THE SWAMP STANDS WITH PARIS.

In the U.S. this year, corporate spending on “cause sponsorship” will hit a new record of US$2.06 billion, more than double the amount spent on business sponsorships for festivals, fairs, annual events and the arts, according to estimates by the IEG Sponsorship Report. Cause sponsorship — think of Bell publicly aligning its brand with mental health awareness — has been one of the hottest growth areas for marketers in the last few years.

But a low-cost disruptor has burst onto the scene that allows even the richest, most image-challenged companies to instantly transform themselves into benevolent do-gooders at no cost. All you need is a quick tweet from your CEO expressing your profound disappointment that President Donald Trump decided to keep his election promise to voters and pull America out of the Paris climate deal.

With a few moments of time, a few words, and a mouse click, your company can become a paragon of corporate virtue. Even ExxonMobil — a company once vilified by the left as the chief warlord of environmental slavery and destruction — found itself winning headlines and praise from the Parisian Resistance last week when it urged Trump to stick with Paris. On CNBC, former Democratic Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers namedropped the company as the new mainstream lodestar, marvelling that the White House had unbelievably turned “way to the right of Exxon on a fossil fuel issue.”

Remember before last Thursday, when Goldman Sachs was the byword among business-bashers for corporate greed and exploitation? All is forgiven after CEO Lloyd Blankfein used his Twitter account — for the first time since signing up in 2011 — to tweet his unhappiness with Trump’s announcement Thursday: “Today’s decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.’s leadership position in the world. #ParisAgreement.” He got 12,000 retweets.

GE, Apple, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Unilever… companies have been offering tweets, interviews and press releases at a blistering pace to burnish their pro-Paris credentials. Journalists have obligingly reserved any cynicism as to why so many corporate interests might be suddenly lining up with radical environmental groups, preferring instead to credulously believe that somehow the hearts of Wall Street and Big Oil grew three sizes last Thursday.

The reality, of course, is that corporations are doing what they’ve always done, which is to look out for their own best financial interests. The fact that Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, was celebrated for protesting Trump’s decision with his own tweet announcing his resignation in Parisian protest from the president’s business council reveals better than anything the naked, shameless self-interest at work here.

Musk’s business model is predicated on government climate policy redirecting ever-larger heaps of wealth from taxpayers and other firms to Tesla via subsidies. The billions the company has raked in for carbon credits, subsidized factories for its car, battery and solar plants, and buyer handouts that make its otherwise unaffordable car marketable (like Ontario’s $14,000 per Tesla) are well known — as is Tesla’s inability to stay afloat without them. Musk “definitely goes where there is government money,” one analyst remarked to the LA Times a couple of years ago. “That’s a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day.” Then Trump got elected.

When major energy companies like Exxon stand up for the Paris deal, you can assume they’re also protecting years of work in finagling creative ways to profit off the globalist carbon-control agenda. As The Wall Street Journal pointed out last week, the tough rules on methane that the U.S. has deployed to meet international climate goals would give Exxon an edge over smaller rivals, since its wells are “in large fields near pipelines where the methane can already be captured and turned into valuable fuels.” Carbon-cutting also favours lower-carbon natural gas over oil, and Exxon’s number-one market position in natural gas — which is largely landlocked and so better sheltered from global competition — gives it a bigger edge than its rank as the sixth-largest world oil producer.

The next time you hear GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt criticizing Trump’s decision to end policies that are driving cheap coal off the U.S. power grid, keep in mind GE’s huge investments in wind and solar generation — and that it’s now also the only remaining manufacturer of American-made nuclear plants after Westinghouse’s bankruptcy.

Remember, for every dollar corporate America spends on “cause sponsorship,” it spends $1.50 on lobbyists it pays richly for their uncanny ability to spot gaps and open up seams in any tangle of regulatory red tape until they’ve found a way to manipulate governmental rules to divert money from taxpayers towards their clients’ bottom lines. They had all spent a great deal of time and money lobbying their way to gaming profits off Paris’s global regulatory climate regime; of course they’re upset that Trump overturned the gameboard.

If corporatist-elites, bailout-bankers and rent-seekers are still keen to signal their climate virtuousness, they can spend as much on renewable energy schemes and carbon offsets as their shareholders can stand, and leave other businesses and consumers out of paying for it all. But anyone who doubts for a moment that dumping Paris will be good for regular American workers — and business-owners who don’t have lobbyists — need only consider the calls now for Paris signatories to slap “carbon tariffs” on U.S. exports, to supposedly re-level the playing field for economies signing up to a future of expensive energy. That demand puts quick lie to claims that adhering to the deal would bring nations a windfall of clean-tech and green-tech jobs while sparking untold innovation that would make every Paris signatory richer and more competitive in the new, low-carbon economy.

The only ones who get rich from regulatory restraint are those shrewd enough to exploit the regulatory state at the expense of everyone else. They’re what Donald Trump used to call “the swamp.” And they’re not the voters he made his Paris promise to.