Memo to REC: "Sustainability Index" Is an Oxymoron!

The current fetish with environmental sustainability lies beneath the Roberts Environmental Center report that assessed companies based upon their supposed “social responsibility."

Of course whenever you hear the words “sustainability,” you ought to be on the lookout. It is Orwellian for dirigisme - or the belief that we can tinker with the world economy to get the results that some have arbitrarily defined as socially good. In truth, companies only have one real responsibility: profit and its companion, growth.

But you wouldn’t know that from reading the report that was picked up by a press that little understands business, let alone economic growth.

If you look at the front page of the 132 page report, you will see that there is a new slogan — “Help commerce help Nature.” (I'll update the image once Blogger lets me.) It’s as if it were something wrong with capitalism, the process by which millions of people have been lifted out of the stone age.

You’ll notice that our real motto “civilization prospers with commerce” is minuscule print. The message is clear: Roberts Environmental center is apologizing for our erstwhile focus on the real issues. They have decided to do some environmental emoting instead by compiling the “social and environmental” self-reporting of California publicly traded companies and by looking at their websites to see if they mention “human rights” or environmental protection.

The authors dub their report the Pacific Sustainability Index. But the real purpose of any index isn’t “sustainability” at all, but maximizing growth. (Sadly, sloppy language is something very common with do-gooder progressives.)

Unsurprisingly, the study - if it could be called that -- comes up with some rather silly results. Did you know Chevron got an A+? (It’s probably due to their PR department, flush with all those dollars from the pump, pulling a fast one… Who could blame them for trying to get good PR? The Left often uses a hatchet on the oil people - the very people and companies responsible for bringing us out of human misery and into the modern world.)

Nowhere is that more evident than in their report, entitled, “Analysis of Sustainability Reporting of Fortune Companies in California.” (Full report here http://www.roberts.cmc.edu/psi/PDF/California2007.pdf)

The report’s authors “find[s] that some, like Chevron, Hewlett-Packard and Walt Disney, publicized their sustainability on their Web sites, while others, like eBay, Google and Apple, rarely mentioned the subject, if at all.”

Maybe that’s because they are too busy making money to care about stupid economic planning.

Just ask yourself: Where would you rather work? Disney? Or Google?