Office Hours: How to fight Big Oil’s plan to destroy the planet?
Climate change is wreaking havoc, yet the industry has devised a plan for the next Republican administration to worsen it.
Friends,
The fossil fuel industry is pushing a massive plan to reverse progress on fighting climate change, as a cornerstone of the next Republican administration.
As The New York Times reports, fossil fuel think tanks, along with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, are spearheading “Project 2025,” which will likely define the agenda if a Republican wins the White House next year.
Several of the architects of the plan are veterans of the Trump administration — such as Bernard L. McNamee, a former Trump official who has worked as an adviser to fossil fuel companies as well as for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which spreads misinformation about climate change, and Mandy Gunasekara, who was chief of staff at the E.P.A. during the Trump administration and considers herself the force behind Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord. Their recommendations match positions held by Trump.
The nearly 1,000-page plan calls for dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels, including shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells, and power plants.
This is insane. The effects of climate change are already literally killing millions of people around the world through record heat waves, droughts, floods, fires, worsening air quality, and rising sea levels — and these consequences are just beginning.
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that the uses of oil, gas, and coal have led to an increase in average global temperatures. They fear we are near a tipping point after which it will be impossible for much of humanity to adapt.
Fortunately, by a nearly two-to-one margin, Republicans aged 18 to 39 years old agree that human activity contributes a great deal to climate change and that the federal government has a role to play in curbing it.
Which brings us to today’s Office Hours question: What’s the best strategy for taking on Big Oil’s plan for the next Republican administration?
We are at the point when olio and gas companies need to pay for the damage they are inflicting. All legal means should be used including monetary fines and compensation as well as criminal charges for climate change denial and acting falsely. It is so sad that these companies, who could have leaders in divestment and transformation to new forms of profitable energy have chosen to deliberately destroy our and their home in the name of capitalism and profit. Evil!
Make the Heritage Foundation and the radical, anti environment wing of the Right Wing GOP own it. Post their names, their Positions, the sources of their wealth.
Publish Plain English and Graphic Comic versions of their grotesque manifesto and lay clear the disaster that they are proposing to force the rest of us, the great majority of us who are concerned with the future and fate of our children,our grandchildren, our fellow travelers the Animals, the Trees, our Streams, Rivers and Oceans - in short Life on Earth.
They propose to make Planet Earth walk their plank. We simply can’t let them.
Good for the young members of the GOP who oppose them! Good for the young Dems and Independents who feel the same way.
It needs to be that we, the Elders, join them in their Mission. And begin to dismantle this radical wing of what used to call itself the Grand Old Party. It has become instead Grotesque Old Party.
Make the own it! Make it public.