Is Stupidity an Effective Legal Defense?

A Layperson’s Opinion–

Somehow,  failure has become a guiding principle for our corporate society. Does that foreshadow a day when corporate stupidity might therefore become a defensible legal argument?

Consider this. Instead of facing challenges head on, like climate change, racism, unemployment, or corporate corruption we see unfiltered information evoking media blasts declaring how journalists, scientists, and others are creating a climate of fear, selling out for funding, or spinning the truth to meet a researcher’s own objectives. Insofar as climate change (anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance), we often read:

• Societal research says the climate is too big a problem to solve. So we will just have to cope with it.
• If we turn the problem into an economic problem, it will be acceptable to all.
• If we turn the problem into a technology problem, gates will open, and the problem will go away.
• Partisan divide keeps us from addressing the climate problem. It’s an issue of political will we cannot solve.
• Making people afraid of the new climate regime is worse than the problem itself. Media therefore has the right to keep the truth from the commoner.
• It makes sense to hide research if the resulting actions invoke dramatic change.
• Push facts into the far future whether they belong there or not.
• Over population (that means you and I) is the real problem.

What the heck? What happened to America’s “Can Do” attitude? Could the answer possibly lie in the intrusive policies of corporate leadership hell-bent on keeping investors happy? Or dare I write it–perhaps our corporate citizens are just plain stupid, or worse?

In the early 1970’s, the US Chamber of Commerce distributed and backed a document called the Powell Memo. It declared corporate America must step up to the plate to mold the nation (I don’t see any pun) by influencing public opinion and changing the research process to meet corporate objectives. Satire declares this theory was born of early research by General Bullmoose (1959).

Accepted and implemented nationwide over the last forty years, amplified corporate involvement in research, media, and policy has evoked criticism over the influence of the corporate citizens in our daily lives. Insofar as America’s “Can Do” attitude, perhaps our corporate citizens’ methods and purpose for funding research has become questionable. (I know you are shocked.) Current allegations include assertion that industry funded research is:

• Corrupted by the profit motive;
• Seeks to harvest doubt, not deliver facts if facts negatively impact equity prices;
• Too often seeks to undermine rational science with junk science;
• Relegates science to a fool’s enterprise by making it subservient to economics and media;
• Colors think tanks with a tint of the cat-house–because often enough research never sees the light of day–if the results do not match the objectives of corporate sponsors;
• Muddles the line between legitimate research and bribery;
• Corrupts the academic process;
• Develops a taste for bribery among researchers;
• The profit motive undercuts technology transfer among researchers so corporate control of research is a stupid idea if you want your nation to be a technological leader.

There’s that word again: Stupid. I suppose one could make the argument–and many continue to–that stupidity is a choice. That stupidity is any citizen’s right–and therefore an option to our corporate citizens. Consider one set of corporate citizens, the utility companies, and the way they deal with research results. I paraphrase:

• We cannot effectively address the requirements of the changing climate because cleaning GHGs in the flue  of fossil fuel plants costs a few hundred million per facility. We have therefore concluded the population just doesn’t want to pay the cost. Social and economic forces prevent us from cleaning the GHGs from our stacks.
• Renewable energy has cut down on our revenue stream. The switch to renewables will thus not only cost you more, but utilities must lobby to slow systemic change to renewables so we can depreciate assets and profitably become your infrastructure partner.
• We will work to limit the acceptance of solar, wind, and any other technologies that slices into our balance sheet. Honestly, the population doesn’t want to pay the costs of our shortsighted planning so renewables must wait…
• Centralized control of the grid was reliable in 1980. Distributed control of the grid is dangerous. The public just doesn’t understand.
• Renewables are not an effective base load system because batteries and other systems are not up to the task.
• What’s a microgrid?
• And of course, “Climate change is a serious issue, but our hands are tied…”

So, to recap (Al not withstanding), corporate stupidity appears to be the right of our corporate citizens so long as it is in support of the profit motive and equity prices. Or to put it in a countrywide framework, “…The U.S. Chamber (of Commerce) promotes market-based solutions, policies that foster investment in technology research and deployment, and balanced regulatory treatment of technical platforms.”

Yet, if science hadn’t been under attack from fossil fuel dependent corporations, by special interest groups, by investors, the clarity that many scientists developed in the mid-1990s–about anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance–would have filtered out to the public and politicians twenty years ago. Instead, reactionary corporate mandates tied to an acceptance of the Powell Memo chains our nation to a mid-20^th century view of energy generation. We could have been much further up the curve of dealing with climate change if science controlled R&D–not equity positions. To this day, credible research remains under assault by stupidity and the profit motive.

The state of New York and the state of California are investigating Exxon/Mobil–and the fossil fuels industry–over allegations the fossil fuel industry intentionally works against the public good by undercutting climate science.

Have you heard the GHGT series of conferences? They are a series of trade conferences initially put on by the fossil fuels industry (not universities) to address greenhouse gases because GHGs were identified by the fossil fuels industry as dangerous to us all. GHGT stands for Greenhouse Gas Control Technology. The first GHGT conference was held in the mid-1990’s. At the same time, the mid-1990s, the fossil-fuel-industry-spinmeisters (PR people) began stepping up attacks on climate science through shills and the media.

In 2004, I attended GHGT-7 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference was full of industry researchers and university people presenting state of the art information on controlling CO₂ and other GHGs because CO₂ and alike were accepted by corporate research teams as deadly emissions. (Don’t stand in a valley full of CO₂. It will kill you.) The researchers at the GHGT I attended were from Shell, Exxon, BP–and other carbon-based industries.

Returning to our theme of corporate stupidity, does the fostering of the GHGT series mean our fossil-fuel-corporate-citizens didn’t really mean to corrupt the process of building political will, distort understanding, or undercut science? Or does it mean our fossil-fuel-corporate-citizens did mean to betray the nation and its citizens once they mistakenly concluded the fossil fuel industry was the cause of global climate change. (This is a clear example of corporate stupidity. The fossil fuel industry is not the cause of climate change. Our need for cheap energy is the root-cause. On the other hand, once the fossil-fuel-corporate-citizens take up the spear of lies to gut the truth, undercut political will, and delay effective action against the national threat they become culpable. Tell me their myopia is not stupidity.) So again, is stupidity a defense?

Perhaps there is another term we could use. Consider that our fossil-fuel-corporate-citizens use lies, propagandistic methods, and attacks on innocent scientists, which, in effect, enhances climate damage to people, places, and things–like companies. That by promoting propaganda our fossil-fuel-corporate-citizens eviscerated the layperson’s chance to understand anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance (Global Warming) thereby setting back the layperson’s comprehension of the problem by twenty years. Is it a crime if lies cripple our nation’s effective response to a threat? Could our corporate citizens be prosecuted because of their involvement in the enhanced morbidity of people and their pets from disease caused by climate change–or just the increased amount of dead folk? The term manslaughter–which is a legal term that applies to murder without deliberation, premeditation, and malice–doesn’t apply. Perhaps we could use the term climate-slaughter.

Probably not, I suggest, because the immense death and destruction coming at us is a developing event. Nope, climate-slaughter will not work…Yet. How about corporate-stupidity-slaughter? After all, stupidity is sometimes a product of shortsighted corporate policy–sadly, their most important product–for you and yours in the years to come.

Our nation is entering a period of intense suffering because science, research, and technology remain constrained–in the national sense–by a shortsighted corporate objective: profit. Worse, our corporate citizens cannot even feel the pain they inflict on humans by having delayed our national response to climate change. So the corporate citizen’s behavior is clearly antisocial–in the case of climate change. And even scarier, corporate citizens have no social conscience. Their profit motive forbids it. Most importantly, a corporation is a thing, not a person. In that, we have an answer: Whether or not stupidity is defensible is not the core issue. It may be relevant, but the core issue is corporate citizens must pursue the profit motive; and that sometimes leads to sociopathic corporate behavior, which must never be defensible in our courts of law.