Global Warmin' Is Fer Idjuts
Exxon writes America's energy policy, BushCo chops up emissions
reports. Is there any hope at all?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, June 10, 2005


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Who is this guy?

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Like anyone is the slightest bit shocked.
Like anyone is the slightest bit appalled anymore by the breathtaking
litany of utter BS oozing forth from the White House these days, this
time about how one of BushCo's top oil-lovin' henchmen has been hacking
away at countless scientific reports for over two years, editing them
at will, all to downplay the effects of emissions on global warming.

His name is Philip Cooney, and he has zero scientific training
whatsoever and was formerly the "climate-team leader" (read: top flying
monkey) and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest
trade group representing the oil industry. He is now chief of staff for
the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the group that helps
devise and set the nation's environmental agenda; Cooney's cuts and
edits of scientific emissions and global warming reports often made it
into final White House policy.

Isn't that just the cutest thing? Aren't you just, like, yawning with
ennui at the bitter repetition of it all? At how savagely and biliously
common these stories have become?

Or how about that other story about how Bush's decision not to sign the
Kyoto Treaty, the landmark environmental policy signed by 122 other
nations to reduce greenhouse emissions, was influenced not at all by
sound science or serious concern for the planet, but by pressure put on
him by his pals at ExxonMobil and other major oil corporations? Did you
read that one?

Thus proving what everyone already knows: Bush cares about as much for
the health of the planet and for air quality and for the future of your
miserable stupid emphysemic kids as a snake cares for lip balm.

Or rather, in more plain terms, it means this: The environmental
policies of the most powerful and gluttonous nation on the planet are
being written by the world's most powerful oil company. Which is, of
course, a bit like our national dietary guidelines being written by
Burger King, or our national health care guidelines being written by
Merck, or our national school curricula being written by lost
born-again Neanderthal creationists. Oh wait.

This, as we all now know, is the BushCo way. They lie about
environmental devastation, going so far as to hire known skeptics of
global warming to testify in court against piles of data compiled by
thousands of world-class scientists the world over that prove the
obvious direness of the threat.

They lie about abortion and breast cancer. They lie about unemployment
data and corporate layoffs. They lie about prison-inmate torture, about
intentionally desecrating the Koran and smearing menstrual blood on
prisoners and violating the Geneva Convention the way a lonely farmer
violates a sheep.

They lie about why a gay male model and former prostitute who ran gay
porn Web sites was allowed to pose as a partisan hack reporter in White
House press briefings for over two years, allowed to ask softball
questions of the president and the press secretary and allowed to sleep
overnight in the White House and shall we venture a guess who might've
been waiting down in the dungeon all those nights, all sweaty and
adipose, waiting for hunky Jeff Gannon to come and spank him but good?

And of course, most impressively, BushCo lied about WMDs, about why
we're at war, about why we're dumping $5 billion along with dozens of
dead U.S. soldiers and thousands of wounded per month into the Iraq
quagmire (total cost: over $175 billion, and counting -- fast) when our
own economy is gutted and the dollar is at a desperate low and the
deficit is at an all-time high and our education and health care
systems are crumbling and we are, as a nation, essentially running on
fumes.

Yes, I know. This isn't even news anymore. Doesn't even raise an
eyebrow. And how sad is that?

So these latest salvos, these latest disgusting proofs of misprision
and environmental abuse, they're just par for the BushCo course,
standard operating procedure for a callous and domineering
administration that, if it can't find the data it needs to support its
agenda, simply creates it, edits it, forces it into existence and crams
it down your throat and calls it sound government policy.

There are, however, glimmers of hope. There are forces of change at
work, despite BushCo's laziness and resistance and despite his
administration's whorelike devotion to Big Oil and Big Coal and despite
his outright ignorance of all things environmental and desperate and
imminent.

Look over here. There stand 132 U.S. mayors from all over the nation,
including many Republicans and including some from Texas and including
Bloomberg from New York, who have bucked the general vicious BushCo
idiocy regarding global warming and have agreed to carry out the Kyoto
Protocol rules in their own cities, on their own. Seattle, for one, is
poised to become, by the end of this year, the only city in the nation
whose municipal energy utility produces zero net emissions of
greenhouse gases.

And over here are the national scientific academies of all G8 nations,
plus those of the three developing countries that consume the most oil
on the planet -- China, India and Brazil -- making an unprecedented
political gesture by signing a common letter declaring that a plan to
address global warming must be put into action immediately, if not
sooner.

And they've aimed the letter straight at the mumbling, bumbling BushCo,
whose only decision on greenhouse emissions to date has been to let the
major polluters of the nation self-regulate until 2012, when he's a
faint, painful, cancerous memory and the global warming problem is far
worse and even more dire and is shoved onto the plate of the next guy.
Aww, thanks Dubya.

Even some of BushCo's more rabid followers, even some hardcore
evangelical Christians, those intelligent few not wrapped up in the
nutball Rapture Index and who therefore don't believe it's our
God-given duty to ravage the planet and burn through all the resources
as fast as possible so as to hasten the arrival of a really ****ed-off,
homophobic Christ, even some powerful evangelicals are urging Bush to
get on the global warming issue ASAP, as, according to the Bible, we
are supposed to be good stewards of the Earth, not its destroyers.

And you know the global warming issue has become dire when even
staunch, lifelong environmental activists like Stewart Brand are
beginning to look anew at the old demon of nuclear power to help ease
the energy strain on the nation. It's not because nuclear reactors have
become so beautiful and safe and desirable. It's because the global
warming threat has become just that ominous. Going back to nuclear is
simply the lesser of two evils. We have little choice.

So there you go. For the next 3.5 years, these alternatives appear to
be the only path, the only means toward change. Via grassroots
movements, regional lawmaking, commonsense ideas, collectives of
like-minded people banding together despite their differences to thwart
the idiocy and abuse and general autocracy of one of the most heartless
and corporatized and least accountable administrations in American
history. Think it'll work? Think we'll make it? Stock up on water, keep
your fingers crossed and keep handy plenty of SPF 1000.