No more squishy, hand-wringing-on-bended-knees pleading by conservationists for an end to air pollution.
"Green" groups are taking a lesson from hard-nosed corporate executives who have the ear of politicians because of their industrial financial clout.
Money, indeed, seems to talk.
Conservation groups and their allies, as owners of blocks of stock, are putting more pressure on financial institutions and industries to join in the attack on deteriorating air quality.
The results have been astonishing and should embarrass lawmakers who have isolated the United States as the world's only industrial nation to not ratify the Kyoto Treaty on global warming and failed to rein in sources of air pollution and greenhouse gases at home.
In one new development, the financial giant J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has agreed to new lending guidelines that make emissions controls conditions for corporate loans to industry. Also, J.P. Morgan will lobby the U.S. government for more stringent emission control standards.
Morgan's new policy comes after unrelenting lobbying by the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network and after new pro-green policies were adopted by Morgan competitors, Citigroup and Bank of America.
Smart conservationists are applying pressure elsewhere, too. At the May stockholders meeting of ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, conservationists with the backing of 20 percent of the shareholders will ask executives to explain how the company plans to reduce greenhouse emissions from fuels in the five Kyoto signatory countries. These include Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, which produce 37 percent of its revenues.
Back home, the state of Oregon is on the brink of becoming the 10th state to adopt tougher auto emissions standards to attack global warming.
And this: conservationists also have learned from Republicans about the power of religion. "Religious environmentalists" have started a groundswell of pressure on politicians, linking the biblical entreaty to be stewards of God's gifts.
The new tactics have a high probability of success over time. Business and political resistance to aggressively protecting the environment is based wholly on sparing industry the trouble and expense of protecting the earth's resources, bolstered by the vacuous excuse that jobs will be lost because of higher standards.
Slowly, ordinary Americans may discover that they can stop politicians and institutions that foul the quality of our world solely for the sake of profits.
