Profits & Prophets

Art Immitates Stupidity

The AP is reporting on an artist who seems to have been sniffing paint fumes a bit too much.  Mark McGowan is an "artist" who has a new exhibit called "Running Water" that consists solely of a running faucet in a small kitchen in a London art gallery.  He is going to leave the water running for an entire year to - get this - protest the waste of water in London.

The exhibit will be both wasteful and pricey.  Over the course of the year, he will waste an estimated 3.9 million gallons of water.  Since the exhibit started three weeks ago, he has already wasted 193,000 gallons of water during the driest Summer in London since 1976.

I certainly sympathize with the guy's environmentalism, but he seems to have missed the point in his desire to be thought-provoking.  To waste 3.9 million gallons of clean drinking water when millions of people on the Earth are dying for want of clean drinking water is unconscionable.

This isn't art. It's lack of creativity and laziness.  "Art" would have been setting up the exhibit so that a small pump under the sink recirculated the water to the faucet so you would have the image of wastefulness for people to reflect on without actually being wasteful.

We can only hope that no donor steps up to fund this stupidity since it sounds like the exhibit will prematurely end as soon as the poorly-funded gallery (who is paying for the exhibit) gets its first water bill.

G8 does good (but not great)

It's hard to know how much the terrorist attacks yesterday in London caused the G8 leaders to take their eyes off the ball, but as the G8 Summit wound down today, it's apparent that Tony Blair and many of us are a little disappointed with what was ultimately accomplished.  Some of the more concrete and/or higher profile results in a nutshell:

• G8 leaders agreed to double aid to Africa from $25B to $50B, but didn't go the next step to match Blair's challenge to commit 0.7 percent of their nations' incomes to foreign aid by 2015.  The EU agreed to that level of support but the U.S. balked - the U.S. is currently giving 0.16 percent of national income, the smallest percentage of any of the G8 nations.
• The leaders agreed on a deal to cancel the debt of the world's 18 poorest nations, 14 of which are in Africa.
• The G8 members agreed to work toward freer trade with poor nations, including ending farm subsidies that make it very difficult for poorer nations to export their agricultural goods to richer nations (the details will be worked out at the WTO meeting in December) - this may be more important to Africa's future than the debt relief.
• G8 leaders tried to reach a consensus on reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions, but again, Bush balked at a firm number.  On the plus side, Bush admitted that global warming is an issue and that human activity is partly to blame for climate change; positions he has previously resisted.
• The leaders committed $3-9B aid to the Palestinians which may have a positive effect on the Israeli/Palestinian peace process.

It's a shame that the G8 did not achieve the full scale of the goals that they had set out to accomplish, and an even bigger shame that the U.S., the richest of the G8 nations, was the roadblock to two of the more important goals (aid to Africa as a percentage of GNP and greenhouse gas emission reduction), but the aid and trade deals, combined with the concomitant better governance from African leaders, is a big step in the right direction for Africa.  It will be interesting to watch what happens over the next few years as a result of this G8 Summit.

Why I still won't buy gas at Exxon Mobil

It's been more than 15 years since the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil across 1,300 miles of coastline in one of the worst environmental disasters of our times.  Exxon's response was pitiful (here's a nice case study in how not to handle a crisis) and a consumer boycott of Exxon was one of the many ramifications.  I participated in that boycott and though I'm certainly one to give people/organizations a second chance (or third or fourth . . .), Exxon Mobil continues to be the type of company that seems to have little to no concern for anything but profits.

Today, The Wall Street Journal has a front-page article [subscription required] about Exxon Mobil's response to the issue of global warming.  A telling line from the article:

Exxon's approach to global warming typifies the bottom-line focus of its entire business.

While other forward-thinking energy companies such as Shell and BP support the emission caps established by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and are investing to find renewable energy sources, Exxon Mobil is investing in think tanks and scientists to cast doubt on the now nearly universal scientific consensus on the impact of burning fossil fuels on global warming.  It seems that Exxon Mobil has not learned much since the Valdez days when it also tried to play down the magnitude of the situation.

Exxon Mobil may be the world's largest oil company, but I continue to drive past its stations to buy my gas at the Shell station (even if it costs me more to do so) and wait for that day when Exxon Mobil is forced to play catch-up to the more responsible energy producers who are preparing for the future today.