atheism environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility divestiture media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 13: I’ve Enjoyed About As Much Of This As I Can Stand
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishes the driveling of an unintentional apologist for our corporate overlords:
The resolution on climate change approved last month by the General Synod of the United Church of Christ has garnered mostly admiring attention from the news media. But I admit to a degree of perplexity and sorrow over the document, which seems to place the blame for our heavy use of fossil fuels mostly on the companies that produce them — not the consumers who demand them.
The resolution is intended to create a path toward divestment of church funds, including pension money, from “fossil fuel companies” unless they meet certain benchmarks. The text never defines “fossil fuel companies,” but it’s a good bet that the target is oil and mining enterprises.
The resolution also calls upon church members to “make shareholder engagement on climate change an immediate, top priority for the next five years” and to “demand action from legislators and advocate for the creation and enforcement of carbon-reducing laws.”
Poor pathetic little sociopaths. Sheesh. July 21:
Yes, when it comes to our societal dependence on fossil energy, we’ve all got to go beyond the call of ordinary duty to reduce our consumption of the prehistoric carbon which has fueled our civilization and triggered a rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect. But to feel “perplexity and sorrow” over deploring the roles played in the climate crisis by oil and coal companies is breathtakingly naive. In the service of higher profits, these corporate miscreants have invested countless millions of dollars in manipulative media campaigns, and even more millions in the co-optation of US lawmakers, resulting in hopelessly muddled public discussion of climate issues, and a legislative paralysis which would be hilarious if it weren’t tragic.
These “corporate persons” are the worst sort of planetary citizens, and they deserve the worst sort of reputation. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but there’s not enough blame for them.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility divestment economics
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 11: Don’t Do As I Say, Do As I Want. Is That Clear?
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel discusses some of the opposition to divestment from our side of the ideological divide:
Not everyone supports the strategy. A local religious leader who’s been battling Exxon Mobil Corp. for years over climate change says he considers divestment the wrong move.
“This approach to this issue is too simplistic in my mind. It generates a lot of enthusiasm among young idealists, but it’s not a good strategy,” said the Rev. Michael Crosby of Milwaukee, a representative of the Capuchin order and board member of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility.
Crosby prefers direct engagement. He traveled to Texas to urge shareholders of Exxon Mobil to adopt a climate change resolution.
The Capuchins’ work of direct engagement with Exxon Mobil has gone on for more than a decade — and during that time the corporation agreed to stop funding groups that were denying the existence of global warming, Crosby said.
Resistance remains. At this year’s shareholder meeting, Exxon Mobil Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson said the company agrees that climate change is a serious issue. However, the ability to forecast the severity of what’s to come is limited.
“How do you want to deal with something where the outcome is unknowable but the risks are significant?” Tillerson said. “We do not have a readily available replacement for the energy that provides the means of living that the world has today.
“What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers in the process of those efforts when you don’t know exactly what your impacts are going to be?” he said.
This was pretty complicated to get down to 150 words. July 21:
When Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson asks, “what good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?” his definition of “humanity” pays more heed to the sociopathic corporate “persons” which he represents than to those of us made of old-fashioned flesh and blood. In this context, the notion that divesting from fossil fuel corporations is somehow futile because “the stock would be bought up by somebody else” is an obvious evasion of the moral and ethical foundations of good citizenship.
While Michael Crosby and his Interfaith allies may be using their investments as a point of leverage to confront corporate polluters over their contributions to planetary climate change, that strategy isn’t an option for most of us. It’s never the wrong time to do the right thing, and ending financial collaboration with the multi-national polluters who are fueling the climate crisis is both ethically and environmentally appropriate.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility Koch Brothers
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 4: Hey, You! Yeah, You!
The Washington Post reports on the Worst People In The Universe:
When environmental journalist David Sassoon began reporting about the billionaire Koch brothers’ interests in the Canadian oil industry last year, he sought information from their privately held conglomerate, Koch Industries. The brothers, who have gained prominence in recent years as supporters of and donors to conservative causes and candidates, weren’t playing. Despite Sassoon’s repeated requests, Koch Industries declined to respond to him or his news site, InsideClimate News.But Sassoon, who also serves as publisher of the Pulitzer Prize-winning site, heard from the Kochs after his story was posted.
In a rebuttal posted on its Web site, KochFacts.com, the company asserted that Sassoon’s story “deceives readers” by suggesting that Koch Industries stood to benefit from construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — a denial Sassoon included in his story. KochFacts went on to dismiss Sassoon as a “professional eco-activist” and an “agenda-driven activist.”
It didn’t stop there. The company took out ads on Facebook and via Google featuring a photo of Sassoon with the headline, “David Sassoon’s Deceptions.” The ad’s copy read, “Activist/owner of InsideClimate News misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods about Koch. Get the full facts on KochFacts.com.”
They’ll be coming after me, too, if this one gets published. July 16:
As the newest poster boys for A.J. Liebling’s quip, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” the Koch brothers have attracted plenty of opprobrium from the left. Their long history of ultra-conservative advocacy encompasses the reflexive anti-communism of the John Birch Society, an open hostility to the New Deal, and a double helping of the deep mistrust of intellectual accomplishment and expertise which has long been a staple ingredient of the GOP’s faux populism. Their heavy-handed attempts to silence investigators and critics demonstrate the absurdity of “balancing” two billionaires’ wealth and influence against the efforts of those who take seriously their responsibility to the Jeffersonian ideal of a “well-informed citizenry.”
The Kochs would be garden-variety robber barons were it not for their irresponsible readiness to hinder any progress in dealing with the accelerating climate crisis, a factor which moves them into a special category: species traitors.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 3: Just Shoot Me
The Chicago Tribune comes down heavily on the side of the predators:
North American railroads typically transport oil and other hazardous materials with care and caution. Yet the disastrous train wreck in Lac-Megantic on the U.S.-Canadian border points to the risks involved. A runaway train carrying crude oil exploded in a fireball, devastating the town.
In all commerce, public safety risks have to be weighed. This frightening crash points to a fact of life in the shipment of the continent’s fast-growing supplies of oil and gas. Pipelines are the safest means of transit, safer than trucks and trains. Safer for people. Safer for the environment.
Yes, this is an argument for the Keystone XL pipeline.
This page has voiced strong support for the privately funded $7 billion pipeline, which would connect the rich Canadian oil sands with U.S. refineries at the Gulf of Mexico and create thousands of jobs.
This is maddening, albeit predictable. July 16:
To assert that “pipelines are the safest means of transit” as an argument for approving the Keystone XL is a bizarre rhetorical evasion based on the unfounded assumption that the dangerous and dirty tar sands oil will inevitably be extracted and transported across the continental US.
This is like an emphysema patient rationalizing, “having purchased all these cigarettes, I must smoke them — but I’ll use a filter, which is safer.” Far better, obviously, to leave the tobacco unburned in the first place.
The question of pipelines’ safety record may be forever unresolvable: which is worse, an explosive train derailment or a massive leak over a vulnerable aquifer? But what has been resolved conclusively is that CO2 emissions from the Canadian Tar Sands are more than enough to trigger runaway climate change on an order far greater than any we’ve yet experienced. The Keystone pipeline is a disaster in the making.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots James Inhofe Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 2: Who Cooda Knowed?
The Silicon Valley Mercury News (CA) reports on the bizarre fundraiser Google hosted for (gasp!) Jim Inhofe:
July 10
Mountain View-based Google is taking some heat for hosting a fundraiser for a U.S. senator who is an outspoken disbeliever in man-made climate change, despite the company’s green rhetoric.
Google’s Washington, D.C., office will host a lunch Thursday, at $250 to $2,500 per plate, to benefit Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., just a month after Google chairman Eric Schmidt said those who deny climate change and global warming are liars.
Climate change activists plan to picket outside in order to “remind people of Google’s professed culture of ethics, environmental stewardship, and respect for scientific truth which help make Google products so popular,” according to a news release. “They’ll also remind people of Sen. Jim Inhofe’s long record of unethical environmental destruction and promotion of anti-scientific conspiracy theories on behalf of the likes of Koch Industries, his biggest corporate funder.”
The protesters say they’ll deliver 10,000 signatures of people from across the nation, calling on Google CEO Larry Page to end his company’s support for politicians like Inhofe.
“We regularly host fundraisers for candidates, on both sides of the aisle, but that doesn’t mean we endorse all of their positions,” a Google spokesperson replied to my email Wednesday. “And while we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.”
This one was easy and fun to write. July 15:
We should be fair to the people who run the world’s most popular search engine.
Perhaps they just didn’t know how to find out about James Inhofe’s obsessive climate-change denialism (“inhofe climate denial” worked pretty well for me). Perhaps they couldn’t find the right search string that would have unearthed the Oklahoma Senator’s gleeful self-description as the number-one “Enemy of The Earth” (“inhofe enemy earth,” in case you’re wondering). Perhaps they’d never noticed that the Center for Biological Diversity last year awarded Inhofe the “Rubber Dodo” award in recognition of his relentless work pushing humanity and countless other species toward what biologists tactfully call an “evolutionary bottleneck” (try “inhofe rubber dodo”).
Or perhaps, given that the Senator’s entire legislative career has consisted of putting his vote up for sale to the highest bidder (“inhofe political corruption”), Google’s executives figured they might be able to simply buy him off. Who knows?
Warren Senders