(Image: BP Oil Spill, from the Air)
Naomi Klein on Climate Change and the Clinton Campaign
Naomi Klein questions Hillary Clinton’s readiness to take the drastic action that is necessary to save us from global climate change’s ill effects:
A new paper from Oxford University, published in the journal Applied Energy, concludes that for humanity to have a 50-50 chance of meeting the temperature targets set in Paris, every new power plant has to be zero-carbon starting next year.
That is hard. Really hard. At a bare minimum, it requires a willingness to go head-to-head with the two most powerful industries on the planet—fossil-fuel companies and the banks that finance them. Hillary Clinton is uniquely unsuited to this epic task.
The real issue is not Clinton’s corporate cash; it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology.
While Clinton is great at warring with Republicans, taking on powerful corporations goes against her entire worldview, against everything she’s built, and everything she stands for. The real issue, in other words, isn’t Clinton’s corporate cash, it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology: one that makes taking money from lobbyists and accepting exorbitant speech fees from banks seem so natural that the candidate is openly struggling to see why any of this has blown up at all.
As indeed most on her side seem to be: what is this “public figures should avoid the appearance of impropriety” you speak of? What on earth do you mean, “one shouldn’t take millions of dollars’ worth of speaking fees and then frantically try one’s best to cover up what was said in exchange”? On the contrary! One should positively back up the dump truck and LOAD IT UP with that cash, whether from big banks straight to your bank account, or from fossil fuel companies or bundlers straight to your super-PAC. (Leave out the fact that payments of that size from the fossil fuel industry or big banks to REPUBLICANS used to be cause for criticism among the progressive Left. Unlike them, Hillary Clinton does not deny climate change being manmade. But she has been MUCH more friendly to fracking and, as the next paragraph shows, other fossil fuel concerns, than Bernie looks to be.) Well? So what? Meh! Nothingburger. What does it matter that you’re asking for the job of Regulator-in-Chief for those very industries that are paying you or your super-PAC or your charitable foundation millions upon millions of dollars?
Avoiding the Appearance of Impropriety
Well, it matters if you’re placed in charge of whether to approve the Alberta Clipper tar-sands oil pipeline, which will pump 450,000 barrels per day from Alberta, Canada to Wisconsin, and you approve it, while the same ExxonMobil that lobbied for the pipeline readies large donations to the Clinton Foundation, which pays Clinton nothing, but which pays her friends pretty big six-figure salaries, such as Bill Clinton advisor Bruce Lindsey, who made $360,000 as Chairman of the Clinton Foundation after working for years as a Bill Clinton staffer (see page 7 on the Foundation’s 990 form here), and which paid Clinton ally Sid Blumenthal, who also consults for two firms working on the Clinton campaign, $10,000 a month for consultancy. A donation to the Clinton Foundation, then, goes directly to provide Clinton allies with payments in the tens of thousands of dollars. That is not conspiracy theory, nor is it right-wing propaganda; no credible source, to my knowledge, denies Politico’s report of that $10,000 a month payment for Blumenthal, and the 990 form showing Lindsey’s pay is a tax form, which doesn’t lie. And approve the pipeline she certainly did. I’m sorry, but Hillary taking $0 salary from the Foundation is great, but it’s cold consolation to say “yes but it’s only her FRIENDS’ pockets that are being fattened by tens of thousands of dollars a month.” If you say to me “Whamadoodle, you’re in charge of approving my public project. Now, I can’t give money to YOU, of course, but… how about if I give to this fund here, that you can appoint your trusted friends to?” then I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much filling the “appearance of impropriety” bill. It just is.
And if one wonders “well shouldn’t you be saying something positive about Bernie?” his negatives are his positives: he hasn’t taken the fossil fuel money, he hasn’t set policy in a fossil-fuel friendly way, and he has pledged that he will say “No” to fracking, with no mile-long list of end-of-the-ad lawyers’ qualifications.
Nothing, of course, will ever convince the people claiming “it’s impossible that Clinton grants policy favors to the fossil fuel or fracking industry in exchange for the favors they grant to her.” I have heard the denials; no one has explained why she can’t simply adopt Bernie’s “simple answer: No” to fracking. Hillary, of course, has friends in fracking and fossil fuels, who bundle hundreds of thousands of dollars for her (when they’re not giving Chelsea jobs). These friends would not take kindly to her saying a flat “No” to fracking, as Bernie does; they get her truckloads of money; and she does not say a flat “No” to fracking. If you want to say “but there’s NO connection between those three facts,” then I can’t stop you. Go ahead and think that. I don’t. I think I’m a grifter’s DREAM if I believe there’s no connection between those facts (and the others that have come to light and been diaried lately). And if there are enough of you voting, then we’ll see whether you’re right, or whether, in fact, she allows fossil-fuel-friendly policy to be made on her watch. For me, it’s too great a risk.
The Risks We Are Facing
Our Last Chance
Here is the risk: first, as Naomi Klein’s article points out, a recent Oxford study has shown that we must go carbon-zero NOW—as in, within the next year—to meet the goals of the Paris climate change accords (which, by the way, aren’t universally seen as going nearly far enough).
Campaign Finance Reform, or Giving It to the Industry; Our Choice Second, we HAVE to have campaign finance reform, of the aggressive type Sanders has consistently and doggedly promised, and which Clinton has promised very laxly, and seems unwilling to go very far to enact (I haven’t heard her decrying the super-PAC system that benefits her, though she does say she wants to overthrow Citizens United). If we don’t do this, then fossil-fuel dollars are simply going to be the thing that drives issues around fossil-fuel use. We don’t want that to happen. That is NOT going to be good for the progressive Left and our environmental imperatives.
Fossil Fuels Are Important; the Fresh Water and Seafood Habitats They’re Ruining Is More Important
Third, and most important of all, our fresh water is being contaminated by fracking wastewater. We cannot have this. My dear friends: get this. This is the most important part of this diary. We do not have unlimited sources of fresh water and river- and seafood. People always say “but what are you gonna do? We have to have our power source, and it’s either fracking or oil or coal.” Well, no—dear friends, fellow human beings, we may have differences, but there’s one similarity we ALL share: we all need fresh water. We all need seafood. And we all live in a world where both our fresh water and our seafood are becoming MORE SCARCE THAN OUR POWER SOURCES. We don’t WANT to live without our power sources; but we CANNOT live without fresh drinking and irrigation water and seafood. (Even if you don’t eat seafood, if the seafood goes away, then all the world’s people who survive on it will turn to your and my chicken, steak, vegetables, and grain. You do NOT want to see what society will degenerate into then. And both the burning and the production of fossil fuels contribute to crop failures and drought.) Our fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, the commons for both the US and Mexico, were absolutely ravaged, like oyster fisheries in the Gulf states, by the Gulf oil spill (which happened a mere MONTH after President Obama, embarrassingly for him, opened the Atlantic and parts of the Gulf to even MORE oil exploration, so it’s worth wondering if that is another score on which Hillary would say “I WILL DEFEND BARACK OBAMA); even the land environment, as in the coastal mangrove trees, was decimated. The Keystone XL pipeline was originally slated to pass over the Ogallala Aquifer, source of fresh drinking and irrigation water for millions of farmers and residents. I don’t begrudge anyone their right to earn a good living, but the oil companies (and these same people also run the fracking business) have simply gone insane. They’re simply insane for money, whether it destroys our water sources, our seafood sources, or our lives. And the fracking industry’s methods have NOT been tested enough to declare that it is safe; billions of gallons of it have already contaminated California’s water, and “Adding insult to injury, fracking is a water-intensive process, using as much as 140,000 to 150,000 gallons per frack job every day, permanently removing it from the water cycle.”
Money is important; oil is important; natural gas is important; NONE of them are more important to us than fresh water and seafood. Fossil fuels have been proven to despoil both, if left unchecked. You all know I’m right about that, don’t you? Come on, now, friends.
Once upon a time, the same Hillary Clinton now running for president criticized one Barack Obama, for taking far LESS money than she has (her list in this ad amounts to about $200,000, only including INDIVIDUAL contributions from fossil fuel companies, not including the hundreds of thousands of dollars in bundled contributions bundled for Hillary by fossil fuel lobbyists or fossil-fuel-investing hedge fund executives like Marc Lasry, who Obama got NO money from). She should take the same pledge. But now she’s unwilling to.
The risk is real; not only for contamination of our fresh water and seafood supplies, but for the burning of fossil fuels to cause sea level rise that imperils coastal cities, to cause superstorms, and to cause crop failure from drought. Incrementalism and “what we can realistically accomplish with this Congress” isn’t going to cut it; we’ve simply run out of time.
We need to turn over Congress, and we need Bernie in office. To do both, the remaining more than 1/3 of the US that has yet to vote needs to turn out. It may not happen. Two months from now, we may be looking at primary results that were very good, that were record-breaking except for 2008’s historic results, but which were not enough; and a lot of relieved fracking magnates. The voters’ will will be heard. That’s all very well for me personally; we are not likely to have children, and we may be gone before the worst of this stuff really hits. But it doesn’t matter: it is simply immoral to will other people’s children, and the animals and plants that make up the rest of the world’s life, this misery, just because of our apathy, because we couldn’t be bothered, because someone else will deal with it one day. We all use oil, we all use mined materials, we will all continue to do so; understood. But we can take concrete steps to save those who come after us.
More Positives for Bernie
I find Bernie simply a more credible, less compromised alternative. We need to vote for him. He has proposed a carbon tax, repealing subsidies for fossil fuel companies, banning Arctic drilling, and banning offshore drilling.
He proposes a 10-million-job public works project for renewable energy promotion, and has championed solar power, especially for low-income people.
He proposes a nationwide upgrading of our transportation and electrical infrastructure, with high-speed rail, a new electrical grid, and a network of electric charging stations. We made such a change in the 19th Century, when we built our rail network; we made such a change in the 20th Century, when we achieved rural electrification and made the Interstate Highway System; and we can do it now.
OK fellows, here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, we have two more months to go. I’m voting for Bernie, and I hope you do too.
“It’s all down to numbers now, Ross.” — Barbarians at the Gate
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