Wanted - Sir Mark Moody Stuart
For conspiring to sabotage the Earth Summit and for greenwashing big-business to the detriment of society and the environment.

Despite promoting himself as Mr Corporate Social Responsibility, Moody-Stuart heads Business Action for Sustainable Development - the business lobby group largely responsible for wrecking the Earth Summit. He is also a director of several companies involved in activities that belie his pledged commitment to 'sustainable development'

The new brand of corporate environmentalism
A relentless self-publicist, in recent years Mark Moody-Stuart has reinvented himself as an expert on 'sustainable development'. He is one of the leading purveyors of a new and worrying type of corporate environmentalism. By claiming that 'business is part of the solution' and perpetuating the myth that trade liberalisation and fat company profits can go hand in hand with social and environmental justice, Moody-Stuart - and others like him - are jeopardising the very future of the planet.

green*wash: (n) Disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.

Business Action for Sustained Destruction
Sir Mark Moody-Stuart currently heads the Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD) initiative. The BASD was essentially invented to wage a PR campaign at the Earth Summit. Through this vehicle the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) extolled the virtues of voluntary initiatives and self-regulation, and hence thwarted efforts to achieve binding international regulation of corporations. The list of BASD members is telling and includes companies such as Rio Tinto, BP, Proctor & Gamble and Shell.

BASD's efforts were extremely successful. The Earth Summit is widely accepted by environmentalists as having been an unmitigated disaster. Corporations managed to completely escape any regulation of their activities and the only thing of note that was achieved was a framework for voluntary partnerships between big business, governments and NGOs. In other words it will be 'business as usual' for the corporations - largely down to the efforts of BASD.

Utter Hypocrisy
While Moody-Stuart was at the Earth Summit preaching the benefits of a voluntary approach to Corporate Social Responsibility, several of the companies of which he is a director were busy proving just how unrealistic this is.

Moody Stuart is Director of the following companies:
· Shell
Despite professing to be concerned about climate change and to be investing in renewable energy, Shell has not ceased, or scaled back, its oil exploration and production activities. In fact the company intends to increase oil and gas extraction by 5 per-cent year on year and is so far on target.

In addition, Shell is one of the oil companies that the United Nations has accused of being complicit in the killing and displacement by the government of Sudan of thousands of civilians living around the country's oil fields.

· HSBC
Continuing the Sudan theme, HSBC has recently helped issue new European bonds for oil companies with massive investments in Sudan. The company is also currently the target of a Friends of the Earth campaign for its financing of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP). APP is the biggest pulp producer in Asia and is responsible for destroying a large area of Indonesian rainforest.

· Accenture
Moody Stuart is also on the board of Bermuda tax-haven-based Accenture. The company's clients include such socially responsible companies as TotalFinaElf, which supports the brutal military dictatorship in Burma, and Sara Lee, which caused the deaths of 21 people last year by selling Listeria infected hotdogs.

· Anglo American
This company has a long history of exploitation of African labour and has recently faced criticism regarding its planned operations in Peru and alleged pollution in Zambia. The company, which was a pillar of apartheid South Africa, has left behind a legacy of billions of dollars of damage to the environment and communities around Johannesburg itself, the site of the Earth Summit.

Regardless of whether Moody-Stuart actually believes his own rhetoric, its net effect on the Earth Summit has been the same - its complete sabotage. The most dangerous man in the world? - Quite possibly.

Slob a dob a custard,
Green snot pie.
All mixed up with,
A dead dog's eye.

Is there any continuity here with the Greenwash guerillas that surfaced to expose similar corporate greenwash during the cop 6 climate conference in den haag?

Congratulations on a much needed action... I would like to draw peoples attention to the fact that during the Earth Summit, Greenpeace released a joint press release with the World Business Council for Greenwash. On the WBCSD website it proclaimed that 'Greenpeace and corporations' had joined together in historic agreement to push governments to sign the Kyoto protocol.
Consequentially giving the one thing to the WBCSD they needed, legitimacy and justification to carry on Greenwashing us out of existence.
grrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhh

Wouldn't it just be terrible if it ever turned out that these evil corporations are run by ordinary human beings with children and grandchildren who live in the same world that we do and breathe the same air. Worse still, they might even mean what they say and actually be trying to help. Wouldn't that just turn your self satisfied elitist world view on its head. What if the shareholder's of these evil companies actually turned out to be the pension schemes that pay your dad's pension or the insurance companies that insure your flat. If these guys weren't evil what would YOU do to feel good about yourselves.

If you don't want mobile phone masts then don't buy mobile phones. If you don't like fossil fuels then don't use em. Convince enough people voluntarily to follow your lead and you'll change the world. I don't think that you will because ordinary people want these things.

Business is not evil, it's just groups of people coming together to do something constructive. Of course business is part of the solution.