Externalities of the Oil Industry — Great Comments
There have been some fantastic comments to my piece on the externalities of fossil fuels the other day. I encourage folks to check out the response of frequent blogger Cameron Atwood in particular, to whom I reply:
Unfortunately, this corporatocracy has gotten so strong that it’s really tough to refocus people on what’s happening at the macro level which, you’ve nailed with 100% accuracy in your excellent remarks. There’s a great deal of mainstream coverage of the perils of Lindsay Lohan, but very little insight into the true cost of oil and gas. So when you write:
The next time you talk with a child, apologize to them for bankrupting their future, because that’s when the bulk of these costs will come due… but our parents’ children – we who sit here today – will also surely suffer personally, far more than we do presently. Do we possess the collective wisdom and will to stem that tide of pain and change the course of our nation?
… I’m afraid that I have to say that the answer at this point appears to be No.
I have a post going up soon on GreenTechMedia in which I discuss and provide some excerpts from my interview the other day with Ray Lane, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins. When you think about it, he’s actually one of the most powerful people on Earth, as the decisions he makes shape the future of the disruptive technologies that are brought forward into our lives.
He’s a fantastic, committted, and passionate guy. I happened to ask him about the huge subsidies for oil, and he replied, “I’m a Republican. And even I don’t understand why we as a nation are still doing this.”
Well, sadly, I do. It’s called corruption. Pick a euphemism for it if it makes you feel better, but that’s what it is.
Indeed – back again we go to the root of nearly all political evils: bribery.
Until enough of us get behind MoveToAmend.org, and pull the almighty dollar from its entrenched and decisive position of leadership throughout our government, we’ll all just keep on speeding – pedal to the metal – toward that yawning abyss that you and I, and so many others, have long seen approaching.
Frank Zappa is quoted as having said, “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
I think that’s been far too true across our country’s tangled history – with the exception of those rare moments of wakefulness when folks made too much fuss, as we did in the 1930’s and the 1960’s. In those challenging times, enough of us remembered that our government in these United States can – and should – be a powerful arm of We the People, to be wielded for our own defense and to ensure our own just prosperity in the face of tyrannical combinations both foreign and domestic.
The key to success for such despotic forces is to keep their target population sufficiently divided and ignorant. Ignorance is of chief importance, because as people gain knowledge and understanding they become increasingly united and, as they become conscious of their collective potency, they tend to act.
As I pointed out in my “Where Are We Going” post here not long ago, despite the fact that nearly every candidate is utterly bought and paid for long before they ever get on the ballot, there’s a glimmer of hope to be seen in the failure of the Whitman and Fiorina campaigns (far more than in the resulting success of the lukewarm Brown and Feinstein), and in the defeat of Prop 23. Those three outcomes here in California demonstrated solidly that not every election can yet be bought – even with such unprecedented campaign spending – if public awareness and activism are robust.
True, Big Oil, affluent CEO’s and GOP politicians had already been struggling against their own well-deserved unpopularity across the urban areas of the state where most of the people reside… but a compliant media and floods of cash like we saw in those races are often sufficient to overcome logic and experience in the minds of enough of the voting public.
Despite the widespread success of moneyed interests in their efforts to befuddle and bamboozle the people in so many other races across the rest of our country, those three notable exceptions show that our unique and ailing democratic republic has not quite yet slipped beyond rescue and resuscitation.
However, if we are to bring our exceptional and beloved patient back to life, we must now quickly combine to take action and amend our Constitution. That venerated document, our highest expression of Law, must firmly recognize and declare that legal fictions are subordinate to people, not our equals, and it must potently and permanently disallow the purchase of our political candidates – red, blue and purple.
Otherwise, our ballots will only have the power to change the color of the shoe that’s jammed down on the accelerator.