Saving the Planet

With a president who thinks oil and coal are the only way to create energy, probably because his portfolio is ass deep in those stocks and a fossil fuel industry that has run unfettered for the last hundred years, it’s no wonder that the planet is facing extinction. Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is running amok, creating famine, disease and species extinction all over the globe. And it isn’t like any of the perpetrators of this dismal situation are willing to take any responsibility for what they are causing.  Rupturing pipelines, burning landscapes and exploding nuclear facilities destroy entire communities and worse, and the perps never accept the blame. BP still owes billions in reparations for the damage they did to our Gulf Coast almost a decade ago. Energy Transfer is still trying to lay pipelines into areas where they would eventually cause even more damage than BP ever considered.

Why don’t these companies see the future? Why are they willing to poison your children and theirs, just to pump up a bottom line that is leaking profits and this year will surrender the profitability equation to renewable fuel industry forever.

But despite the greed, the deception, the illegal tactics and the support of our dysfunctional president the fossil fuel industry is starting to take some big hits, the kinds of body blows that will eventually destroy it.

Last Sunday, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy, two of the biggest, most dishonest and greediest of east coast energy producers, announced they were dropping plans for the Atlantic Coast natural-gas pipeline despite a court ruling just a few weeks ago that gave them the right to lay the new line right along the Appalachian Trail. This was a project in which they had already invested $3.4 billion. But the win wasn’t going to be enough to offset the fact that the green light was based on a Trump edict that was no longer valid. A Montana Court ruled in April that the Trump administration had no right to waive environmental laws to benefit the Keystone XL Pipeline. That would apply to Duke and Dominion as well. So even though they had the okay to put their pipeline along the Trail they faced a lawsuit based on ecological problems at every stream they planned to cross. Faced with the long- term decline of their product, they decided to take the loss and walk away.

Then on Monday a Federal Court ruled in favor of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River tribes in their battle with the Dakota Access Pipeline, which had already been built. The ruling declared that Energy Transfer must take down the pipeline and drain it within thirty days.

Neither of these rulings happened overnight. These fights had been going on for years, all the way back to a time when fossil fuels seemed to have a future.

Then on Monday Night the Supreme Court ruled that Keystone XL couldn’t go ahead until all the litigation is settled. This is essentially the death knell of the Keystone XL project as there’s no way all the litigation can be cleared before the November election where Trump faces a devastating loss and Biden has already stated that he will oppose this kind of infrastructure.

A democratic win in each of the three government bodies in November will signal a whole new approach to the energy problem. The first thing that will obviously happen is the end to subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, which is just about all that is keeping them competitive. The next thing promises to be a whole new approach to building regulations featuring the concept of the home as a climate envelope and aimed at reducing the total energy supply needed. Add those changes to the job creation promised by the renewable industry and fossil fuels will have the same future as the horse and buggy.

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Chris Christie, in a futile attempt at defending the sociopath in the Oval Office, made a big deal out of Trump having a vision of the future to sell to the American people. The future? Trump doesn’t have a vision of what he wants to do today. He is a disaster that can’t put two thoughts together with any kind of logic, how the hell is he going to muster a vision of the future?

Christie keeps pounding but he’s beating a dead horse. Trump just isn’t the man Christie needs him to be and it’s a mind-boggling wonder that a guy as clever as Christie is still trying to pump life into the Trump cadaver.

On the other hand there is the theory that Chris is making his own plans to run in 2024. If that’s true, the fact that he is showing the ultimate loyalty to a president that gave none to him will probably stand him in good stead with what’s left of the Republican Party.

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Trump made another stupid move last week when he pardoned Roger Stone. This wasn’t any attempt to get a fair deal for some guy who got caught up in the justice trap and got a bad deal. Stone is a criminal who lied to everybody, committed felonies and lied some more just to cover up for Trump. Even the aides in the White House tried to stop Trump from this folly but he was determined to let his crooked pal off.

But that’s not the point of this piece. The point is, why did he do this, why did he pardon a man who was obviously a criminal and was about to serve a well-deserved sentence?

If you just said “loyalty to a pal,” it would be the first instance of that in Trump’s entire life. He is a man who demands loyalty but has never displayed any. This is a creep that would sell out his mother. So why did he do it? Or why is he such good friends with Putin? What did Putin ever do for him?

Those who have studied the question suggest it’s because of something that Putin has on him. It’s obvious that Stone, who knows a hell of a lot of his secrets, is in the same position. Stone knows stuff that Trump can’t allow to become public just as Putin does.  What are those things? Well, it should be obvious that I don’t know because if I did I would have Trump under my thumb. No one but Putin and Stone know what they have on him but you can bet your ass it’s damn big. You can also bet your ass that no one will get to find out before the election. Once Trump’s out and Putin no longer has anything to gain by keeping his mouth or his photo vault shut, he may decide that it’s to his advantage to give a rival administration the info just to curry favor. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has long been mocked for her lack of credentials.  Being the daughter of a billionaire who donates heavily to all Trump causes is not considered a credential for anything more lofty than hosting fund raisers, but DeVos has held her post, mainly by means of her family’s donations, throughout the entre Trump administration and yesterday she proved all those mockers right.

Dana Bash, who conducted the interview, did a great job of revealing the depth of ignorance and lack of any kind of planning by the Education Secretary. Over and over and over she demanded that DeVos reveal some kind of plan on how to safely open schools and time after time DeVos struck out. DeVos earned an “F” in every area of the interview, thereby terrifying every parent in the nation who now realize that the Secretary of Education, the person most involved in their child’s learning and safety while being educated, was less informed, less interested and less functional than the Fat Liar who sits in the White House and who, by his inactivity, has allowed the pandemic to reach it’s current state, one where all the sunbelt states are breaking records in new cases.

DeVos is a sub-moronic wart on the ass of humanity. But because the greed and idiocy of Trump has placed her in charge of the safe education of the nations children, she is also a dangerous sub-moronic wart.

She was unable to give Dana Bash one single intelligent answer to any question. She obviously has no idea how to keep children safe; she has no concept of what safety is as it relates to our schools. She is mindless, gutless and without a plan. Our schools have universally deteriorated under her, and our children, especially those in our public school systems, have seen their educations deteriorate under her useless leadership.

She is in her job because Trump wants her money and she will stay there until he is crushed in November.

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Then there is the even more dangerous and just as ignorant Governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis was shown on the tube this week in earlier rants where he attacked reporters and compared his state with New York, which at the time had far more cases of COVID-19 than Florida. Since then DeSantis has made one stupid move after another. He has ignored all unsafe behavior by Floridians, has encouraged the abandonment of masks, social distancing and any other guideline that might have helped keep the virus away from his constituents. So now he’s breaking every record on new cases. One in four of Florida residents now have contracted the virus. That jumps to one in three residents of Miami.

How did this happen?  It was easy. This moron acted like there was no such thing as communicability. There’s a reason why New York has beaten back the virus. New Yorkers have treated it with respect. Look at pictures of beaches in NYC and you see most people wearing masks. Look at pictures of Miami beaches and no one is wearing a mask. The same is true for the city’s streets and all other places.

I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and even though we have pretty much beaten back the virus here, there is still almost no one on the streets without a mask.

New Yorkers are intelligent enough to understand that wearing a mask has to do with health concerns. It has nothing to do with bravery or machismo. No one likes to wear a mask. It slightly restricts one’s breathing; mine knocks my hearing aids out. But it’s little enough inconvenience for the safety it provides; to me and even more importantly to others around me. That’s what seems to be escaping the idiot legions of the south and parts of the mid-west. Everything can’t be fun. It isn’t like you’ve been locked in a dark, murky cell where some guy comes in every hour and kicks you in the face. You’re being asked to wear a little mask and to stay a reasonable distance from others. If you haven’t got the self-discipline to do that you are a seriously retarded four-year-old.

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And finally, we have to deal with an almost universally non-functioning president and his equally inept administration issuing an order that all future patient information from all sources be directed to the Federal Government instead of the CDC. Any reasoning human being understands that if followed, this order would be catastrophic. The nation is already crippled by an administration that has utterly failed in its too few attempts to bring any kind of reason or order to the battle with the pandemic.

Now a president, to whom the truth is a distant fantasy and the virus a political inconvenience, wants the nation to give all the medical facts to his care so he can twist them to suit his political aims.

This sociopathic buffoon, who has so far ignored the medical advice of scientists simply because it doesn’t further his political goals, now wants to have all the facts in his grimy hands so he can further lie to the American people without the inconvenience of having the truth exist anywhere he can’t conceal it.

Giving this information to this addled degenerate would be tantamount to installing a baboon in the Oval Office and giving him the nuclear football. Oh wait! We already did that. So maybe there is no reason not to give this monster the means to completely destroy the nation. He probably couldn’t do that right either.