Of Petrochemical Companies and Corporate Social Responsibility

By: Ferdinand Sy


Many have wondered a year ago – in 2008 – whether if the crude oil trading via the commodities speculation game “might” push the already teetering global economy over the edge. Given that everyone and their dog’s pension funds – not to mention pension funds – are used by commodities speculators to hike up crude oil prices to almost 150 US dollars a barrel back in July 2008. It surely looks like the greed of commodities speculators will be the end of us all. Fast forward to 2009 and OPEC already has plans to keep prices of crude oil within 3 to 10% of August 2009 prices for the rest of the year citing reduced demand. You can now start wondering whether petrochemical companies - multi-national corporations or nationalized OPEC members - ever possess a semblance of corporate social responsibility.

Even though former US Vice President Al Gore was “too polite” to have mentioned it in his environmental opus called An Inconvenient Truth. Over the past few years, the crude oil lobbyists in the Capitol Hill had been very busy funding their own “information campaign” to tell everyone that global warming is not caused by fossil fuel burning. They even managed to buy off the American “Religious Right”, which is quite odd given that America’s Religious Right was very busy bitching about the wholesale destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest during the second half of the Reagan Administration.

Do petrochemical companies want to be compared with the famed hedge fund fraudster Bernie Madoff? Of course not, but if these crude oil companies continue to run their business like it is still George “Dubya” Bush on the helm of the White House, then petrochemical companies are probably selling the most unethically produced commodity on the face of the planet. You could be right for saying that the cars of today are run with the blood of young Americans cut down in their prime. Sadly, it is not very easy to boycott petroleum, let alone plastics. Given that almost everything around has been made with plastic since the end of World War II.