FRAMING THE CLIMATE CONTROL DEBATE

It is the same old garbage; President Obama promised to cut carbon emissions and the Republicans blocked him from doing so and now they make headlines by blaming him for not keeping his promises. The truth is that he has done much to stem carbon emissions but it will take much more and only congress can do it. Obama is up against a monster; big business, a Goliath, has bought and paid for Congress.  Hence, we have the current dilemma; support Obama or support congress. The answer is not to destroy the government but to change the power hold big oil (and coal) has on congress.

There is a cadre of liberal media types, who are advancing the idea that Republicans are science deniers, which seems to be true until you stop and think about it in political terms. They are pretending to be science deniers to hide what they consider a more damaging charge: their plain unadulterated greed. They care about the environment but only if it does not prevent them from maximizing their bottom line. Most people, including corporate stockholders, are quite willing to accept less return on their investments to protect the air, water, forests, and oceans. Corporate executives are schooled in MBA programs that ignore morality and replace it with selfishness. In their minds, it is immoral not to achieve the maximum one is capable of achieving.  Riches are rewards for being hard work and cleverness not a reward for honesty and caring.

I keep complaining on this web site about the heartlessness of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which is that only the successful count. No one else really matters. This leads to such inane ideas as exemplified by the George W. Bush’s cabinet anti environmentalism; if you want to prevent forest fires, harvest the timber and then there would be nothing to burn. Or, the Key Stone pipe line argument, which is to transport millions of gallons of Canadian oil across the entire width of the United States, refine it in Texas with all the attendant air pollution, and then sell the gasoline to China for a few jobs. Canada profits, oil companies profit, China profits but the U.S. is left with the spilled old and contaminated air. No, the oil companies are treating the United States and its people as if we were some third world country over which they had control of their government: like they did in pre Hugo Chávez Venezuela.

We liberals can learn a lesson from that experience.  The big oil companies bought the Venezuelan government, harvested vast amounts of oil in that country, keep the profits for themselves, and trashed the environment with only their bottom line in mind.  The Venezuelan people rose up and elected Hugo Chávez, who the oil companies labeled as a radical leftist, as communists, as social lists, and as anti-capitalist. We are painfully familiar with the list of labels because that is what we hear right wing TV and Radio calling Obama.  In the United States, the situation is similar to that in Venezuela. We threw out George W. Bush and elected Obama. We must support him 100%.  We must not “aide and abet” the oil companies to overthrow the government so they can continue to contaminate the environment. We must have “cap and trade” legislation or some other form of stricter environmental control. There can be fewer significant and clearer examples of the liberal cry, “put the people first” than we have in the climate control debate. We must frame the debate and not let the oil companies use the media to do it.   

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