Who Cooked the Planet?

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on Congress' failure to pass anti-global warming legislation:

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

More here.

If you have any doubt in your mind at all that our representatives and senators in Congress no longer act in the best interests of the people of the United States, take a close look at how our leaders have doomed our civilization to certain destruction.

There is no longer any serious debate about the existence of global warming, or that man made carbon emissions are causing it. Really, there hasn't been any serious scientific debate on the subject for many years. Man made global warming is simply a fact. And anybody who goes just a stone's throw outside the circus known as the US news media can easily verify it. Major legislation on the issue, severely limiting carbon emissions, is a no-brainer: this is what must be done in order to salvage what we can of the American way of life, whatever that might mean to you. Nonetheless, Congress appears to be incapable of performing this desperately needed task.

If they were actually working for the people of the United States, their ostensible function, such legislation would have been passed in the late 1990s. Instead, they maintain the status quo that got us into this dire predicament in the first place. That's because they, in reality, represent the will of the gigantic corporations which own and operate the US, and all these corporations are institutionally organized such that events occurring any further in the future than the next quarter are unimportant. Consequently, global warming is unimportant to the corporations, which means that global warming is unimportant to Congress.

It's all over now. Too late to really do anything about it. All we can do is wait.

Here's my advice to everybody under fifty:

Don't have any children; the world they will inherit will be bleak at best. Don't save for retirement because the economy will crash. Consider survivalism. Consider nihilism. Consider hedonism. Do what you love. Don't worry about the future because you already know that the future will be awful and there's nothing you can do about it.

Listen to the Doors.



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