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Today, AstraZeneca announced one of the largest corporate carbon offset programmes in the world. They will spend $400m planting and maintaining 200 million trees in Brazil, Vietnam, Ghana, Rwanda and India. Astra-Zeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, wants to remove 30 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere to allow the company and its suppliers to become carbon neutral by 2045. Along with the pharmaceutical firm’s supply of Oxford University’s publicly funded Covid vaccination breakthrough at cost price, this is a good example of a corporation owning and acting on their responsibility. In 2011, the US Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found that – although widespread failures in regulation and the collapse of the subprime mortgage sector contributed to the global financial crisis of 2007 – all the other causes were to be found in Wall Street: - Dramatic failures of corporate governance
- A systemic breakdown in corporate accountability and ethics
- Widespread trading in deregulated derivatives, particularly credit default swaps where the holder can insure themselves against risk and can influence whether or not the underlying asset is visible
- Credit rating agencies, who were actually clients of the companies for whom they issued ratings, not issuing correct price risk assessments
Sure enough, in 2009 the chairman of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein said, “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret, we apologise.” After taking $10bn from the taxpayer (which they paid back) Goldman put 3% of their bonus pot ($500m) aside to fund 10,000 small businesses in the US. Admittedly this took some haranguing from the public and the press. In a classic article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone he called Goldman Sachs, “a blood sucking vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Also, around the same time, 100 protestors gathered outside Goldman’s New York office and demanded help for homeowners struggling with foreclosure chanting, “Who's got the money, money? They got the money, money? We got the bill!" In 2011 the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK from 1997-2007 Gordon Brown said, “We set up the FSA (the City of London regulator) believing the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. That was the big mistake. We didn't understand just how entangled things were. I accept my responsibility." At that time, it was not apparent how long the financial fallout from the crisis would last. As companies around the world deemed, ‘too big to fail,’ were bailed out by the tax payer some governments were elected on a platform of austerity as a means of dealing with public debt and economic depression. This led to the immiseration of tens if not hundreds of millions of people. So, should we be expecting more responsibility, apology and reparation? As a genuinely hopeful person, I believe anyone who played a crucial part in contributing to the immiseration of millions of people (myself as a voter included), will step up, own it, apologise and compensate anyone for whom $10-$100 was literally the difference between life and death. As hard as it may be to see a pathway to that, I believe it did happen, it is happening and it will happen. If companies like Astra-Zeneca can find a way to serve their shareholders while ameliorating their impact on the climate and use their manufacturing prowess to benefit the public not-for-profit, then there is every reason to hope.
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