Writing for the Buffalo Beast, Michael Roddy and Ian Murphy have an excellent rundown on some of the planet’s worst enemies right now – people who would make excellent villains in an episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers – and while I’m being a little sarcastic, these are folks who not only put their own heads in the sand to the damage they, their businesses, and their interests do to the environment and the health of the planet, they also spend tons of money to make sure that you put your head in the sand and keep it there.

What makes the story even better is that The Beast comes up with some scenarios that would be poetic justice for these folks as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

George Will, Columnist

Misdeeds: The errors Will has committed to print over the years are both more numerous and irresponsible than his bow tie collection, for which he also feels no remorse. He claimed in a February 2009 Washington Post column that “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” The Center responded: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information… global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.”

Corporate teats: The Republican Party, a catchall for corporate polluters, his wife, rapacious swine in general, and anyone who cites Ronald Reagan to justify his massive carbon footprint.

Most egregious lie: “So the column accurately reported what the Center had reported.” Incredibly, the Post backed him up.

Comeuppance: Locked in a large freezer, strapped to a chair directly under a ten-foot icicle and made to write a column. The room’s climate is controlled by a computer program, which checks his column for scientific veracity. The temperature goes down when Will’s right and up when he’s wrong. He either freezes to death or the icicle falls and splits his head open. It’s up to him.

…

James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma

Misdeeds: Inhofe thinks that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind,” yet somehow served as the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from ‘03 to ‘07. Once called Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton to testify as a key witness. Believes that “scientific consensus” on climate change is a conspiracy perpetrated by greedy scientists to score grant money. Went to Copenhagen as the leader of the Climate Truth Squad, earning big laughs from overseas reporters. Lifetime recipient of Twelve Dumbest Members of Congress award.

Corporate teats: Seven figures from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and anyone willing to pay for his “campaign expenses.”

Most egregious lie: “You know, God’s still up there. We’re now going through a cooling spell.”

Comeuppance: Locked in an outhouse and set on fire.

…

Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Misdeeds: For the last 60 years, Singer’s pimped his PhD credentials to any and every industry in need of phony science. He’s slithered seamlessly from denying that smoking causes cancer to saying that DDT is harmless to “raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’” of climate change. Glacier data he later attributed to his wife was denounced as “complete bullshit” by the Glacier Monitoring Service.

Corporate teats: Exxon Mobil, Shell, Sun Oil, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Most egregious lie: “55% of glaciers have gained mass in the last 30 years.”

Comeuppance: While addressing yet another denier conference in 2012, the pressure created by an undetected tumor in Singer’s brain triggers an anomalous episode of schizophasia, causing his entire speech to spew forth as an incoherent word salad. Instead of the audience stopping Singer and urging him to seek the immediate medical attention he so obviously needs, they offer him a thunderous standing ovation and an invitation to speak again next year.

There’s so much more hilarity where that came from, too.

[ THE BEAST 15 Most Heinous Climate Villains ]
Source: The Buffalo Beast

Oh, I have to let this article speak for itself. The title is strong on its own, but it’s true – it is ideology that’s holding back a green revolution in this country – there are more technologies and cottage industries and new products and businesses to count, but something is holding them back – something is keeping this entire market from breaking the surface. Let’s take a look at what it is:

American competitiveness is severely hobbled by our “free market” and anti-government attitudes. One way our competitors hold us back is by encouraging this outdated ideology. Result: other countries have national economic/industrial strategies and we don’t. So we lose.

Remember how “chips” was a major driver of the economy in the 80s and 90s? Then the Internet drove the economy late 90’s and early 2000s? The world understands that “green energy” is the next big industry that will drive the world economy. Actually, the rest of the world has understood this for some time and has been investing and inventing and innovating and building. Meanwhile over here America’s big oil and coal companies bought themselves a Presidency and an anti-government ideology and a climate-change-denial industry that has cost us 8 years and counting.

Now we’re playing catch-up, and the rest of the world is determined to keep us from taking the lead.

It’s true. I heard the CEO of a coal company in West Virginia in an interview with NPR say, when asked if climate change was real, outright say it’s fake – claiming that it, just like other so-called “scares” in the past, passed over and nothing was made of them (of course, the ones he chose are actually real – like the hole in the ozone layer, which is very much real even today, but the multinational push to stop using CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals managed to keep it from spreading to the point where it’s a serious problem – but even so, remember that your grandparents could go out without sunscreen in the summer. We can’t.) and that if government did manage to pass climate regulations, that we all may as well “teach our children to speak Chinese.”

That’s infuriating, especially since it’s the actions of people like him that may force us to do that anyway, if you think that’s such a horrible thing (personally I think American children could do with a little multi-lingual teaching, but that’s just me – only Americans are truly monolingual.) – the Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese, and just about every other industrialized nation in the world is making a push towards clean energy and green technologies, and while they’re in no horrific hurry to turn off their carbon producing industries (although some of them are farther on the forefront than we are) they’re still developing and rolling out technologies and large-scale tests while we at home are still debating the evidence in front of us as if adding up all of the coins in the piggy bank a different way will lead to a different result.

Dave Johnson, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, specifically points at the great lengths that the Chinese are going to in order to power and employ their massive lower and burgeoning middle classes with renewable energy, and while it’s not slowing their emissions rate, it could very easily begin to do so quickly, or wind up powering more people at an America-style rate while using a fraction of the fossil fuels we do.

If the United States doesn’t take its rightful place back at the front of the pack in science and technology, especially in the area of energy, we’ll wind up behind the curve, and in another position where we’ll have to buy tech or energy from someone who knows how to do it better than we do, and I don’t think anyone really wants that, from a security or a self-determination perspective. Instead of writing massive checks to OPEC nations, we’ll wind up writing them to the Chinese and the Germans to buy their expertise and their energy technologies.

[ Green Revolution - Ideology Holding America Back ]
Source: The Campaign for America’s Future

Let’s be clear from the outset: I believe the answer to that question is yes. Which is why I am a strong supporter of environmental justice, clean air and water laws and their enforcement, renewable and sustainable energy technologies, and climate protection overall.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m also a scientist – I also believe that unless we stop having so many children as a civilization, we’ll deplete our resources and use more energy than we can sustain; and I say that meaning as a human civilization, not just Americans. But that’s what Fred Branfman, writing for the Sacramento News and Review, is saying in his article “Do Our Children Deserve to Live?”

He proposes that a “human movement” will be required to avert the a global climate crisis, and that what’s going on in Copenhagen doesn’t give him much faith that movement is going to come, or that this meeting will be the turning point. I agree, but I also admit that getting buy-in from the nations of the world takes time- as you can see at home with our own gridlocked energy and climate policies and bils locked up in Congress now.

A strange cloud envelops human civilization as its leaders fail to take the measures to protect it that they themselves endorsed just five months ago. It is oddly fitting that the latest act in humanity’s climate-crisis drama will occur next week in the city where history’s most famous Dane, brooding in his fog-enshrouded castle, failed to act decisively upon the very question hanging over the upcoming conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It will not be on the agenda. But whether civilization is or is not to be will be the real question haunting the shadow play about to ensue at the United Nations-sponsored talks.

A child under 13 today can expect to live into the 2080s, by which time civilization as we know it will have disappeared if we continue to fail to reduce carbon emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050, according to our climate scientists. Although world leaders accept this recommendation, they are presently overseeing a steady increase projected to be more than double the maximum our climate scientists think safe.

The stark figures reveal just how much Copenhagen will fail our children, despite PR efforts to obscure them. The climate scientists’ minimal 25 percent cut would see the United States emitting 3.94 billion metric tons in 2020. President Barack Obama’s 2020 target is 4.99 bmt, only 5.5 percent lower than U.S. 1990 emissions of 5.26 bmt, or less than 1/4 of the minimum 25 percent cut urged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (The United States packages its nonreduction target as a 17 percent cut from the sky-high 2005 level of 5.99 bmt.) The Chinese, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Michael Levi, will increase their CO2 emissions by 72 to 88 percent by 2020, i.e., from 6 bmt today to more than 10 bmt. (The Chinese package their increase by pledging a 45 to 50 percent reduction in “carbon intensity,” or carbon per unit of gross domestic product, even though averting disastrous climate change requires reducing CO2 emissions, not just intensity.)

What will occur in Copenhagen thus continues a pattern seen since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Scientists I spoke with there were anguished that the treaty only sought to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. None foresaw that the treaty would be ignored and that world emissions would be 40.8 percent higher (and U.S. emissions 19.8 percent higher) in 2007 than in 1990.

Copenhagen will fail because the great publics of the world have not been involved in the great human questions underlying the technical issues the scientists discuss. It is not only that the conference will fail to protect our young, but that the rest of us will barely notice.

Pretty depressing, eh? Branfman goes into a damning critique of our modern society, and how we’re dreaming and ignoring the entire problem, which I agree with to some extent but I’m not quite as scathing about I don’t think:

We live today as if in a trance, conducting business as usual in times so unusual that they pose an even greater threat than 20th-century wars that killed more than 100 million people. It seems incredible, for example, that nonscientists barely discuss how the human climate crisis undermines so many of their basic assumptions—in philosophy, law, psychology, sociology, economics, the arts and humanities, education and health—about human beings and their society.

If a new “human movement” working beside today’s environmentalists can help more people see that we are the first adults in history to pose the single greatest threat facing our children, however, there is much reason to believe that human civilization can still be saved.

Branfman definitely subscribes to some of the most worst-case climate scenarios, but it’s important to sit up and take note that what he’s describing very well may be our global future if something isn’t done. If everything goes on the way it does now, the best case is that he’s only partially right, and the worst case is that he’s completely and totally right.

[ Do Our Children Deserve to Live? - Copenhagen Won’t be Enough. Only a ‘Human Movement’ can Save Civilization from the Climate Crisis. ]
Source: The Sacramento News and Review

Let’s start off with some of the opening text from this article, written for The Campaign for America’s Future by Natasha Chart:

Sen. Claire McCaskill said last week that the Senate wasn’t going to tackle the Clean Energy Jobs and American Protection Act this year because it would be “really, really hard.” If the Senate doesn’t handle it this year, will they deal with it in an election year? I think everyone working in progressive politics has heard the ‘it’s an election year’ excuse for why something terribly important can’t be done.

While McCaskill’s comment in particular was frustrating, she has a lot of colleagues in the Senate who obviously feel the same way. So I’d like to talk about some of the hard things people who aren’t Senators are facing that the CEJAPA legislation could begin fixing.

Chart goes on to discuss a number of amazing points – all things that the Senate really needs to take up before they get bogged down in election-year politics in 2010 and wind up doing little, if nothing at all in order to try and save their skins for re-election. Whether it’s health care, climate change, jobs, or transportation, all the Republicans need to do in order to prove to the public that the Democrats haven’t brought the change they swept in promising is continue to be obstinate and block any progress they can, and all the Democrats in the Senate have to do to play into their hands is do nothing for fear or not being bipartisan. At the same time, if they’re too aggressive, they risk earning the same rep that Republicans earned when they tried to push through changes using dirty tricks. It’s a fine line, but I’d rather see them push the barriers of progress than do nothing at all.

Let’s take a look at some of those issues that need to be addressed, shall we?

Earlier this year, a report came out on how the bottom 15 percent of the work force was having its wages stolen to the tune of $2.9 billion per year in, if you can believe it, three US cities. Workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are getting almost $3 billion dollars per year stolen from them by their employers. Workers can try to fight wage theft, but they can lose their jobs in the process, and face having to fight court battles against employers who lie and falsify records.

…

Speaking of climate, scientists’ concerns over the state of our planetary life support system are growing. While the scientific community was hopeful even three years ago that we could hold warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a global temperature increase that would already mean the loss of the Arctic sea ice and heat waves that might end corn production in the US Midwest, more of them are seeing signs that a business-as-usual approach will get us 6 degrees Celsius in global warming. If 6 degrees of warming happen, not only will many coastal cities go under water, but the North American and Eurasian temperate zones could become uninhabitable.

As some 350.org activists wrote, “There is no Planet B.”

…

The world can’t wait, and neither can Americans who need good jobs and fair pay. Our leaders need to step up and correct these problems responsibly, which they were hired to do by a public that is increasingly too sick, broke and tired to keep hounding them about it all the time.

The Senate needs to do its duty by the planet and their voters. They need to start cranking the gears down on emissions and get America back to work with all possible speed.

This is critical – the issues of climate change and jobs and unemployment are closely related – they can be fixed with some of the same forces, and those forces don’t involve leaving people to fend for themselves or shaming them into vanishing into the shadows away from the light of the public. Smarter energy solutions and green energy technologies could go a long way to putting the millions of Americans currently out of work back to work in high-paying, high-skill jobs that, as the President so often says, cannot be outsourced. It’s absolutely true – if only we have the political will to make it happen and private industry would get moving on it.

I’m doing Chart a horrible injustice here by snipping her post up to snag some of what I think are her most poignant paragraphs. You should very definitely head over and see her post in its original context. In the end though, her critical point is that the Democrats in the Senate can’t shy away from the issues in front of them because they’re “hard,” or because they require a great deal of political will. We elected them to do the hard things, work through the difficult problems, and help make America a better place. There’s a lot of work to do, I understand, and there are some seriously obstructionist Republicans on the other side, I understand that as well, but if anything that only adds to the urgency.

[ The Hard Things We Elect Them To Solve ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

There are still people out there with their heads in the sand, claiming that global warming and climate change aren’t caused or at least exacerbated by human influence, that climate change is a “religion” instead of scientific fact. To these people, the phrase “just because you want it to be the case doesn’t make it so” applies ten-fold. Just because these people don’t want to share responsibility for the damage we’re causing to our ecosystem (ironically, these are the same people who nihilistically and stupidly claim that you can’t “harm” the Earth because there’s nothing we can do to really really damage it that it won’t recover from) doesn’t mean the damage isn’t happening, and doesn’t mean that we don’t need to do something about it now.

The Obama administration recently declassified satellite imagery that the Bush administration had kept under lock and key for years, mostly with the intent of keeping the so-called climate change “debate” alive long enough that they didn’t have to risk their pocketbooks by doing anything about it, and they didn’t want to have to present even more clear and damning evidence in front of the American people that climate change is real, is happening now, and is having a very visceral impact on the environment.

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images – selected from the 1,000 photographs released – includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice – a record loss – were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

When you talk to the people who live there; who make their livelihoods in those waters, they’ll tell you the same thing. Let’s be clear – weather does not climate make, and the two are not the same thing by any stretch, but there are some disturbing trends that simply can’t be ignored.

The Obama administration is already taking steps to bring science back to its proper place of investigation, observation, and limited recommendation in public life. Now comes the hard part – getting the American people and their elected representatives to garner the guts and will to do something about what the scientific community has been telling us for years.

[ Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide ]
Source: The Guardian UK

Let’s be honest – all of the ads about so-called “Clean Coal” are obviously biased and fronted by the coal industry; they claim their technology is incredibly clean, but only compared to technology that’s 50 years or more old, and they claim that they’re making strides towards clean air when out of the other side of their mouths they beg the EPA for a pass on actually implementing clean coal technology because of its cost. When they’re mandated to or forced to by local or regional governments because of air quality standards, they’d rather spend more money in protracted legal battles than they would actually spend on cleaning up their plants.

For example, the coal industry discusses how they’re all about carbon sequestering, but the fact is that not a single American home is powered by a coal-fired plant that sequesters its carbon. And similarly, what the coal industry won’t tell you is that they’re responsible for at least a third of America’s global carbon footprint. If that’s “clean,” I’d hate to see dirty.

The Reality Coalition, a collaborative project from the Alliance for Climate Protection, the League of Conservation Voters, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, and The We Campaign, is out to debunk the myths being perpetuated by the coal industry with a new site called This Is Reality.

[ This Is Reality ]
Source: The Reality Campaign

Damn – way to go out with a bang there, King George.

Bush has always wanted to gut environmental protection laws and regulations, and it’ll likely take years to undo the damage that he’s already done to existing laws and pending legislation that he’s vetoed (let’s not forget that he only started waving the veto pen like a Texas flag after Republicans lost the majority in Congress – prior to that he’d sign anything that crawled out of a crack in the foundation of the Capitol building) and how he’s already all but eviscerated the Environmental Protection Agency, the Justice Department, and even NASA’s Earth Sciences programs.

This is a big step even for him, but it’s proof that he has no intention of going out of office without making the energy interests that got him into office (and are now trying desperately to get John McCain into office) happy that they got him there. I can only imagine the phone call he must have received from one of his old friends reminding him that it’s coming up on the closing days of his Presidency and they still aren’t drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, they’re still not drilling offshore like they wanted to, they’re still not logging in the Pacific Northwest like they wanted to, and the courts are still ruling against them when citizens step up against them. What does he decide to do? Let’s get rid of the Endangered Species Act! The fallout from gutting the Act could open up a world of natural resources to energy and market interests to be exploited.

Yesterday, the AP reported on new draft rules being proposed by the Bush administration to gut the Endangered Species Act. These would be the biggest change to the groundbreaking legislation since 1988, and would not require the approval of Congress.

Currently, federal agencies are required to consult with an independent agency — the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or the National Marine Fisheries Service — to determine whether a project would harm an endangered species. The AP reports that under the new rules, agencies would simply be able to “decide for themselves”:

The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants. New regulations, which don’t require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft obtained by The Associated Press.

The draft rules also would bar federal agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.

35 years of environmental protection – the kind of environmental protection that brought the Bald Eagle, the very symbol of our great nation, back from the brink of extinction, and Bush wants to overturn it with a swipe of his pen.

I’ve been crowing about this little statement since I heard it in one of the 2004 election debates, but I think King George is proving now exactly what he meant when he promised to be a “good steward of the land” in front of America.

[ Bush Plans to Make The Endangered Species Act Extinct ]
Source: Alternet

Take Action:
[ Environmental Defense Fund: Take Action to Protect America's Endangered Species ]
Source: Environmental Defense Fund

Changing positions again to suit the demand of the day, John McCain made one of his more preposterous propositions today; picking up the Bush rallying cry that the best way to help Americans feeling the pinch at the pump is to open up our coastlines to leasing and drilling by oil companies. Apparently the Republican campaign and party line on energy policy is “consume, consume, consume! We can just drill our way out of it!”

I can’t say this is a surprise, after all, Dick Cheney was the man who claimed that energy conservation is a “personal virtue,” and even though McCain distanced himself from that comment today, it’s no surprise that Bush and Cheney – both men who make loads of money from the rabid success of the oil industry in the US – are less about alternative energies, better fuel and consumption efficiency, and conservation, and are all in favor of finding new and interesting ways to put off actually dealing with our energy problems. What was that about not running for Bush’s third term, John? Funny – he certainly seems eager to pick up where Bush left off.

McCain has had his moments on climate change, and even said that while we should dot American coastlines on the east and west coasts with oil rigs and refineries (after all, when we have all that oil, now American drivers will have something to go see when they go to the beach instead of all that boring sand and sea life) we should leave the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge alone. Thanks for the bone there. What was that about trying to build a green image, John?

But here’s my question – while he’s all about this, and the Republicans are all but frothing at the mouth at the notion of even more giveaways to oil companies, the Democrats in Congress are pointing out something very very important:

Oil companies already hold the leases to over 65 MILLION ACRES on which they have failed to begin drilling. 65 million acres on which there’s every indication there’s enough oil underneath that they could produce enough to meet growing demand. But they’re not using it.

Why not? No one seems to have the answer to that question. Republicans are trying the old bait and switch, “there’s no oil under there,” which is hilarious in its idiocy: we already know there’s oil under there, and besides, even if we didn’t know already, the oil companies would be in more than a hurry to break their leases on all that land if they didn’t think they should have it. The trick? They just haven’t bothered to use it.

Some argue that oil companies have the technology and the know-how to drill on new areas cleanly and minimize environmental impact. I don’t doubt this is true – the technology exists and the oil companies have it. What’s wrong with that picture is getting them to use it. Let’s examine another industry that has the technology to do its business cleanly but simply fails to: the so-called “clean coal” industry: the ones that spend millions of dollars marketing themselves as the best option for the environment, replete with ads featuring sunny, red-faced children looking up at perfect skies? Yeah – when you ask those coal companies to implement that “clean” technology they tout in their ads, they fight you every step of the way. The oil companies are no different. They’re all for marketing their green credentials, but that’s as far as it goes. In some cases, they’re more willing to spend money on green marketing than green business practices.

So. In the face of all of the land that the oil companies currently don’t drill on, Republicans still want to give them more. Every President since the 80s has extended the offshore leasing ban, but McCain is more than willing to tow the Bush line and fill Bush’s buddies’ coffers with more taxpayer money by mortgaging our future and environmental security.

Add to this the fact that even if we granted all of the leases that Republicans want to hand out to oil companies tomorrow that Americans wouldn’t see relief at the pump for more than 5 years, and no serious oil supplies from those new regions for longer than that, and yep- you see where this is going – another bad idea from our friends, the experts at bad ideas.

Independent energy analyst Phillip Verleger agrees, but he says even if the moratorium were lifted, it would take years for new offshore rigs to produce any oil.

“It will not be in the term of the next president that we will see much significant increase in production,” Verleger said, “even if we were to change the moratorium, say, on Jan. 20, 2009.”

Verleger and other energy economists say the best way to address high gas prices is through conservation and improved efficiency.

“We’re only going to get out of this problem by using less,” he said.

For what it’s worth, that’s exactly what Barack Obama is saying we should do. Conservation should become a virtue, automobile and truck manufacturers have the technology to make more fuel efficient vehicles within months and years, not half-decades, and should be pressed into rolling those technologies out now instead of just making commercials about them, and America can create jobs and connect communities by investing in our infrastructure and public transit. Makes almost too much sense, doesn’t it?

[ McCain Energy Policy Targets Offshore Drilling ]
Source: NPR

[ McCain Seeks to End Offshore Drilling Ban ]
Source: The Washington Post

So-called “global warming” is just a secret plot by wacko tree huggers to make America energy independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, kick-start 21st-century industries, and make our cities safer and more livable. Don’t let them get away with it!

~ Founder and President of Grist.org, Chip Giller