Profits and Principles

Profits and Principles

However, Shell has learnt something from its mistakes over Brent Spar and Nigeria, and is trying to make PR amends. The company's publication Profits and Principles: Does there have to be a Choice? takes corporate PR into a new phase as well. The book is designed to redefine Shell in the public mind-set and is meant to prove that there does not have to be a difference between profit and principle and that Shell is a company with which you can have both. "We care what you think about us", it says in hand-writing on the inside cover, whilst also mentioning dialogue. Shell, by the way, are also spending $30 million changing their image.

You do not have to look far to see the hypocrisy of Shell's position. In Profits and Principles, Shell says about climate change that "prudent precautionary measures are called for" and that "the world needs to take action now". However, last year Shell also spent $7.5 billion on exploration and production of new oil and gas. Hardly a precautionary measure.

We can see Shell's hypocrisy elsewhere. Take the issue of globalisation. Shell says in the same publication that "it strongly supports globalisation for a way to ensure greater prosperity for all". For many people, globalisation represents a race to the bottom for the economy, for the environment and for equity. To them it represents the age of insecurity, while to Shell it represents a business as usual future. Despite the near meltdown of the global economy, most large transnationals argue that further deregulation and liberalisation of the global economy is necessary -indeed Shell supports the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or MAI, which will further erode the rights of citizens around the world.

Not only is the fossil fuel industry one of the biggest proponents of globalisation, but we have to realise that it is also incompatible with economic stability. There is a myth about oil development in that it actually benefits the host country. In reality, petroleum-led development strategies have delivered nation after nation into a spiral of debt and dependency. For example, a recent Harvard University study looked at 97 developing countries with natural resources and examined their growth from 1971 to 1989. The results of the study showed a negative correlation between a country's reliance on resource extraction and its overall growth. While it should be noted that 'growth' as it is commonly understood rarely benefits the majority of people, the creation of debt certainly has very real negative effects on society and on the potential for genuine sustainable development.

Furthermore, recent ground-breaking research emanating from Ecuador shows that the country is actually worse off now than before its oil was exploited. Its oil reserves have allowed the country to borrow heavily from international money sources, but little of this money has actually benefited the public. Ecuador has a higher national debt than before, a greater number of people who live in poverty, and a greater gap between rich and poor. 80 per cent of oil revenue now goes to service the debt and nothing else. Not only has the country got a higher national debt, but it also has a huge ecological debt, with millions of hectares of rainforest and thousands of Indigenous people adversely affected.

If you calculated the ecological debt that the Northern oil companies owe Southern countries for exploiting their resources, for polluting their lands and their people, the case for oil extraction becomes terminal. From an ecological, cultural and economic perspective, we should be disinvesting now.