Corporate Social and Environmental Accountability

Corporate Social and Environmental Accountability

U.S. corporations have been striving in recent years to be more socially and environmentally accountable -- or at least, depending on your level of skepticism, to create the impression of moving in that direction. The reason they're doing this is not, shocking though some may find this, to salve their collective consciences. (I remain steadfast in my belief that corporations do not have consciences, collective or otherwise.) The reason corporations are doing this is because the marketplace tells them they'd be fools -- and dinosaurs -- not to.

That's one of the key points made by Steve Lydenberg in this interview published Monday by the Christian Science Monitor. Lydenberg, chief investment officer of Domini Social Investments and author of the new book Corporations and the Public Interest, makes compelling points about the oil industry's need to diversify the types of energy it produces, and about industry deregulation and its effect on the economy and the environment.

"The real dilemma that government has created for itself and society is this," Lydenberg says. "How can you get corporations to act more in the public interest -- but without returning to the same kind of heavy-handed regulation that we had before?" A fundamental change we're moving toward, he says, is the marketplace forcing corporations "to compete on social and environmental issues the way they had competed in the past on price, on innovation, on efficiency."

If Lydenberg writes as persuasively as he talks in this interview, his book is worth a read, despite the dreary, textbooky title.

Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is starting to take on the sheen of inevitability, as evidenced by this Washington Post report and this Wall Street Journal editorial, both published yesterday. Before 9/11, I was against drilling in the ANWR, but since the attack I've been on the fence, and I still am. I'm edging closer to being convinced that the benefits of drilling in the refuge would outweigh the costs -- for sure in the near term, but over the long haul as well. (The WSJ editorial provides persuasive evidence of this.) On the other hand, I'm also increasingly convinced that our overdependence on oil is real and deep, that we're not pushing as hard as we sh ould to develop alternatives, and that subsequent generations of Americans will pay dearly for this shortsightedness.

The Wall Street Journal opines that the Senate's 51-48 vote last week to allow drilling in the refuge was as close as it was only because of opposition from Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., "who led most of her party and seven Republicans in arguing that drilling in Alaska would only feed the nation's dangerous oil addiction." Then the WSJ offeres this riposte: "Does she know any other addiction that propels automobiles down city streets?"

That's clever, but it's also pointless. This is a crucial, complex issue. We're better off hewing to the black and white, and avoiding the red herrings.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.