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to more sustainable long-term moderate profitability for a broader range of energy producers.
Just need the big old fuel providers to open their minds to a new business model. We don't want to zoom ahead furiously using up all our fossil fuels rushing through the next fifteen years. Most of us know full well that we will want to use fossil fuels for decades to come, so we need to increase our efforts on building in alternatives to stretch those precious supplies. We would rather use petroleum more carefully than scramble into pumping millions of gallons of poisons into the ground to force out the natural gas. That's desperation. Business as usual-- do whatever it takes to generate oil.
We want a more judicious approach. Much better safety to save the millions of gallons so callously wasted in deep water drilling so far. But using fossil fuels more responsibly involves a new business paradigm-- including the public good in business strategies. Businesses could no longer hide behind being legally bound by their charter with shareholders to maximize their quarterly profits. They have hidden behind that imperative so far-- Poison is cheaper so we've gotta use it. It's not illegal and we won't be liable for it since we paid to get the laws written in our favor. You know we'd like to do things more responsibly but gosh, we've gotta go for the cheapest production we can afford because we're obligated to maximize profits.
I remember a time when businesses accepted the value of pollution regulations-- all companies would be bound to follow the more expensive waste disposal procedures so none could get ahead with reckless disposal. Everyone's got to do it, so no one has the advantage. Businesses grudgingly accepted some constraints after they had seen rivers catch fire, and subsequently saw the ecosystems improve. They accommodated OSHA and saw less workers injured on the job. The value of those improvements was appreciated for a while. We were talking about the environment and sustainable development in the late 70's.
But in the meantime, alas, get rich quick guys were plotting away, to take back that Do Good money. Recycling and regulations were bothersome so they could work those angles. And after we had lost the War in Vietnam, talking about how wasteful the USA is compared to other countries could be portrayed as disparaging our country, being unpatriotic. We're America! We don't have to cut back! It's Morning in America...
That was the slick messaging of Ronald Reagan's era-- that environmental stuff is a real pain in the butt, why should there be any Limits to Growth? We're America! It's time to Get Rich Quick, squash those demanding unions, and exalt the Wisdom of the Free Market. Get people to think the Free Market will regulate itself. Unconstrained it will work for all of us and best practices will naturally triumph.
Now we know-- unconstrained, it worked to enrich the Top Two Percent of us by hundreds of percent increases in their annual incomes, and billion dollar corporations. Too many of them took those fabulous tax savings and invested them in lobbying Congress for more favorable laws like subsidies to off-shore production that had been done by those demanding unions, and better tax shelters. They didn't use the Bush tax cuts to create jobs; they used them to gamble by selling shady mortgages and repackaging and swapping them around until the Wisdom of The Free Market crashed our economy. Supply side trickle down economics failed miserably.
And yet the Koch Parties are still with us. The Chamber still spends millions to loosen pollution regulations and crush more unions. How very sad. Still using professional PR to inflame desperate citizens to vote against their own and humanity's best interests in order to increase the quarterly profits of multinational corporations.
Our media used to issue challenges to Republicans to defend outrageous ideas like defunding the EPA or cutting Low Income Heating Assistance. But our last Democratic president allowed media ownership to be deregulated into fewer, stronger, multinational corporate hands, so we don't see enough direct challenges to Republican officials.
I've been glad to see more Democratic legislators taking up the slack recently. I have really appreciated their direct challenges to the reckless cruelty of the GOP's budget. But I wish I'd seen more TV news people asking Republican officials directly to explain why they voted to cut over a billion from the EPA in these treacherous times for energy production. And why they voted to cut back on community clinics when we still have 50 million people uninsured.
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