The Business Climate

Articles and opeds that tell us how bad things are vis a vis the climate crisis are depressingly frequent.  But this one in the NY Times quotes several facts and studies I missed.  Mostly about the ongoing role of those behemoths of the age, the fossil fuel megacorporations.

Mark Bittman first of all cites this Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report showing that the world is not going to run out of fossil fuels for a very long time, once new technologies to wring the stuff out of sands and rocks etc. are considered.  There's potentially five times as much oil to be tortured out of the Earth than we've soaked up and burned up already.  A lot of the extracting action is likely to be within the U.S. So even if societies balk at the damage and expense of getting all of it, for a century or so there's not much threat of Peak Oil.  There are others that dispute this, however.

Bittman then puts this together with a Rolling Stone report that asserts that the Big Oil companies are no longer even faking a commitment to clean energy.   BP put its $3.1 billion United States wind farm operation up for sale. Last year, ConocoPhillips divested itself of its alternative-energy activities. Shell, with its “Let’s Go” campaign to “broaden the world’s energy mix,” spends less than 2 percent of its expenditures on “alternatives.”

The implication is that Big Oil has figured out that it doesn't have to hedge its bets by getting into clean energy businesses--it's got such a sweet thing going as the world's richest corporations ever, that nevertheless demand and get government subsidies, and that never has to pay any of the estimated $2 trillion in damages to the global environment.  Why bother?  It's like that t-shirt I used to have, with the Exxon logo and the words: We Don't Care.  We Don't Have to Care.  We're Exxon.  It's an all-purpose slogan.

So with almost literally all the money in the world, these corporations can buy all the state legislators they need to keep on pumping and fracking until the ground collapses beneath befuddled non-voters and I Told You So Jesus Apocalyptics.  And they tie up the federal legislature with paid deniers, otherwise known as Republicans, though some Dems are on the payrolls too. Bittman cites an American Progress study  that counts 125 congressional deniers who soak up some $30 million from fossil fuel corps just in "campaign donations."  Which doesn't include speaking and consultant fees, etc.

So the U.S. and the world keep burning the fuels that fuel the climate crisis, and while everybody else struggles to survive the consequences of past pollution, the future is fried for thousands of years after these folks die in their greed-fevered beds.

Tobacco companies were once all-powerful, but regulations limiting smoking eventually became common and pretty pervasive.  The task is even greater this time, because there's no place for fossil fuel corps to shift their business, unless they can market to extraterrestrials.  We have to hope some of them are run by people with a rudimentary conscience, at least about the world their own future generations will inherit. Not to mention the victims of the climate crisis and their children--look no further than the children of the 19 firefighters killed in Colorado.  It will take that, and immense political will and cultural change to make the necessary difference.