (environmental, social and governance), DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)—the goal is as much to appear righteous as it is to earn money.
Nowhere is this clearer than on the issue on which almost everybody purports to agree: climate. The average letter to shareholders contains obligatory references to the climate “crisis,” claiming the company is doing all it can to stave off doom.
................
Almost all the governments and corporations of North America and Europe cheerfully endorse some version of the net-zero-by-2050 commitment. Even companies for which that would mean emasculation by governments—ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical—have joined the club.
Two questions seem pertinent. First, why do corporate managers and their spokesmen praise objectives they know to be impossible and, if followed in earnest, deadly to their industries? Second, will anyone in corporate America stand against this crowd?
Peter Huntsman will. He is president, CEO and chairman of Huntsman Corp., a multinational chemical manufacturing company. He has adopted a policy of brutal honesty about climate alarmism and its destructive potential. Mr. Huntsman, 60, has ample reason to worry about the acquiescence of corporate boardrooms to the mental pathologies of 21st-century American politics.
............................
“Think about the year 1970,” Mr. Huntsman says. “That’s the year we hit a trillion-dollar GDP, and the year Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote that great song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ A great year, right? Well today we’re emitting roughly 6,500 million metric tons of CO2. Same thing we were emitting in 1970. And look how much more electricity we’re using, and look how many more transportation and miles we’re driving. We’ve expanded the economy 30 times over, nearly, and core CO2 has stayed flat. We should be celebrating this achievement, shouldn’t we?”
..................................
Mr. Huntsman holds up a plastic water bottle: “We can make 10 of these for the amount of plastic we used in one of them a decade ago. . . . I don’t know why we don’t celebrate these accomplishments.”
.....................
“Most CEOs I work with are so preoccupied doing their jobs. They’re a few years away from retirement; they’ve got two or three years left to go, and they don’t want to go out and cause a big ruckus that might get them fired, risk their pensions.”
..................
He softens it a little. “I’m not saying that’s bad—that’s human nature. And I think if they were asked and they were put on the spot, they’d say what they honestly believe. But I don’t think most CEOs seek a forum to proudly declare it. They don’t talk about American exceptionalism, American free markets,” he says. “America’s not perfect, we have big problems—I get all that. But the more you travel around the world, you see the progress we’ve made here. No place has come remotely close to what we’ve done in this country, and it seems like people almost want to avoid talking about that.”
Mr. Huntsman first began to entertain doubts about climate orthodoxy in the years after he saw Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” “His story was so well laid out, so precise,” Mr. Huntsman says. “At certain times, certain events would happen, certain measurements would be reached.” They didn’t and weren’t.
It wasn’t a sudden “Aha” moment, he says, but he began to think about other dire predictions that had people panicked not long ago. “In the ’70s we were going into an ice age. Then we went to acid rain—in six or seven years that was going to destroy all the oak trees and pine trees, and New England would be this deforested area. Then the ozone was going to disappear. And then we got to global warming, and we were all going to fry to death.”
...............................
None of that jibed with the real world: “I grew up in Los Angeles. I went back many years later, and I could see the San Gabriel Mountains from the home I grew up in. I don’t remember ever seeing mountains in the home I grew up in. You start thinking. In the early 1970s I lived in Washington, D.C. The Potomac River stunk, it was disgusting. Now the air is cleaner, the rivers are cleaner.”
..........................
“I speak from time to time in colleges,” Mr. Huntsman says. “I occasionally get students who say to me, ‘We’re boycotting your industry.’ I tell them, ‘Well, everything from your skateboard to your iPhone, to your clothes, to all those earrings, the makeup you’re wearing, everything—you are a customer. Thank you.’ They think the chemical industry is just plastic bags.”
Mr. Huntsman gestures around the office. “Everything—from the lighting to the paint to the glass, the furniture, the ink on this paper—everything in here comes from petroleum or is tempered by petroleum or powered by it. And look, I’m anxious to get beyond petroleum, but how are we going to do it? What’s the game plan? And how do we do it without screwing the bottom 80% of the world, who just try to make it day to day?”
.......................
Opinion | Peter Huntsman Is a CEO Who Doesn’t Equivocate About Climate
Why do so many corporate leaders accept the false premises of global warming catastrophism?
www.wsj.com
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