The Western Standard, Alberta, May 8, 2006

With Kyoto failing, Maurice Strong, the father of the accord, says it's time for an all-out environmental revolution

In the $1,500-a-night, 1,200-square-foot Topaz Suite, on the corner of the 10th floor of Vancouver's swank Pan Pacific Hotel, Maurice Strong has just wrapped up a private discussion with Robert Fung, the multi-millionaire investment banker from Toronto. The two make plans to get together in a few weeks in Beijing, where Strong spends most of his time these days. The 77-year-old Strong settles back into a sectional. Behind him, a breathtaking panoramic view of Vancouver harbour twinkles. Now he's ready to talk revolution.

Originally from Oak Lake, Man., Strong is a well-known globetrotter, but he doesn't get back this way much these days. The former head of Ontario Hydro, Power Corp. and Petro-Canada is now also a former adviser to the UN secretary-general, as well as a former mentor to a Canadian prime minister (Paul Martin). So this hemisphere is possibly seeing less of the man than ever before. But he's stopped in to speak at March's biennial Globe conference on business and the environment. Put on by the Globe Foundation, the event has been held nine times in this same spot, and Strong hasn't missed a single one.

But the father of the Kyoto accord (Strong chaired the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro from which the pact was born) arrived this time with a more radical message than ever. Speaking of the environmental movement post-2012, the year Kyoto expires, Strong laid out a vision for what he thinks it will take to keep the green movement alive in the hearts of world governments. "What we really need are massive incentives for the right kind of behaviour," Strong explained at one seminar to an audience of roughly 400. "Economic incentives, but also moral incentives, ethical incentives, psychological incentives . . . fear."

What kind of fear? Of the uprising masses, of course. In discussions at the conference and conversations with this magazine, Strong makes it clear that he envisions massive "people's movements" as the only reliable motivator for environmental preservation. There's little question that for green crusaders like him, these are times of crisis. Not because the environment is getting worse, mind. In the U.S., for instance, a country widely accused of the worst industrial decadence, air pollution is at the lowest level ever recorded, forests and wetlands are increasing in number, not decreasing, and toxic, mercury and vehicle emissions are all in decline, according to the Pacific Research Institute.

In fact, that's the problem. Western governments have demonstrated through their actions, if not their words, that they've little appetite for collectivist, state-enforced environmental policies such as Kyoto. The U.S. never bothered signing on to the agreement. Last year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a former Kyoto booster, admitted his "thinking had changed" on the climate change agreement: "No country is going to cut its growth" to reduce emissions, he said.

And in Canada, the Conservative government's apathy toward Kyoto is even more palpable than that of its predecessors, the Liberals, who paid great lip service to the greenhouse gas agreement, but not much more. In April, federal Environment Minister Rona Ambrose announced that Ottawa would end funding for groups promoting the One-Tonne Challenge, a campaign to get Canadians to voluntarily reduce their own contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. What's a global-warming zealot to do?

"Political leaders cannot go far beyond what their constituents are prepared to accept, nor can those who are negative be more negative than what their constituents are willing to support," notes Strong, acknowledging that democratic solutions have their limits. "So, politics really responds to public movements. If you look at the great movements in history, the abolishment of the slave trade and all that, they didn't start with individual policies from governments. They were forced on them by people's movements. And that's the same with the environmental movement." Later, he adds: "And remember: the communist revolution was a people's revolution."

Maurice Strong is certainly an accomplished capitalist in his own right. He's headed up billion-dollar companies and sat on countless corporate boards (see sidebar, page 33). And despite his calls for environmental revolutions, he's invested money and efforts in the oil and gas sector, toxic waste handling, freshwater sales and the automotive business--one of his biggest projects currently is helping the Chinese government develop its own domestic car manufacturer.

But with his right foot firmly planted in the free market, Strong has always sounded just as much at home on the far left. "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse?" Strong said, while attending the Earth Summit. "Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" And his current plan for environmental revolution is shot through with similar ideas about capitalist collapse as a precursor to positive collectivist change. To reduce industrial emissions, he told the audience in Vancouver, "we may need a depression to do what we can willfully do on the positive side." And if changes don't come voluntarily, he warned, they would be forced on us: "They are going to be done much more harshly. . . . That means strong incentives and significant and enforceable penalties."

Strong has never been one to shy away from considering authoritarian solutions to societal problems. In the past, he's advocated Beijing-style population-control policies, suggesting that Canadians should have to obtain a licence to have children. "Licenses to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child," he once said.

In 1994, he created the Earth Charter (with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev), a manifesto for world governments, or as Strong put it: "The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments." Among other things, the charter called for the creation of "societies that are just, participatory, sustainable and peaceful" and "uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities." It also demanded "universal access to health care that fosters reproductive health and responsible reproduction."

But China has more to teach us than just population-control techniques, notes Strong, a renowned Sinophile. "They've raised more people out of poverty than any country has ever done in history," he says of his Communist hosts. In Beijing, he says, "they talk a lot these days about people's movements. Now, they don't want people's movements that are going to overturn their government. That's clear." But, he elaborates, "there are very few governments that can resist major popular movements for long periods of time. That's my point. And if we really want [something], don't just wait for the government, political leaders. You know, people's movements do make a difference."

But when the environmental revolution comes, Strong told the Globe conference, it will require "strict regulation and discipline. Highly organized societies, as we've seen, are the most successful societies." The trouble with western countries, he noted, is that "our open societies are self-disciplining but they are self-indulgent."

With reform comes re-education. Inculcating our children with environmental doctrine. Here, too, fear is a motivator, namely exploiting geopolitical unrest or natural disasters to create a sense of urgency about restructuring our industrial societies. Think about the way environmentalists use everything from rainy summers, cold winters, tsunamis and hurricane activity in the southern U.S. as ways to scare people about global warming. "Complacency is the enemy," Strong explained. "And if some of these anecdotal problems that exist, with the typhoons and weather-related problems, if they can help to generate political will . . . and I think they are helping. I see that. In the United States, why is the president suddenly declaring we are addicted to fossil fuels? People are gradually shifting, not because they are necessarily changing their minds, but because they are having to respond to what they see the public is forcing. So I'm a great believer that the public is at the root of any major political change and it will not get through without an educated, informed and agitated public," he said.

Those who have spent a lot of time with Strong insist that, despite the Hegelian rhetoric, the former UN envoy to North Korea is no Marxist--or Maoist, if you prefer. "I think he is generally interested in the environment," says Elaine Dewar, who did extensive biographical work on Strong in the course of writing her 1995 profile of the environmental movement, Cloak of Green. "The frame in his head is how do we get businesses up and running, how do we get societies producing surpluses, and how do you do that without choking to death. He's interested in development, in other words. He doesn't want people being dirt poor like he was," Dewar says.

Born in 1929, Strong was a child of the dirty thirties. The family was impoverished when his father lost his job as a junior station manager with the Canadian Pacific Railroad. His mother died at 56 in a mental institution--something Strong blamed on the Depression. At 14, he ran away from home and found work on a Canadian Pacific ship, ferrying U.S. troops from Victoria, B.C., to Alaska, until his father brought him home. Though Strong has self-identified as a socialist, Dewar says that his lack of education (he completed Grade 11) means he's probably not sure of how to classify his own ideology. "If you have a political science degree, you have a bunch of categories in your head that he doesn't have," she says from her home in Toronto. "He has practical experience and that counts for a lot, but if you try to put him inside some kind of ideological box, he's going to pop out because he doesn't really fit, because he never got in."

Still, Strong acknowledges that he was heavily influenced in his youth by reading the works of his distant cousin, Anna Louise Strong, the American journalist who became a spy for the Soviet Union. "The Chinese up-play that, but I tend to downplay that," says Maurice. "I say yes, she is a distant relative, but more particularly she was quite an influence on me because when she wrote about China it fascinated me." Anna Louise spent years travelling the U.S.S.R. and China, producing agitprop for western consumption. Like The New York Times' Walter Duranty, critics have said Anna Louise Strong was what Stalin used to call a "useful idiot"--a naive apologist for his brutal regime.

In 1931, she wrote The Soviets Conquer Wheat, just before the Ukrainian famine killed millions. In 1937, The Soviet Constitution: A Study in Socialist Democracy, at the time Stalin was conducting his great purge. On the eve of Mao Tse Tung's bloody takeover of China, in 1948, Anna Louise wrote Tomorrow's China. And in 1960, her The Rise of the People's Communes of China was produced amidst Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward. A personal friend of Mao's, Anna Louise Strong was buried in China in 1970. Her funeral was reportedly arranged and attended by Zhou Enlai, Chinese premier at the time. While he shares his cousin's fascination with China, Maurice Strong insists it's "not in the ideological sense, but just because China is an important place and it's an interesting place."

If Strong doesn't see China as a worker's paradise, he certainly sees in it a venture capitalist's utopia. He helped found--and remains a director of--the Canada China Business Council, with Paul Desmarais, chairman of Quebec-based Power Corp. Power has invested billions in partnerships with the Communist Chinese government since Strong was an executive there. In his work helping Beijing develop the state-owned Chery Automobile Co., Strong seems to have figured out a way to leverage the power of the authoritarian state and the environmentalist doctrine to make money.

The man who helped spawn the tendentious Kyoto accord has no qualms about preaching about the perils of global warming on one hand and, on the other, helping build what could one day become the world's biggest auto manufacturing industry. The Chinese, he notes pragmatically, are going to need cars, whether he likes it or not. "No use saying, 'Don't use automobiles,'" he says. "So therefore I got in on helping to suggest to them that they become leaders in environmentally sound automobiles and hybrids for their own good, but also that could be a comparative advantage for them internationally," he says. "And the Chery company has made a commitment to make real environmentally sound automobiles and therefore, yes, we have been encouraging them with help." In other words, if the green revolutionaries end up allowing us to drive only hybrid vehicles, things could work out beautifully for Beijing.

"I think he would be horrified if anybody thought he was a Marxist," says David Runnalls, of Strong. Runnalls is president of the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development and admits that over the 35 years he's known him, he's become one of Strong's biggest fans. "I think he believes in the role of government much more so than many other people," says Runnalls, who moderated the Globe 2006 armchair session where Strong raised this idea of environmental people's movements. "But I think he believes in the importance of the market and the private sector, too." Kenneth Green, visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that when conservationism got its start in the Teddy Roosevelt era of the early 20th century, it was a right-wing movement, anathema to Communists. "The liberal part of the spectrum had the 'workers triumphant' vision that placed workers above everything else, including environmental conservation," Green says.

Runnalls says he prefers to classify Strong as more of a populist, going so far as to liken him to Canadian Alliance and Reform party founder Preston Manning, a longtime critic of Kyoto but a man who has, in recent years, publicly floated the idea of a political party that mixes rights-based conservationism with capitalist economics. "If I had had Preston Manning up there on the platform, they would have had an interesting debate, because Preston's idea of combining conservation and conservatism is sort of the classic Maurice Strong formula," Runnalls notes. "Preston is more conservative than Maurice, but the idea that you can mix up free market economics and environmental protection is pure Maurice. I'd love to put the two of them together."

Then again, Manning has never gone in for top-down edicts, be they from Ottawa or the UN. And though he's faced his own frustration with finicky democracy--having failed to win power with either of the two political parties he founded--Manning has yet to call for insurrection. Revolutions are, after all, rarely necessary in democratic jurisdictions. But then, Manning may have wisely calculated that if a majority of people aren't willing to vote for your movement, why would they take to the streets for it? And Strong may find his popular environmental movement stymied by lack of popularity. He readily admits the influence of Kyoto "has been significantly diminished" and polls consistently show widespread ambivalence about climate change. An April Leger Marketing survey found that only half of Canadians were afraid of global warming, and a large majority said they didn't think it would ruin the planet. In March, a poll conducted by Stanford University for ABC News asked American respondents: "If nothing is done to reduce global warming in the future, how serious of a problem do you think it will be for the world?" Americans were clearly pessimistic, with 57 per cent saying "very serious" and 28 per cent, "somewhat serious." But when asked about what sacrifices they'd be willing to make themselves, respondents balked. Higher taxes on electricity to promote conservation? Eighty-one per cent opposed. Higher taxes on gasoline? Sixty-eight per cent opposed. Similarly, a March Gallup Poll found 65 per cent of U.S. respondents believed "the American people" were doing "too little" to protect the environment. When asked if they favoured setting legal limits on household energy consumption, however, nearly the same number, 62 per cent, were opposed. As always, people want someone to do something about the environment--as long as it's not them.

Then again, revolutions are usually more a test of wills than one of numbers. Strong might wish to be careful what he asks for. Those with the will to man the barricades in a battle for the ecosystem would surely be mostly from the furthest left side of the green movement. And they have little sentimentality for business. "I think that most people who join the environmental movement have an image of a society that is extremely regulated, where capitalism is considered an evil, not a good, and where socialist forms of organization are their optimal outcome," says Green. For Strong, who, like his hosts in Beijing, strives to mix his collectivism with capitalism, perhaps a society that limbos somewhere between apathy and environmental radicalism may be the most comfortable place. Especially when it comes with room service and a glorious view of Vancouver's harbour.

STILL SOMEBODY AT THE WORLD BODY:

Did you hear that Maurice Strong had to step down from his senior role at the United Nations amidst questions about his role in the massive oil-for-food scandal? That's the story as most UN-watchers understand it. But the former special UN envoy to North Korea insists it's just not true.

Strong's name did surface in the final report on the US$10-billion scandal, released by UN investigator Paul Volcker in September. While working at the UN, the Volcker commission reported, Strong had met several times with Iraqi agent Tongsun Park, now awaiting trial in a New York prison for allegedly trying to bribe UN officials to tilt oil-for-food in Iraq's favour. The program was set up in 1997 by the UN to allow Saddam Hussein to trade oil to buy humanitarian supplies after years of sanctions, but Hussein ended up cheating on the arrangement by skimming billions off of the program.

"It had nothing to do with that," says Strong, of stories that his departure from the UN was the result of the connections to Park. "Basically, I had this Korean role long before, and it was just an advisory monitoring role, then I took on a more full-time role. And the negotiations were moving very slowly and I wanted to be free of them. And my contract ended anyway in July, and so it just ended." (Strong was also criticized for giving his stepdaughter a job at the UN, despite regulations against hiring family members.)

Volcker's report also noted that Park had apparently transferred money from Hussein to Strong. In 1997, days after Strong had promised an investor in his firm, Cordex Petroleums Inc., that he would refund the investor's guaranteed million-dollar investment, Park picked up enough cash to cover the guarantee in Iraq. He drove it to Amman, where he deposited it in a Jordanian bank, and soon after gave Strong a cheque for US$988,850. Strong used the money to compensate the investor, but insists he had no idea the money came from the Iraqi regime. As for any alleged involvement in the oil-for-food scandal, Strong says that everything he knows is in the Volcker report.

Besides, Strong says that while his formal role at the UN may have ended, he continues to work closely with the world body. When he sat down to talk to the Western Standard, Strong said he had just moments ago wrapped up a phone call with the UN deputy secretary-general. "I'm in constant touch with the UN," he explains. "I've always had a friendly relationship with the UN, whatever my formal role was. And I continue to have. But I have no formal role." Strong, after all, has been active in the UN since the 1970s. After more than three decades together, it's no wonder the two are inseparable.

MO'S ADVENTURES IN CAPITALISM:

Hobnobbing with heads of state, mingling with monarchs and socializing with CEOs; it might seem as if Maurice Strong has led a charmed life in his adult years. Like most of us, though, he's had his difficulties in business. But when the going gets tough, as they say, the tough get going. And some of Strong's former colleagues have noticed his knack to get going . . . out the door, and relatively unscathed--even after they've ended up burned.

For a guy with a history of socialist rhetoric, Strong--who made his first million in his thirties in the oil business--has tried plenty of high-risk stock plays. In 1981, while chairman and major shareholder of Denver oil promoter AZL Resources, Strong was sued by investors for allegedly manipulating the stock. The accusations, according to Forbes magazine, were that Strong had been "hyping the stock ahead of a merger that eventually failed." The suit was settled out of court for US$4.2 million. When AZL really did merge with another oil firm years later, it unloaded some of its land holdings at deep discounts, allowing Strong to pick up his 160,000-acre Baca Ranch in Colorado for a bargain-basement price.

In the nineties, while Strong was on the board of directors of Molten Metal Technology, Inc., a hazardous waste management firm in Boston, accusations surfaced again. Molten had received millions in research grants from the U.S. government, thanks largely to a close relationship with then vice-president Al Gore. In 1996, the company was forced to announce that grants it had told shareholders to count on, weren't coming after all, and the stock price fell by half. As it happens, Strong had sold a large holding in the company ahead of the announcement, netting him US$2.8 million. Several of his fellow directors had done the same thing. Shareholders sued for fraud and stock manipulation, and Molten folded shortly afterward. Insurance companies later settled the case.

Strong's most controversial stock play happened with the much publicized Cordex Petroleum Inc., based out of Calgary. This time, a firm in which Strong was the biggest shareholder ended up embroiled in the UN's oil-for-food scandal. UN investigators discovered that in 1997, nearly US$1 million had been transferred to Cordex via South Korean national Tongsun Park, who appears to have received the cash from Saddam Hussein's government. Park is currently awaiting trial in New York on charges that he was acting as an Iraqi agent in the U.S., and laundering money connected to oil-for-food. Still, even that million-dollar investment couldn't save this company. Cordex folded in 1999.