Just As Business Starts Thinking Green, the White House Doesn’t

For a minute, let’s go to Alaska. All the way to the top, to the North Slope. Up there on the edge of the Beaufort Sea, the big oil companies have been pumping petroleum for almost a generation.

Let’s talk about taking sides.

Maps show the place to be Prudhoe Bay, a sprawling network of oil fields. To the west lays the distant Inupiat Eskimo town of Barrow and more than 1,000 miles of wild coastline, the habitat of the polar bear. To the east, just over the horizon, is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge--ground zero in the big battle over further drilling on public lands here.

Put that fight aside for the moment, and take a tour closer by.

Behind chain-link fences, clusters of sheet-metal buildings tower over treeless wilderness. Petroleum is drawn up from beneath the permafrost and “cracked.” Oil is separated out and sent south via the trans-Alaska pipeline. Natural gas is pumped back into the ground because there is no pipeline to carry it.

There is something else nearby. A town. Deadhorse. Built on a grid of gravel streets, Deadhorse is the frontier outpost where independent contractors set up shop, along with bush pilots, tourism guides and businesses that support them. There’s a general store, a gas station, a cafeteria and an airport.

Where are we going with this story? Maybe not where you think.

Let’s look closer at these oil fields and the pint-size settlement at Deadhorse.

At Prudhoe Bay, industrialization is startlingly antiseptic. People are neurotic about appearances. No gum wrappers, no junk piles, no soda cans. Once, I saw a pickup truck pulled over after its radiator popped a hose. The driver was down on his hands and knees deploying his emergency oil-spill mop-up pads.

Grimy Deadhorse offers a contrast. Every time I’ve passed through after the snow melts, I’ve seen rusting barrels thrown on the ground, along with cast-off tires, food wrappers, oily pools of water behind buildings, cigarette butts, plastic bags fluttering on fence posts. You’re not apt to find anyone daubing up radiator coolant in Deadhorse.

The point to which I labor is this. There are two kinds of businesses in America. You can see the difference between them in the most unexpected places. Some companies are mindful of growing environmental sensibilities and are getting in step. Others don’t care and kick whenever they can.

George W. Bush has taken sides when it comes to scenes like this. I don’t mean simply that he’s in favor of oil drilling wherever oil may be. He’s taken sides in the way American business does business.

With his clumsy and unremitting assault on environmentalism, the president is selling out companies that are going green. By seeming to favor polluters and short-cutters, he’s making the others out to be saps. He’s undermining the genuine progress that has given us clearer skies, cleaner water, record corporate profits and soaring employment. He’s a Cold Warrior at home as well as abroad. He’s retreating to the polarizing, simplistic war of words: business versus environment.

He is creating a mood that is bad for business. Bad for America.

Since the 1960s, environmentalists have been pushing, boycotting, suing and raising hell with corporate America. And you know what? It’s been working. Whether because of fear, enlightenment, regulation, tax incentives or just marketing savvy--who cares which?--businesses have been investing millions in recycling, co-generation, eco-friendly packaging, organic cotton, nontoxic inks and dyes. In some boardrooms you hear new words, like “sustainability,” and more than a few corporate leaders have gone beyond rhetoric to embrace the formerly one-sided idea that a good environment is good for business.

The names of companies that have turned the corner would fill this column. Those that have taken the first step and pay lip-service to the ideals would fill this page. Read some corporate business plans today and you’d wonder if a Sierra Club hacker hadn’t been fiddling with Web sites.

It’s a trend, and one of the most heartening ones in the country.

Now comes Bush, telling us to set our watches back 40 years.

Instead of encouraging the best from business, he appeals to the worst. Instead of pushing market opportunities and social responsibility for environmentally sensitive commerce, he reverts to the tired wheeze that the environment is an impediment to the boom times. Instead of budgeting conservation incentives, he’s calling for rollbacks.

Some corporate lobbyists are thrilled. But a good number of progressive business leaders know better. They are being stigmatized. After years of trying to win public approval by thinking green, they are being lumped together with those who won’t face up to global warming or safe standards for drinking water.

“The companies I’m working with are trying to do the right thing. So why should government reward those that aren’t?” asks Bill Dempsey, director of the California Environmental Dialogue, a collaboration of environmentalists and businesses, including Chevron, Hewlett Packard and Walt Disney. “The last thing that any sensible businessman wants is the pendulum swinging wildly back and forth.”

They know that when the regulatory and consumer backlash comes, and it always does when politicians overreach, the companies that get down on their hands and knees to mop up radiator spills will be tarred along with the wildcatters who throw their rusty junk onto the tundra. So who can blame them if they throw up their hands and say, why bother?