I read two stories today, neither of which are new, both of which made me think of the insanity of the whole energy/environment conflict in this country.
The first story had to do with ten thousand gallons of crude oil leaking from a Sunoco pipeline in Ohio and spilling into the Oak Glen nature Preserve near Cincinnati. Way to go Sunoco. If you’re going to allow a leak and I use the word allow advisedly, what better place to make yourself look bad than in a nature preserve. These guys really work at stupid.
The second story, which is a real knee slapper, is about Rex Tillerson. Rex is a country farmer, (read phony farm that gets government subsidies) and oh, yes, the CEO of Exxon Mobile, the company, probably more than any other, responsible for all the evils of fracting in this country. It seems that someone at one of his contractor’s was dumb enough to put up a 15 story water tower right next to ole Rex’s ranch down in Bartonville, Texas. The reason for the water tower was to supply said water for fracting processes on his companies various projects in the area. The result of the tower was that it screwed up Rex’s views of the natural landscape that the rest of his company hasn’t gotten around to decimating yet. Rex got all bent out of shape and now he’s suing the cointractor and demanding they take the tower down. It’s nice to see a human being who has some sensitivity to the beauties of the land and the trees that surround his subsidized farm. Too bad he doesn’t care much about poisoning that land, clouding the sky and killing those trees.
These two, hardly mentioned stories illustrate the problems we are facing as a nation over how to heat our homes, light our nights and fuel our cars without killing everything that is currently living on the planet. The problem is we are failing. The fossil fuel interests, bent on protecting trillions of dollars of investment and billions in profits have set a course of lies, obfuscation, paramilitary tactics, bribery and whatever else works to protect their financial interests and the hell with the lives, health and function of the planet.
Look, no one expects Exxon, BP or Shell to just throw away their investments or their profits. What those with logical heads propose is that those giants of industry slow or stop their current expansion and switch course to renewable technologies that would create the same or higher profits without destroying the world.
Sure the oil, coal and gas are under the surface and sure the big fossil fuel companies have expended huge amounts to secure the rights to them but what they haven’t done is to expend the same kind of money to guarantee the safe extraction of those minerals, their safe transportation to market and even more important their safe usage. Just look at Duke Energy, the perfect example of the degenerate polluter that cares nothing for safety but only for profits. This $50 billion mega polluter has been hit with hundreds of violations and because they are in bed with North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, a former Duke employee, they were about to get off with a $99,000 fine. Then, because they are not only greedy and uncaring but also stupid, they were responsible for a massive coal ash spill in Eden, NC in February that turned the Dan River into 70 miles of toxic sludge. Duke’s entire executive level should be in jail. They don’t care who they poison or how they do it as long as the money keep flowing in.
I’m not going to deal with climate change here, even though it is an accepted fact in all intelligent circles. Instead, I’m going to deal with a far less controversial subject, planetary poisoning, something that can’t be argued even among the most uninformed, unintelligent luddites available. The burning of fossil fuels cause particulate debris to enter the atmosphere and a certain amount of that debris settles back to earth, poisoning streams and land, killing vegetation and in one particular case threatening to flood the planet with an excess of melting ice.
Greenland is the largest island on earth. It supports 680,000 cubic miles of ice. The sheet is almost three miles thick in most places. In recent years around 10 billion tons of water melt off the ice sheet and contribute to the raise of the planets seas by about 15%. In recent years the melt off has increased dramatically and if it continues unabated it will probably lead to a rise in sea levels of over 20 feet in the next 50 years. That is catastrophic. The cause of this increased melt off is not just a rise in planetary temperature which is factual but still argued by the moron class, but mostly due to the increased presence of dirty snow on the Greenland surface.
Dirty snow is caused by particulate settling of wind borne residue from the burning of various fossil fuels and its effect on the Greenland snow is devastating. Everyone knows that dark colors attract heat and bright colors, especially white, reflect it. (I’m sure that someone in the fossil fuel industry will deny this) The white reflective snow has for ions kept the surface of Greenland cold and covered with ice but now with the massive influx of pollutants and particulates the surface has gotten increasingly darker and darker, much like a city street three days after a snow. This dirty surface no longer reflects the sun but absorbs it, melting the ice at a much faster rate than we have ever seen. If this keeps up, goodbye to all the coastal cities in the world.
How do we stop it? By ending pollution, because that pollution, which when it falls on Manhattan and does little damage, becomes the cause of devastation when it covers the Greenland ice sheet.
This is no big surprise to any of the companies involved in the fossil fuel business. They know about it, they just don’t care. Is it possible for someone to consider themselves a human being and still choose to do nothing about ending life on the planet on which we live? It appears so. Just look at Mr. Tillerson, who cares more about his view from the farm than he does about the toll his company is extracting from his fellow humans and the land they live on.
The Sunoco pipeline break is one of so many that it’s almost impossible to keep track. The word “allow” was used above and as stated there, it was used advisedly because all, pipeline leaks, spills and breaks could be avoided, except that the companies who built and maintain the pipelines refuse to spend the money necessary to build and maintain them safely. It’s just a matter of money and the fossil fuel companies value their buck far more than they do your kid’s health or the public’s nature preserve or anything else. It’s about greed, about making more money than anyone else and about keeping it; and if that means your kid gets sick, or the ice sheet melts or the gulf gets coated with oil, they just don’t give a flying f**k.
So what do we do? Well, if you believe the men who wrote the constitution, you all have a right to health and happiness and if someone stands in the way of that right you have the right to remove them. That sounds strangely like the gun nuts finally have something with which to back up their insane ranting. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but what it does do is give the people a war cry, a rallying point. It’s time for draconian strategies to fight draconian greed. Big fossil fuel has already proven that they will do nothing to help the planet if it takes one penny out of their overstuffed pockets. It appears to be time for some massive civil disobedience and for actions that are too big for police to handle, actions that will show the fossil fuel murderers that it’s cheaper to do the right thing than to continue on their current path to planetary destruction.