Riding the Dragon: Royal Dutch Shell and the Fossil Fire
By Jack Doyle
Environmental Health Fund, Boston
Available for free download at <http://www.shellfacts.com>
Hard copies can be ordered from Gary Cohen, Environmental Health Fund, 41 Oakview Terrace, Jamaica Plain, MA, 02130, USA
Include a US$15 international postal order.
REVIEWED BY DALE T McKINLEY
As the world watched the latest oil-related environmental tragedy — the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige off Europe's eastern Atlantic coastline — a book dedicated to telling the "story" of one of the world's most successful but hated oil corporations, Royal Dutch Shell, was released. While the book's author, Jack Doyle, and its publisher might have congratulated themselves for such good timing, Shell's executives and shareholders probably heaved a big sigh of relief. Riding the Dragon is a let down.
There could be few better, or easier, contemporary "targets" for critical investigation and analysis than the giant Shell corporation. In its 100+ years of "riding the hydrocarbon dragon", the pride of Dutch and British corporate capital has been responsible, either directly or indirectly, for more human misery and environmental destruction than even the most cynical anti-capitalist could imagine.
From its humble beginnings as an importer of seashells (thus its name and logo) from Asia to Europe in the late 1800s, Shell has turned itself into a formidable multinational corporation whose 2001 revenue of US$150 billion dwarfs the GDPs of all but the world's wealthiest countries.
Despite Doyle's characterisation of Shell as being an essentially "good", and even "outstanding", company, with negative practices which have been merely occasional rather than the norm, the corporation's history, as partially exposed in the book, reveals a systematic and ruthless pursuit of profit regardless of the human and environmental costs.
A prime example of this is the horrendous record (both past and present) of Shell's operations at the South African Petroleum Refinery in heavily populated South Durban, South Africa. In the past five years alone, there has been a litany of "accidents" involving pipeline leaks (more than 1 million litres of fuel leaked into the underground water table in July, 2001), burst holding tanks that have spewed deadly concentrations of lead into the surrounding environment and massive emissions of carcinogenic sulfur dioxide that have repeatedly been under-reported by Shell management.
As a result, the predominately working-class South Durban community suffers levels leukaemia rate 24 times the South African average and must breath air containing levels of benzene that are up to 30 times those found in other developed countries.
Despite Riding the Dragon's impressive empirical evidence and descriptions that detail the character and content of Shell's corporate practices across the globe, Doyle appears to ignore the analytical logic of much of his own research. When Shell is shown to be responsible for more than 4000 oil spills and pipeline leaks since the 1960s in Nigeria alone — with no convincing evidence to suggest that the situation is improving — is it not the height of folly to suggest an answer lies with the application of better "corporate responsibility"? This begs the question: what kind of responsibility, and to whom?
For example, what kind of "responsibility" did Shell display, and to whom did they answer, when Nigerian community and political activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was murdered by a Nigerian military regime for exposing the symbiotic relationship between the regime and Shell's operations in the oil-rich Niger Delta? Who was Shell answering to when one of its refineries in the US state of Louisiana was held formally responsible for unlawfully discharging more than 420,000 kilograms of sulfur dioxide within six months without receiving so much as 1 cent in fines?
The answer, which Doyle seems incapable of grasping, is that such "responsibility" is determined by that basest of capitalist principles, the profit margin. That is the nature of the corporate "dragon" and it is to the profit god that these dragons answer and pay homage. Human beings and the environment in which they live are simply a means to that end. No amount of well-intentioned arguments for "stakeholder" consultation or environmental watchdog role-playing has ever, or will ever, force fundamental change in the way capitalist mega-corporations like Shell operate.
Shell made a record US$11 billion in profits last year by remaining true to its historic "business model" and institutional mandate, and its projected profit margins for the foreseeable future look even brighter. What better confirmation does Shell need for maintaining the status quo, even if it does feel the occasional need to engage in mea culpa politics and to spend small change to show how "humane" and "environmentally friendly" it can be? Doyle is simply fooling himself and his readers when he states: "Shell can become a new kind of corporation that changes the paradigm".
For the people (and environments) that have suffered, and continue to suffer, under the "profit burden" of corporations like Shell, any meaningful change of "paradigm", as radical as it may sound, can only come through mass democratic struggle that results in the socialisation of the ownership, extraction, manufacturing and distribution of natural resources.
Doyle's argument for Shell to adopt a "new, safer business model" that moves away from reliance on fossil fuels towards the exploitation of cleaner, renewable sources of energy sounds more like a naive moral plea than a serious critical assessment of the realities that frame the contemporary character and content of the activities of corporate capital.
Not long after Saro-Wiwa's murder and the resultant outcry directed at Shell's role in Nigeria, the corporation's top management produced a paper entitled, Profits and principles: does there have to be a choice?. What Riding the Dragon reveals, even if not by the author's design or intent, is that for corporate capital (like Shell) there is no choice between them: profit is the principle.
As long as this remains the reality, Shell will continue to wreak havoc on people's lives and the environments which sustain them. It's time to stop trying to ride and pacify the dragons, they must be slain.
From Green Left Weekly, January 22, 2003.
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