Killing With Kindness.

• Author: SCHMIDHEINY, STEPHAN
• Position: Brief Article

Bush will only weaken companies by exempting them from environmental standards.

One of the biggest challenges President George W. Bush is facing in the early stages of his presidency concerns energy and the environment. How can his administration protect the environment and at the same time keep U.S. businesses competitive in the global economy? The answer to this vexing question may lie in an approach that was outlined during an Oval Office meeting in which I participated almost ten years ago.

At that time, a group of executives from international companies, which had formed the Business Council for Sustainable Development, was invited to the White House. We were there to present to the first President Bush a report that we had prepared for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit on ways in which business could contribute more towards sustainable human progress. Our report explained how business could produce more goods and services with less waste and pollution, and how we could be better "corporate citizens." We asked governments for appropriate "framework conditions."

In that meeting, predominantly with the Council's U.S. members--companies such as 3M, Alcoa, Browning-Ferris, Chevron, Dow, and Dupont--President Bush started out merely polite, but slowly became very interested.

He eventually took me into the Oval Office for a private chat and essentially made an interesting confession. In his long political career, he said, he had met with lots of business groups, but they usually came to ask for favors: protection here, a subsidy or a special deal there. He asked me to explain how we could lobby him with what he considered solutions, while others lobbied him with problems.

I said it was simple. He had mostly been hearing from the uncompetitive companies, those who needed help. That day, in contrast, he heard from the competitive U.S. companies, those that did not need to lobby, those that were too busy making profits to lobby government.

Apparently the forty-first President did not pass on to his son the can-do spirit displayed by those U.S. business leaders of ten years ago. Or perhaps the current president is still being lobbied only by uncompetitive companies.

History shows that the worst thing a business-friendly government--such as the current Bush administration--can do is to go easy on business. Britain, for example, once had a world-famous car industry, but successive governments required little of these companies. They failed to compete...