Divesting in GCC Will Not Help Environment

By Matthew Franczak

The Ozone Action Coalition, a group of 42 professors and some students, has recently decided to urge the University to withdraw its investments in General Motors Corp., Exxon Corp., and Mobil Corp. Showing a poor understanding of business, international and domestic politics, and environmental science as well as a conspicuous lack of research, OAC is encouraging the university to sell its shares in these companies due to their membership in the Global Climate Coalition. The GCC is a Washington-D.C. based organization representing companies that have an interest in issues pertaining to the emission of greenhouse gasses. The GCC has recently come under fire by environmentalists for opposing the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement that was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized countries by 5%.

OAC fails to realize that the Kyoto Protocol is itself inconsistent and economically unfeasible. This treaty will not affect 134 developing countries, including China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea. These exempted countries are also significant polluters and their exemption is unfair when fully developed countries are forced to make significant cuts in emissions, paralyzing domestic industry. Canada, attempting to implement the Kyoto Protocol, has already realized that compliance cannot be achieved by privately implemented technological fixes; it would require large-scale government intervention. This sort of economic damage, coupled with a loss of industry to unrestricted countries, would spur an economic disaster. Recognizing this, a bipartisan group of Senators have voiced their opposition and have already passed a resolution refusing to allow the US to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, until developing countries are included under it, by a resounding 95-0 vote.

Moreover, the companies targeted by the OAC are not even the true culprits behind the emission of greenhouse gasses. GM, an automobile manufacturer, and Exxon and Mobil, oil companies, are linked to petroleum product use. Although the use of petroleum products contributes around 40% of the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, EPA data shows that CO2 is only a minor contributor to global warming. The EPA has studied the harmfulness of various greenhouse gasses on a weight basis and assigned them a Global Warming Potential. The GWP for CO2 is used as the system’s standard and is assigned the value 1.

Under this scale, methane and NO, which have the second and third largest amounts of emissions by mass, have values of 21 and 310 respectively. N2O emissions due to petroleum consumption form as a byproduct of the pollution-reducing processes that occur in the catalytic converter of a car account for only 7.2% of the total NO emissions. HFC’s and PFC’s have values in the thousands and SF has an incredible GWP of 23,800. None of these emissions are byproducts of petroleum use. Thus, although the CO and NO due to petroleum use accounted for about 34.1% of greenhouse emissions in 1995, when it is weighed against anticipated environmental damage, these emissions were only responsible for 0.42% of the theorized atmospheric change! Appling this number to the estimates of the same environmentalists about our oil reserves, we could use all the oil on the Earth and still not cause 6.3% of the current damage being done by other sources per year!

Despite the innocuous nature of the companies in question and the fundamentally flawed nature of the Kyoto Protocol, the OAC continues to push forward in an effort to pin the blame on the oil and automobile industries. Perennial targets of the left’s “righteous hatred” on every issue from antitrust litigation to consumer safety, these companies can hardly be blamed for banding together as the GCC to oppose the various assaults they suffer from misinformed activists. The OAC has recently joined forces with the Public Interest Research Group in Michigan, a group that considers itself an “environmental watchdog,” to push for the wrongheaded divestment. Despite its boost from the 100,000-member PIRGIM, the OAC still is far from affecting the regents. Regent David Brandon stated that he had not even heard of this issue before the Review asked him to comment on it. Regarding whether he thinks the OAC’s request will be brought before the regents, he “suspect[s] it will not!