“Business that is everything to everyone is not anything at all in itself.”
– Elaine Sternberg, Just Business: Business Ethics in Action. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 33.
No doubt his handlers have given Al Gore the word: go easy on climate warming (aka climate change). The issue has little traction. You are the wrong voice for the cause. Solyndra. Climategate 2.0. Winter snows…. Not now, Al.
Take it up a notch! they must be telling him. Think bigger. Subsume the issue…. And so Gore’s new piece in the Wall Street Journal barely mentions his pet issue of (man-made) climate change but something much larger and amorphous.
“A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism,” coauthored with David Blood, calls for “abandoning short-term economic thinking for ‘sustainable capitalism’.” Such is code for that subjective, holistic, anything goes doctrine of corporate social responsibility, which I elsewhere questioned as follows:
The discipline of business ethics should be reoriented around a more sophisticated understanding of capitalism proper. Business ethicists should also respect methodological individualism given that in both the primary and final analyses, businesses do not act, individual businessmen and businesswomen do. Because corporate social responsibility (CSR) speaks to the elusive whole more than to the parts, much business-ethics thinking has become prone to a central- and social-planning mentality.
Think Enron! As I wrote in this rebuttal letter published yesterday in the Journal:
Al Gore and David Blood’s “A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism” (12/14/11) reminded me of nothing so much as Enron Corporation, whose demise ten years ago is still the topic of debate and learning.
“We believe that incorporating environmental and social considerations into the way we manage risk, govern our projects, and develop products and services will help us maintain our competitive advantage,” Ken Lay stated Gore-like. “As we move forward, we will leverage our intellectual capital and innovative capabilities to promote sustainable business practices around the world.”
Enron had divisions in wind, solar, emissions trading, and energy efficiency services–pillars of sustainable capitalism in Gore and Blood’s calculus. Enron, according to Greenpeace official Jeremy Leggett, was also “the company most responsible for sparking off the greenhouse civil war in the hydrocarbon business.”
Enron’s “green” bets proved quite unsustainable. The company’s renewable energy ventures never turned a profit, and its energy efficiency services via Enron Energy Services was an accounting fraud.
“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good,” Adam Smith cautioned in 1776. “It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.” Remember Enron, and beware of ‘sustainable capitalism’.
Is it a coincidence that Gore makes his play for sustainable capitalism just as the EPA announce consultations on their Green Book?
“Sustainable” is such an abused term nowadays. In this context it basically means screwing the public over the long term. He is America’s most famous slime bag.
He made a 100 million bucks preaching AGW and its variants, that is removing the carbon atom from our economies. Now, that AGW is dead, he wants to make another 100 million bucks preaching the opposite, putting the carbon atom back into the economy, but, of course, sustainably. maybe he gets his second (ig)Nobel prize for peace (or scams).
Is this April 1st? An article by “Blood and Gore” on capitalism?
“Desperation” by the so-called New World Order advocates are finding their rhetoric isn’t doing what it was supposed to do. Make people “think” there is only one way to “save the world” by endorsing anything and everything these idiot’s say!
These “elitist” losers don’t seem to realize that WE are Billions while they only number in the thousands! Majority rules folks!…..it’s called Democracy!
[…] Al Gore Reinvention? (From ‘climate change’ to ‘sustainable capitalism’) — MasterResource No doubt his handlers have given Al Gore the word: go easy on climate warming (aka climate change). The issue has little traction. You are the wrong voice for the cause. Solyndra. Climategate 2.0. Winter snows…. Not now, Al. […]
‘sustainable capitalism’
= to be practically implemented as ‘regulated capitalism’
= via classical ‘central planning’
= which is nothing more than ‘socialism’.
In other words, Gore is a Watermelon. Just like all the other hippies. Nothing new there: the end-goal has always been a given, the method to get there has also always been a given – all that changes are the justifications. This is why politicians are always carping on about ‘new’ ways of doing things: i.e. new lies to replace the old lies that have become exposed for what they are.
The problem here is that people are still surprised by this sort of ‘reveal’: it implies an utter mindlessness in people in general who still, like the brain-dead zombies they are, still ‘believe’ that the hippies can be reasoned with. Fools: people who are that utterly oblivious to the death, suffering and misery they cause are beyond the reach of reason; or for that matter sanity itself.
I always get mixed up between Gore and Goebbels. Which is this again?