Today, on the opening day of the UNFCCC climate meetings in Poland, we invaded the Washington DC office of Environmental Defense. A group of activists representing Global Justice Ecology Project, Global Forest Coalition, and Rising Tide North America and Rising Tide Ecuador walked into ED’s plush pad and politely notified all employees that their founder’s daughter was there to read them a statement commemorating the start of the climate talks in Poland. Roughly two dozen staffers gathered in the glass-walled conference room as Rachel Smolker (from GJEP and GFC) read them a letter detailing how the organization her father founded has become something that she must denounce – ED promotes dangerous false solutions to climate change, is beholden to capitalist profit motives, has plush six-figure salaries, and is complicit with aiding and abetting the world’s worst climate criminals.

As she read her emotional and thought-provoking letter, we could see ED’s staffers disconnecting, tuning out, reading email on their Blackberries, and muttering to each other under their breath. Bit by bit they started walking out, fancy gadgets in hand, and one employee said to our photographer “I don’t work on this issue, and frankly I don’t care about this.” By the time Rachel was finished, there were only a handful of them left in the room who could bear to hear criticism and be self-reflective about what was said. Such symptoms of denial and arrogance are clear signals of highly toxic levels of complicity with carbon crimes, and our last resort was to call in the experts for a consultancy.

Mr. Green and Mr. Wash, the well dressed executives of Green & Wash LLC addressed the group, warning them that complicity with aiding and abetting carbon crimes is a toxic pollutant, with known side effects including inability to listen, denial, sleep loss, and arrogant outright self-exultation. In addition, complicity can be a risk to image and reputation in the green marketplace. However, with the guidance of Green & Wash LLC we assured Environmental Defense that they could transform their complicity into a great asset and turn this risk into opportunity. And so the work began.

Green & Wash workers began scrubbing the office down with “Go Green” all purpose cleanser, while Mr. Green and Mr. Wash used their high-tech state of the art complicity detector to measure exact amounts of complicity throughout the office. Chairs with high complicity readings (my goodness, how many CEOs have sat in here?) were assembled in a corner and quarantined with Global Warming Crime Scene tape. One of Green & Wash’s employees quit, stating that shuffling chairs was no better than rearranging desk chairs on the Titanic, but we had no use for such naive idealism anyway, being the realistic pragmatists that we are. The computational cost-benefit analysis of Green & Wash showed that a well financed PR campaign can cover for lack of structural change, so we lined up top-notch sponsors for the clients, through the “Just US Complicity Alliance Partnership”. We pinned the logos of these sponsors next to our client’s name, with such industry greats as Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, BP, and Shell. At one point, an ED employee got upset and asked us to leave, but we notified them that we have purchased a sufficient number of office occupation credits, from all those offices out there that aren’t been invaded but should be.

The last step of our cleaning and greening was to offset their complicity with something green – like trees! To mask the stinking smell of their lingering complicity in the board room, we planted air freshener trees, specially engineered to grow fast and soak up all their excess complicity, exuding clean green fresh scent throughout the office. (We made sure to clear out any local populations before planting our green plantations).

The final step was to remove all complicity from their books, by investing it in our new financial instrument – Credit/YourFault swaps.  Once the deal was done, their complicity risk had been managed they fresh new complicity credits in place of TheirFault holdings, and was backed and insured by our investment partners, EcoGreenSecurities ™. To close the deal, we presented them with their award, a giant green paintbrush to signify their renewed images. And most importantly, they received ownership of a CRAP Credit – “Certified Realists for Atmospheric Privatization”.

It was such a great deal for them, we just couldn’t understand why some of them seemed upset. Not only did they trade away all their toxic complicity, but they received commodity ownership in return! Their lingering fears and denial must be signs that there is still lingering complicity hidden in back boardrooms that we haven’t yet detected.  Hopefully they’ll invite us back to do a full inventory consulting job.

Until then, we can be happy of a job well done.