When a company or an entire industry skips over the good of the whole—the public good—in lobbying for legislation that only reflects the needs or desires of individuals (qua consumers only), the society itself (and even the Earth) is slighted and thus more at risk. For the good of the whole is more than just the cumulative needs and desires of individuals in part because the latter do not take into account the wider effects of their choices. When an individual company or industry takes this point into account and rebuffs favorable legislative proposals because they would do too much damage to society and/or the planet, social responsibility is at hand. Companies or industries that do not are thus irresponsible from the standpoint of the whole, which, through government, is justified in keeping an eye on them (especially in making transparent their efforts to influence legislation and regulation. The American auto and oil industries can be distinguished in this regard.
“When the Trump administration
laid out a plan” in 2018 that would have eventually allowed “cars to emit more
pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The
changes, they said, went too far even for them.”[1]
Too far even for the obvious winners—an amazing statement, considering that
companies and industries generally try to get as much as they can in terms of
deregulation and favorable laws.
Another industry, however,
fueled by the efforts of Marathon Petroleum, “was pushing for the changes all
along.”[2]
The campaign’s main argument “for significantly easing fuel efficiency
standards” was “that the United States [was] so awash in oil” that energy
conservation need no longer be a worry.[3]
This statement blatantly misses the point that the standards that were in place
then were also to reduce emissions of CO2 from
what they would otherwise have been from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Interestingly, the American
oil industry must have missed the memo on the continuing increases in the emissions.
In fact, 2017 saw a record
amount of emissions added to the atmosphere; the Paris Accord in 2015 was already
proving to have been a failure. Issued
in early October, 2018, a “landmark report” from the UN’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change “paints a far more dire picture of the immediate
consequences of climate change than previously thought.”[4]
The report states that if “greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current
rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5
degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and
intensifying droughts and poverty.”[5]
This was the context in which the oil industry was running “a stealth campaign
to roll back car emissions standards.”[6]
The industry’s rationale
reduced everything to the needs and desires of individual customers with no
consideration of the impact on even them, not to mention humanity—including possibly
its very survival. “With oil scarcity no longer a concern,” Americans should be
given a “choice in vehicles that best fit their needs,” read a draft of a
letter that Marathon helped to circulate to members of Congress over the
summer. Official correspondence later sent to regulators by more than a dozen
lawmakers included phrases or sentences from the industry talking points, and
the Trump administration’s proposed rules incorporate similar logic.”[7]
Of course, that a “quarter of the world’s oil is used to power cars, and
less-thirsty vehicles mean lower gasoline sales” was not missed on either
Marathon or its industry as a whole.[8]
But the notion of a whole apparently
stopped at the industry level; externalities beyond that, even one bearing on
the future of mankind, were apparently of no concern.
Marathon Petroleum even “teamed
up with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a secret policy group financed
by corporations as well as the Koch network, to draft legislation for states
supporting the industry’s position. [The] proposed resolution, dated Sept. 18,
describes [the then] current fuel-efficiency rules as ‘a relic of a disproven
narrative of resource scarcity’ and [urges that ‘unelected bureaucrats’ shouldn’t
dictate the cars Americans drive.”[9]
The resolution’s language doubtlessly included the council’s talking points,
which, in staying on the “resource scarcity” rationale for standards, neglect
the obvious link between emissions and climate change. Furthermore, the smack
on “unelected bureaucrats” demonstrates no regard for government as standing
for the interests of the whole when externalities from cumulative individual
decisions are too much from the
perspective of the whole. To be sure, with industries swaying legislators
and regulators in democracies, laws and regulations can indeed benefit a part
at the expense of the whole, but this deplorable flaw does not negate the need
to protect the whole from parts from exploiting conflicts of interest. Unlike
the auto industry, the oil industry sought to exploit its conflict of interest
by putting its narrow interest ahead of that of the whole where the whole supposed to be paramount—in the halls of
government.
I suggest, therefore, that
heightened scrutiny is warranted where a company or industry (or the business
sector—still but a part of the whole) seeks to influence lawmakers, regulators,
or the general public in line with the private (profit) interest. This is
especially needed in a culture that is generally in line with its business
sector’s values. People and government officials alike in such a culture (such
as that of the U.S.A.) find it difficult to realize the need to see that such
conflicts of interest are not exploited. In fact, in my book, Institutional Conflicts of Interest, I
argue that a conflict of interest is inherently unethical even if it is not
exploited. A few other scholars on the subject argue in contrast that if a
conflict of interest is not exploited, no harm is involved, but I contend that
another reason exists why arrangements or situations that include conflicts of
interest are unethical. I actually met one of those scholars on the Loyola
campus in Chicago, but once in his office, I found he only wanted to talk about
Obama. So much for scholarly exchanges.
1. Hiroko Tabuchi, “The
Oil Industry’s Covert Campaign to Rewrite American Car Emissions Rules,” The New York Times, December 13, 2018.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Coral Davenport, “Major
Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040,” The New York Times, October 7, 2018.
5. Ibid.
6. Hiroko
Tabuchi, “The
Oil Industry’s Covert Campaign to Rewrite American Car Emissions Rules,” The New York Times, December 13, 2018.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
