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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forumsthe planet is dying and half of our political process is being paid to pretend it's not happening
The email from Exxon's in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, over a generation ago factoring that knowledge into its decision about an enormous gas field in south-east Asia. The field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time. "Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia," Lenny Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and Exxon's former in-house climate expert, wrote in the email. "This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2," or carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.
Yet the company kept funding climate-change denialists for nearly three more decades. Please tell me how doing something like thisand there are plenty of people like the Koch Brothers who still are doing itwon't one day be counted as a crime against humanity? And it's not as though we didn't have lengthy previous experience with the damage that can result when scientists whore themselves out to industry.
Analysis of public statements issued by the tobacco industry sources over the past five decades shows that the companies maintained the stance that smoking had not been proven to be injurious to health through 1999. The public statements of the tobacco industry are in sharp contrast to the private views expressed by many of their own scientists. The tobacco documents reveal that many scientists within the tobacco industry acknowledged as early as the 1950s that cigarette smoking was unsafe.
This really should be the only issue in 2016that the planet is dying and half of our political process is being paid to pretend that it's not happening at all.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a36337/climate-change-liars/
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)MH1
(17,608 posts)In case anyone wants to be a stickler.
Hydra
(14,459 posts)As George Carlin pointed out, the Planet is fine. We're ****ed!
Mnemosyne
(21,363 posts)hunter
(38,339 posts)And most the rest of us dancing, and a few of us overwhelmed by the magnitude of changes to come.
People of the future will not speak of Nero and Rome. They will speak of our time.
I still watch it all going down with a sense of curiosity and wonder.
Like Fred Kwan dropped out of space onto the transport deck in Galaxy Quest, commenting, "That was a hell of a thing.." as the rest of the crew still stands shaking in their boots, unable to move, unable to speak.
There's still plenty of positive things to be done, but one thing's for sure: We ain't ever going back to the way things were.
Rex
(65,616 posts)has a 'soul' or bothers to worry about the planet. They don't care about life, they care about dead presidents.
Some folks will never understand that one simple fact.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)Just like the power of the clergy long ago.
When you give so much power to money, shouldn't it be reasonable then that money would have the power to purchase anything, including the government and people's minds?
Doesn't this show how evil greed and immense money in the hands of a few is?
skip fox
(19,360 posts)In many ways.
Over and over again.
Although it's likely too late.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)so everyone else has the right to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Or else.
SoLeftIAmRight
(4,883 posts)it hurts even more knowing that there are solutions and we do not even try