Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River
Killing Salmon With Paul O'Neill
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first Secretary of the Treasury, is an unlikely apostle for the crusade to combat global warming. But for the past couple of years the former corporate executive has been preaching the virtues of moving away from fossil fuels. In 1998, while head of aluminum giant Alcoa, O’Neill gave a speech to the aluminum industry’s trade association in which he named what he believed to be the world’s two most pressing problems. “One is nuclear holocaust,” he said. “The second is environmental: specifically, the issue of global climate change and the potential of global warming.” O’Neill handed out copies of his 1998 speech at Bush’s first cabinet meeting.

O’Neill, who just called for the abolition of the corporate income tax, is not an altruistic green. For more than a decade he ran one of the world’s most rapacious timber giants, International Paper. However, he’s a financial opportunist. While helming Alcoa, O’Neill correctly devined that new clean air rules could help the aluminum makers, which stood to profit if Detroit was forced to switch to lighter weight cars made with more aluminum.

More deviously, O’Neill also foresaw the possibility of making a killing by getting in on the front end of the new energy market, which he did for Alcoa, the company that he ran for a decade. In the process, he made himself a bundle of money.

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