The American west has been on fire for quite a long time while politicians connected monetarily to their task-masters in the fossil-fuel industry whistled while they worked. While the number of wildfires has decreased in recent years, their severity has doubled. If you weren't shocked by the "Camp Fire," of 2018, or distraught by Donald Trump calling climate change "a hoax," then maybe there's no hope for this week's news sinking in with you. You are looking today at evidence in what should be a court case against the fossil fuel industry, politicians and lobbyists who have caused so much loss and misery on a global scale. They know what they're doing. They've got their own in-house scientific evidence to prove it. Still they chose, much like the cigarette industry did, to beguile the public with bullshit and to enrich themselves at the expense of, literally, the entire world. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist who moved from L.A. to North Carolina in recent years fearing precisely the potential for the ongoing climate disaster in L.A., wrote compellingly Friday in the New York Times. "How bad things get depends on how long we let the fossil fuel industry continue to call the shots. The oil, gas and coal corporations have known for half a century that they were causing irreversible climate chaos, and ... chose to spread disinformation and block the transition to cleaner energy. ... They used their wealth to control our politicians," wrote Kalmus.
"Nothing will change until our anger gets powerful enough. But once you accept the truth of loss, and the truth of who perpetrated and profited from that loss, the anger comes rushing in, as fierce as the Santa Anna winds."
Kalmus is right. I'm in my sixties and I've seen it all along. Only with the long view does it become aparent. The political see-saw of "Take America Back" has been a life-long shadow play for me as the country teeters first this way then that, careening like an amoeba from one crisis to another.
Let's observe. James Earl Carter died this week and we should be ashamed of how he was treated in the White House. Here was a man who put solar panels on the white house in the 1970s and who urged Americans to conserve. What did that get him? A middle-eastern hostage crisis and an alleged gasoline crisis. If I knew what I knew today, I would go back and vote for James Earl Carter. That year, 1979, a hoax of a politician, Ronald Reagan, emerged out of California and rode to the rescue. I suspect, and I can't prove this, that we were all played. I was there. I remember what I saw. I suspect that the gas and oil lobby really hated Jimmy Carter. Iranian students took 53 Americans hostage for more than a year in the run up to the U.S. elections. Every night on the evening news the top story was "Day 327 of the hostage crisis." It made Carter look weak. Add that we also were gifted an oil shortage. (Funny, we're not out of oil today.) Gas rationing. Long lines at the gas pumps. Boy did people get mad about that. You can't vote for a guy when the price of gas (or, more recently, the price of gas and eggs?) is too high, man. Same story. Different decade.
Carter was perhaps the most decent man who ever won the presidency. He was a reaction against the republican corruption of the Nixon administration. (And woe to us all, the worm-tongues who surrounded the throne then are still circling, decrepit and undying, in the nation's capitol.) Ronald Reagan, fake soldier, fake cowboy, hollywood democrat and remover of White House solar panels, rode in to save us all. What a hero! Reagan said he would "Never deal with terrorists."
But then he did exactly that in the Iran-Contra scandal. Secretly selling arms to Iran and secretly using the money to pay for a secret war in Nicaragua. Funny how those hostages were all released on the day of Reagan's inauguration.
After Reagan came another oil man, his vice president, George H.W. Bush. A man who comes from some of the oldest money on this continent. H.W. was a one term president, but even he took the time to defend those Middle-Eastern oil fields. He just couldn't handle the political savvy of Bill Clinton. And by the time we reached the millenium, people were Shocked! Shocked! that the president had sex with an intern.
And we could have had climate champion Al Gore. Instead, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in one of the wackiest rulings ever in Bush v Gore that George W. Bush would suffer "irreprable harm" if the Florida recount were to be allowed to continue. Indeed, facts have shown that had the Supreme Court upheld the Florida State Supreme Court's decision to count all the votes, Al Gore would have won. The climate, the planet, would have won. So it was in the year-of-our-lord 2000, that I first knew for sure that the U.S. Supreme Court was corrupt. And we got not one, but two oil men, who, for eight years, harnessed the 9/11 attacks to their benefit instead of their blame, started a preemptive war for oil, and instituted a policy of torture that constituted war crimes.
We, the planet, lost a decade to the greed of the oil industry that we could not afford to lose.
Obama might have been able to do something about the climate if he wasn't handed a global financial collapse engineered by the greedy, deregulated banking industry.
But he was black and liberal. And the blow-back to this was to elect a racist, idiot, fake TV billionaire. I didn't think someone could be dumber than W. Bush. But... Well... Here we go again.
The world cannot afford any more of this shit.
We need to bring political and legal action against the perpetrators of these crimes all down through the decades. We need to repair the climate crisis in a Moon-Shot type of git-r-done and fund it with the money these shit-birds have hauled in for generations.
A big win for the environment was Held et al. v. State of Montana where the Montana Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that republican shield laws for the fossil fuel industry infringed upon the 16 child plaintiffs' right, enumerated in the State Constitution, to a clean and healthful environment. You could help by buying an electric car. This week at the Las Vegas car show, you could see THIS. A car that never needs gas and almost never needs charging. You can dive into the Biden Administration's infrastructure law and install (for the second time now for J and I) roof-top solar. Why pay an electric bill when the electric company can pay you? But, heck, roof-top solar; that's a whole 'nother post. You could tell your power provider that you want your electricity to come from renewable sources. As people do this more and more, the price of renewables go down. Or, you can just mention roof-top solar around your smart-phone and before you know it, you'll be watching your meter run backwards. So, people, it's time to get up and get active because we can no longer wait for the oil and gas industry to get a conscience. And the world sure doesn't have four years to wait for Trump to do anything.
Comments