Jared Diamond praises Chevron's environmental stewardship in Papua New Guinea. Photo: Arthur Chapman (flickr)

From Michael Moore to Jonathan Safran Foer, American liberals love to criticize corporations for violations on everything from the environment to human rights to animal rights.

But in some cases they're dead wrong, writes Jared Diamond — an American liberal himself. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, he argues that big corporations can be a force for good in the fight against climate change, simply because they also stand to benefit by preserving the resources they depend on and reducing their costs through lower consumption.

Diamond draws on examples from three companies: Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Chevron. All three are working to protect the environment in different ways for their own reasons. Coca-Cola depends heavily on water resources and is working to make its plants water-neutral, while Wal-Mart is making its operations more energy-efficient and reducing packaging waste. Chevron, on the other hand, practices a degree of environmental stewardship on the land it owns overseas that Diamond believes is superior to government stewardship of many national parks.

Why would these companies take on such projects? Diamond explains:

Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government. [...] [I]n the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.

Diamond readily admits that not all big businesses are so admirable. But he maintains that when working to stop climate change, activists should focus less on working against corporations, and more on working with them to help them realize how much their own economic interests can be aligned with environmentalists' goals.

Are the people who've lived on this planet the longest the best-suited to protect it?

Liza O’Reilly thinks so.

She's a researcher with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy who spent last week in Alaska at a climate change summit with native peoples around the world. Participants from Borneo, Mexico, Kenya, Nepal traveled to attend … like the rest of us, they all recognize the earth is in peril. What they're saying is, "Let us help save it."

O'Reilly says it makes sense to take them up on their offer, in part because many indigenous groups are themselves affected by climate change. Not far from the conference site, even, the village of Newtok has lost 320 residents because of swollen rivers and melting permafrost.

Another reason for inviting indigenous peoples to the table is their strong spiritual connection with the earth, O'Reilly says. Because of this, they're more likely to come up with solutions that are sustainable over the long haul.

This very timeless wisdom recognizes [Indigenous peoples’] capacity to lead "developed" Nation/states, corporations, and other failed institutions and models out of the dark, wiping the soot out of their infirmed and capitalistic eyes to look at the Indigenous-based model of micro-energy, developed and controlled by the people.

So what would a climate change solution engineered by indigenous peoples look like? Well, it wouldn't involve massive-scale energy solutions like big dams and new nuclear power plants. Instead, it would curb the production of new fossil fuels and call on the various UN agencies to work with indigenous peoples to "address climate change impacts in their strategies and action plans."

Check out O'Reilly's posts on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change.

December's United Nations climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia could have ended in a logjam of indecision until Kevin Conrad, spokesperson for Papua New Guinea, took the floor challenging the United States to take the lead or get out of the way. In a recent interview, Conrad explains why the success of this agreement is vital to smaller countries like Papua New Guinea:

“I think collectively we as humanity have become more mature in this climate battle, and we understand collectively that we’ve got to turn off all the emissions sources in order to win,” he said. “The climate doesn’t know whether it came from a factory or from Papua New Guinea’s deforestation. We’ve really got to get all hands on deck and tackle all of the issues.”

Mr. Conrad said the potential breakdown in the session’s final hours was particularly vexing to him because New Guinea and other forested tropical countries were finally getting attention for a proposal of payments by rich countries for preserving tropical forests. Deforestation currently contributes about a fifth of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

He said the rich-poor divide in the talks, which crystallized in the final clash in Bali, is a distraction from the reality that all countries have agreed, by the end of 2009, to do something new: define a threshold for greenhouse gases beyond which the world will not go.

Mr. Conrad's willingness to stand up for his cause will hopefully have positive results in furthering global cooperation on vital climate change issues, but in the very least, his willingness to speak out has brought greater heed to his country’s situation.