President Obama, has spent the last couple of weeks blowing smoke about how President Assad of Syria, a country that most, geographically challenged, Americans couldn’t even find on the map, has been gassing his citizens. According to the President we are supposed to get very bent out of shape about this. He says that he is and he wants to do something about it.
Sounds really humanitarian doesn’t it. It must be, because it‘s made headlines all over the world. So how come we’re doing the same thing to people in our own country and nobody seems to give a damn, not the President, not the rest of the country and certainly not the greedy polluting slobs who are doing the gassing.
I’m not talking about Damascus, here, I’m talking about a town right in the oil refining heart of the, not so great, state of Texas. I’m talking about Port Arthur, home to massive refineries where 900,000 barrels of crude oil are processed each and every day; where the population is mostly poor and almost completely black, where the cancer mortality rate is 40% higher than it is in the rest of the state. FORTY PERCENT!!! Where Keystone XL wants to bring in another 830,000 barrels of the worst, most poisonous slime on the face of the earth, where 2,500 toxic emissions events occur each year and each of those two thousand five hundred events poisons children and kills seniors, but who cares. Big oil is making trillions so who’ll miss a few black kids and their doddering elders?
Why the hell aren’t we bombing Port Arthur? Or more to the point why aren’t we bombing the BP or Royal Dutch Shell headquarters in Houston or the Exxon Building in Manhattan, or maybe Chevron’s or Texaco’s main offices. How come we give Assad hell and these mass murderers get a tax break?
The Keystone Pipeline will intensify these problems but Obama twiddles his thumbs over a decision while children die or are crippled for life and BP runs commercials about how they are generously helping the people of the Gulf after they destroyed their land and livelihood. Yeah BP is really good for America, like hemorrhoids.
When the hell is this country going to stop being stupid? When is it going to realize that all the publicity and all the lobbyists in the world aren’t going to make fossil fuels safe for our environment. When are we going to learn that mysterious black clouds like the ones that appeared over Detroit aren’t just an air traffic inconvenience but a deadly poison; a byproduct of petroleum coke which is a byproduct of tar sands oil.
With all the money the oil companies are spending on phony ads and lobbyists you would think that they would spend some on insuring the safety of their process and their product, but in the middle of a campaign in which they are seeking to run a pipeline through the center of the country, endangering the water supply of our heartland, they can’t stop themselves from screwing up. Even while the process is in progress they have massive spills in Michigan; smaller ones, over a dozen, all along their existing pipelines and nothing seems to sink in to those who need to make the decisions about whether to allow this abomination to proceed.
This is basically an unsafe process, starting from extraction, through transportation, to refinement, to functional use. All along the way there are components of the process that will kill us and poison the land. But no one in the fossil fuel business cares. Why should they? The are making money faster than the treasury can print it and that, after all, is the bottom line if you are already in the business of poisoning the planet.
I can understand why those in the fossil fuel industry don’t care how many people they kill as long as they get richer and richer but what I can’t see is how our elected officials can be so blind.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not so naïve as to eliminate the influence of lobbyists and bribes, but somewhere in the houses of congress or the White House there must be some men or women with enough oral fiber to fight for the people they represent, the people of the planet. And it isn’t just a moral fight. There are strong indications that renewable energy is not only catching up but passing, fossil fuel as a practical economic source of energy.
Right now there are more people employed in the solar energy marketplace than there are mining coal. Solar is growing 10 times faster than the U.S. economy. In 2012 solar added 14,000 new jobs and this year it will add 30,000 more. The fossil fuel industry lost 4,000 jobs.
The cost of solar panels has dropped in the last 35 years to 10% of their original cost while the cost of coal has risen 13%. Yes solar has been the recipient of government subsidies but the tax subsidies given to fossil fuel companies dwarfs those of the solar industry $409 billion to $60 billion. Add to that difference the cost of medical care because of the atmospheric poisoning of coal, oil and gas, estimated by the Harvard Medical school at $500 billion a year and the difference is off the board.
Over the last two years two-thirds of total global solar capacity has been installed. Think of that; all of the solar capacity in the world that was installed before 2011 is only one third of what we have created in the last two years. In contrast 175 coal-fired plants in this country have shuttered.
And of course, there’s always investment. Soon, due to international environmental regulations a large percentages of the in-ground fossil fuel reserves held by the major fossil companies won’t be able to be used. His reserve has been part of the calculation upon which the values of these companies is measured. Already the value of coal companies has dropped 75% in the last five years due to this problem.
Already investors are fleeing their investments in fossil, due to this problem as well as a new realization that they don’t want to be responsible for killing their own grandchildren.
It’s really time for Obama to take time out from the contemplation of bombing Syrians and making excuses for the NSA and finally kill the Keystone pipeline. The only thing keeping that evil plan alive right now is the infusion of billions by greedy people who care nothing for the human race, but only for their own pocket book. Isn’t it time we put people first and let the profits fall where they may?