July 27, 2019: Looking For Oil, Green-washing, Little Cause For Optimism

The most startling statistic I've seen and, if memory serves, I've run across it in at least two publications—The Nation and Harper's Magazine is this: The fossil fuel industries now own the mineral rights to five times the amount of carbon that, if burned, will make this planet uninhabitable. Five times the amount. The question facing humanity is: What are we going to do to keep it in the ground?

Yesterday, The New York Times published an essay by Lee Wasserman, Director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, an organization seeking an end to the production and use of fossil fuels. (1) Wasserman notes that:

“Climate change can get complicated fast, but there is really only one question to ask when considering an official's climate bona fides: Will his or her policies lead to an increase or decrease in the amount of fossil fuels coming out of the ground? One peer-reviewed study found that to have a 50 percent chance of meeting the Paris climate accord's target of staying “well below” 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit of additional warming, we must refrain from burning much of the fossil fuel reserves listed as assets on the balance sheets of energy companies”. (2)

I do not have to inform the reader of the stranglehold that the national and international corporations now holding these assets have on the republic, indeed upon the world economic order.

What we are talking about is that to save the planet will require the political will to sequester wealth measured in the trillions, confiscation on a scale greater than the wealth taken from the slave holding South—and that took a civil war costing the lives of one of every 50 Americans.

The truth, as Wasserman pointedly demonstrates, is that no matter how bad is our intrepid Caesar in his erstwhile struggle to wrench us back into the 1950's, “to be honest,” writes Wasserman, “the portraits of most of the world's progressive leaders wouldn't be much brighter. The United States was well on its way to becoming the world's largest producer of fossil fuels before Donald Trump. Even today, with only a few decades left for us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without potentially catastrophic long-term consequences, far too many officials of all political stripes continue to expand the amount of fossil fuels we are extracting.” (2)

This is true of politicians and public figures across the political spectrum from Dick Cheney to Robert Kennedy Jr., to Obama. Wasserman cites Obama, after all, who described “all of the above” when asked to cite energy sources and who, like Kennedy, “enthusiastically embraced the fracking boom that is now primed to unleash a tidal wave of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. His successful effort to end the country's export ban on fossil fuels encouraged industry to go after every ounce of oil and gas it could find—and it is finding plenty. Taken together, President Obama's legacy is a nation that produces more oil and natural gas than Saudi Arabia.” (3)

Then there's Jerry Brown of California who has been the nation's most active governor at reducing demand for energy, but California is one of the nation's “leading producers of crude oil in the country. Nearly 5.5 million Californians live within a mile of an oil well and of those 1.8 million—nearly 92 percent of whom are people of color—live in areas already burdened by pollution. Relentless efforts by environmental and public health advocates to convince Governor Brown to at least minimize drilling in and around the most congested neighborhoods for health and safety reasons, in addition to sheer climate necessity, failed.

“Certainly,” comments Wasserman, money generated from extraction is an important revenue source for California. But if Mr. Brown couldn't leave a carbon-based nickel on the table, and if, ultimately, the same will be said for his successor, Gavin Newsom, how can we expect Donald Trump to do more?” (4)

How can we indeed.

What we have here is what has come to be called “green-washing”, a practice of adopting the optics but not the substance of the issue. It is a stratagem first employed by the corporations—like British Petroleum's much publicized solar energy initiative—a program in name only designed to burnish it's image but little else—a stratagem soon adopted by many politicians.

Like Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who made such a show of signing the Paris Accord on Climate Change. Trudeau, Wasserman notes, is a “progressive leader who is creating even greater climate dissonance...just after his government declared a 'climate emergency,' it approved a $5.5 billion expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline that links Alberta's tar sands to British Columbia. Mr. Trudeau's government bought the pipeline to ensure its expansion. That the government had to step in underscored the lack of business rationale to support bitumen, one of the world's dirtiest oils, 600 miles across Canada for shipment to Asia.” (4)

Wasserman goes on to say that Trudeau's embrace “of one of the world's most destructive projects” makes Trump's affair with Big Oil look like “a schoolboy crush”. (5)

Wasserman cites only New York governor Andrew Cuomo as a politician who takes the coming climate crisis seriously. Cuomo has banned fracking choosing to leave an abundance of natural gas in the ground—an action waiting the next Republican administration's reversal.

As humanity hurtles headlong toward environmental catastrophe there is, indeed, little cause for optimism.

An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and imprison.

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1. Wasserman, Lee. Why Are We Still Looking For Oil?” The New York Times. Friday July 26, 2019: Page A23.
2. ibid
3. ibid
4. ibid
5. ibid.