The end of the earth is a brilliant business - for some

 

 

Jan Guillou 

Capitalism sometimes even deceives its own followers  

 

Published: Today 08.17 

 

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's. 

 

Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods. Photo: Richard Drew/AP

  

COLUMNISTS  

 

Most things point to capitalism becoming humanity's greatest and last deadly plague. It is because of the overarching dogma that profitability comes before all other human considerations. This makes it profitable - at least in the short term - to let our planet boil away in greenhouse gases. 

 

Not everyone will profit from that project, far, far from it. But for every ten thousand inhabitants of the Earth, doom is a glorious affair. In the short or medium term.  

 

The problem is that it is this one-tenth percentile of humanity that holds the economic power. And this one-tenth per thousand of us have no ill will whatsoever with the billions of economically powerless people who will die first, for example the Pakistani coastal population or Africans in the Sahel region south of the Sahara. Changing that relationship would mean opportunity costs and thus reduced profitability. 

 

Chief among humanity's terminators are the capitalists who control the oil industry, whether in dictatorial states or in the boardrooms of multinational or American oil companies. The simple observation is hardly revealing.  

 

But a major revelation, which however became little news, was recently published in the journal Science, one of the world's most respected publications. In the Swedish media world, the disclosure was reproduced on half a page in DN (January 13) without causing a stir.  

 

In short, it is about how a research report in Science could lead to evidence that the management of Exxon Mobil, America's largest oil company, has known since the 70s that their products created global warming with an estimated total catastrophe around the year 2050.  

 

And what did the management of the giant company do with the vital knowledge, produced by their own research department?  

 

They did their utmost fifty years ahead to hide the truth and bought up legions of scientists and politicians to fight the knowledge threatening profitability, which after all began to appear also in free research. The same tactics already launched by the tobacco industry. The powerfully well-financed campaign of lies helped prolong the harmful emissions by decades, thus reducing the chances of a changeover before the disaster began to manifest itself in concrete climate change. Now, maybe too late.  

Exxon Mobil had the crucial knowledge. You knew what you were doing, for a long time. A carefully considered decision was made to destroy our planet.  

 

In miniature, here in Sweden, business and its propaganda center Timbro have delayed Swedish climate policy, following the same pattern as the tobacco and oil industries. With financial support from, for example, Exxon Mobil.  

 

The enormous power that the oil industry has usurped, with bought scientists, politicians and the media, seems undeniably invincible. "Money beats talk", as the entrepreneur and cheerful capitalist Jan Stenbeck described the superiority of capital over research and science.  

 

There are nevertheless small glimmers of light in history that show that politics can exceptionally win over capital. Like in the 80s, when it was discovered that emissions of CFCs damaged the Earth's ozone layer in the stratosphere. Freons were used in, for example, hair spray and refrigerators. A destroyed ozone layer could mean that the human race, like other animal species, would die out as a result of skin cancer and changes in the genetic material. 

 

Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Iron Lady and right-wing to say the least, was among the foremost of the politicians who brought about an international ban. Despite the fact that she herself was a big consumer of hairspray. And despite the freon industry wailing and threatening dire consequences if hairspray and refrigerators were deprived of their freon. 

 

After Rachel Carson's controversial book "Silent Spring" in the 60s, we got rid of the overuse of DDT. But on the other hand, it was easy to replace freon and DDT and it wasn't capital bastards like Exxon Mobil who were the ones standing up for the resistance.  

 

But both in theory and in practice, politics can win over capital. But the capital that has so long and single-mindedly fought for our downfall is no, comparatively, small freon industry. Furthermore, politics is not a uniform opponent. Politicians like Donald Trump in large and Jimmie Åkesson in small advocate a continued march towards doom. Without even making money from climate change or, as far as we know, being bribed by Exxon Mobil.

Men både i teorin och praktiken kan alltså politiken vinna över kapitalet. Fast det kapital som så länge och envetet kämpat för vår undergång är ingen, jämförelsevis, liten freonindustri. Dessutom är politiken ingen enhetlig motståndare. Politiker som Donald Trump i stort och Jimmie Åkesson i smått förespråkar fortsatt marsch mot undergången. Utan att ens tjäna pengar på klimatförändringen eller, såvitt känt, vara mutade av Exxon Mobil. Samma sak, förargligt nog, med den svenska regeringen, vars första beslut efter makttillträdet var att lägga ner miljödepartementet och besluta om ökade utsläpp. Och bakom den nya regeringen står en knapp majoritet av det svenska folket. Vilket kan te sig gåtfullt, men inte omöjligt att förklara.   

The same thing, annoyingly enough, with the Swedish government, whose first decision after coming to power was to shut down the environment ministry and decide on increased emissions. And behind the new government is a narrow majority of the Swedish people. Which may seem mysterious, but not impossible to explain. 

 

However, a psychologically more difficult puzzle remains:  

 

Those executives at Exxon Mobil and everyone else in the tenth percentile of humanity who found profitability more important than the survival of the Earth, what did they think of the death or survival of their grandchildren?  

 

Presumably, through inheritance, the grandchildren would be among the tenth-per-thousandth richest part of the Earth's population and would therefore be able to buy themselves the right to survival. Capitalism sometimes even deceives its own followers. 

Furthermore, I believe that…  

 

...it was refreshingly fun to see the expose riders in "Uppdrag granskning" lose the case in the Stockholm district court against Swedbank's former CEO Birgitte Bonnesen. Because "Assignment review" were the losers at the acquittal. Not the prosecutors. 

 

 ...it would be at least as fun if SD tried to redo the trick of cleaning up his friend the Koran-burner Rasmus Paludan. But send him on the next mission to Helsinki. Finnish police would not see the provocation as understanding as the police in Stockholm.