Tim DeChristopher served 21 months in federal prison for making fake bids in an oil lease auction. Protesters just received felony convictions and were denied bail pending appeal for resisting the construction of a pipeline in Michigan. These things have already happened. And CREDO Action has a list of 50,000 people pledging civil disobedience if President Obama approves the Keystone tar sands oil pipeline. There is a surge of resistance coming from the environmental movement, recognition that our laws are not protecting us, that our political system is failing us, and that both the law and the political system have been hijacked by the astonishing wealth and power of Big Oil. Some people slander these resisters as "eco-terrorists" because they engage in civil disobedience to protect the planet, themselves and future generations. But who are the real eco-terrorists?
The consequences of anthropogenic global warming are becoming more horribly clear every passing day: from biblical floods in Britain to historic drought in California, the proof of AGW’s incalculable destructive capacity is slamming into our faces. And this is just the beginning. These are relatively minor consequences, merely a foreshadow of what is to come from AGW unless we dramatically change course.
But people know our government is captured by Big Oil, by EXXON/Mobil, by BP and the Koch Brothers. Utterly captured and given carte blanche by the leaders elected to protect and defend us. From reckless and profligate deep-water drilling to unregulated, uninvestigated and uncontrolled fracking, to a maze of fossil fuel pipelines slashing the nation like a butcher knife, the earth itself is under assault by the Oil Barons and their minions in government. And because the planet is under assault, so are the people.
What are the people to do in response? Act politically, we are told. So we elected a Democratic president, since the Democratic Party is ostensibly the “left” party, the party of the people, the environmental party. And what have we reaped from our rejection of the GOP? What have we achieved by defeating a Republican Party that everyone knows is owned lock, stock and barrel by Big Oil? We see the United States EPA shutting down research projects demonstrating grave environmental problems from fracking. We witness our Democratic president firing a regional EPA Administrator who had the temerity to insult Big Oil. We watch in shock as there is more deep-water drilling than under the Bush-Cheney Big Oil regime. We see the Arctic opened to drilling for the first time. We learn that our new energy secretary's nickname is Dr. Frackenstein.
At a time we know GHG emissions must be cut drastically to avoid catastrophic AGW, we witness worldwide GHG emissions skyrocketing. Even with the collapse of U.S. manufacturing and its outsourcing to China and India, we see U.S. greenhouse gas emission up 2% last year. We see American coal exports increase by 50% under this Democratic president. We bear witness to the tragic truth that there are no international agreements on fossil fuel reduction and none in sight. We have no carbon tax. And, even though the U.S. Supreme Court specifically affirmed EPA’s power to regulate carbon as a pollutant, and even though Candidate Obama repeatedly promised he would do just that, EPA has not issued regulations for airborne carbon and has no intention of doing so. We bear witness to the spectacle as the United States is predicted to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of fossil fuels within 20 years. Not coincidentally, the Obama Department of Energy forecasts a 40% INCREASE in fossil fuel consumption over the next 30 years.
Most of this has been done in silence. Our leaders have not deigned to explain their actions, other than mouthing pablum like “energy independence” and “all of the above” energy approaches (the same “all of the above” energy approach touted by Candidate McCain and rightfully mocked by Candidate Obama’s supporters). There has been no acknowledgment that our foremost climate scientists state unequivocally that most of the remaining fossil fuel must stay underground if humanity is to avoid catastrophic global warming. There are no explanations by the politicians, and our news media -- captured and beholden to the same corporate powers as the government -- asks no questions. It has simply been drill baby drill, lay those pipelines, frack away, and -- above all else -- collect the money.
Until now. Now we know what President Obama thinks about AGW. President Obama believes in “mitigation,” which is also called “adaptation” and various other (presumably) market-tested buzzwords. Now this approach has a superficial appeal because we must indeed acknowledge that our GHG emissions have already locked serious climactic effects into the planet. So, yes, we must prepare for those effects that are necessarily coming and, indeed, are already manifest. But the first rule when one is in a hole is to stop digging. And President Obama has made it clear he has no intention of doing that.
There is no acknowledgement from President Obama of the scientific conclusion that we must curtail fossil fuel usage, rapidly and drastically. There is no discussion of the equation that determines how much the earth’s temperature will rise based upon the amount of GHGs we put into the atmosphere. No, there is just the admonishment that we must “adapt” to whatever comes.
In other words, there is a lot of money in buried fossil fuels, the government is ensuring that the Oil Barons will get that money, and the American People will just have to suck it up and adapt to whatever comes afterward. No matter how horrible the consequences, we must adapt. No matter that adaptation is impossible when conditions are changing at an accelerating rate as we continue to spew evermore GHGs into the atmosphere. No matter how un-adaptable the conditions become, we must adapt anyway or else just suffer and die. Why? Money. Period. According to our own government, according to the people we elected to serve and protect us, there is too much money to be made to do change course, there is too much greed to do anything else. That is the position of our government and that position is fortified by the power of the government’s laws.
So who are the real eco-terrorists? Those who knowingly put the planet and the American People at grave risk? Or those who resist those atrocities through civil disobedience?
