Basav Sen: Fossil-fueled fascism

Via OtherWords.org

The year 2020 will be remembered in history for a deadly pandemic and a deep economic crisis that touched almost every country. . Hopes for a brighter 2021 were one of the few things most people could agree on.

But just six days into the new year, these hopes were rudely shattered by images of far-right white supremacists, incited by an aspiring autocrat refusing to admit his electoral defeat, storming the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the election.

This fascist putsch was implicitly supported by some elected leaders, including GOP members of Congress who continued to promote the thoroughly debunked falsehood that the 2020 elections were “stolen.” Worse still, there are early indications that some elected officials may have aided the violent mob more directly as well.

But this attempted coup wouldn’t have progressed to this point without large amounts of funding, too. And playing a disproportionately large role among business backers of fascism are fossil fuel companies and their owners and top executives.

My Institute for Policy Studies colleagues Chuck Collins and Omar Ocampo recently documented the top billionaire donors to the Trump campaign. In first place is Kelcy Warren, co-founder and board chair (and until last October, CEO) of Energy Transfer — the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

Trump’s wealthy backers over the years have also included the notorious (and now deceased) coal billionaire Robert Murray, who effectively bribed Trump and his former Energy Secretary Rick Perry to implement a policy agenda that would benefit Murray.

This isn’t a case of a few isolated billionaires backing one extremist politician. It’s a case of an entire industry filling the campaign coffers of politicians who’ve waged war on our democracy. In the 2020 election cycle alone, the oil and gas industries gave some $9.3 million to lawmakers who refused to certify the 2020 election results.

The fourth largest Political Action Committee (PAC) making campaign donations to these coup-supporting politicians is the Koch Industries PAC.

Koch Industries is widely known as a major right-wing political donor. It’s also a vast conglomerate that’s deeply intertwined with fossil fuels, with interests in refineries, equipment, engineering, and construction services for petrochemical facilities, gas transportation and storage, and more.

The industry has also funded far-right hate groups directly.

DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund that allows wealthy people to make anonymous contributions, has made large donations to multiple hate groups, totaling $5 million in 2019. The Koch Charitable Foundation is a contributor to DonorsTrust and has other organizational ties with them as well.

Unsurprisingly, Donors Trust also donated $5 million in 2019 to climate denial and misinformation groups, such as the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Climate denial and far-right extremism are two heads of the same monster.

The Koch network, American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, and other fossil fuel organizations all made public statements condemning the violence at the Capitol and supporting certification of the 2020 elections. These were fine as far as they went, but they sound rather like Dr. Frankenstein condemning the monster of his own creation.

Slaying this monster once and for all has to start with ending the culture of legalized bribery and corruption, in which wealthy individuals and corporations can fund far-right extremism inside and outside government, often anonymously.

And just to make sure the monster doesn’t rise again, we need to break the political clout of the fossil fuel industry once and for all.

Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Basev Sen: Trump is willing to kill you with coal

Mountaintop removal by coal-mining company in Appalachia.

Via OtherWords.org

In August 1921, sheriff’s deputies in West Virginia — later joined by federal troops — massacred striking mineworkers using machine guns and aerial bombardment, in what’s now known as the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Nearly a century later, the Trump administration is  going to war in support of mine owners by deregulating coal-fired power plants. This time, the target of the war isn’t striking workers — it’s the public.

Casualties in this war are projected to be steep. By the government’s own estimate, up to 1,600 people a year are going to die from the additional soot and ozone pollution by 2030, thanks to its proposed rules.

They didn’t mention that in the press release or any of the fact sheets accompanying the proposed new rule. Instead, those estimates are buried in technical tables (on pages 169 through 171 of a 289-page document). But they’re there.

These deaths won’t be equally distributed, either. Consequences of ozone and soot pollution include asthma, and the disparities in who gets asthma — and who dies from it — are striking.

More than 11 percent of people in poor households have asthma, compared to under 8 percent of all Americans. Almost three times as many black people die of asthma as white people. And children are particularly acutely affected.

This doesn’t include the additional deaths from extreme heat or violent storms attributable to planet-warming emissions of carbon dioxide, which are projected to increase by up to 37 million tons a year compared to current regulations.

Yet the document proposing the deregulation mentions the phrase “climate change” only three times, and the press release and fact sheets don’t mention it at all. The estimates of increased carbon dioxide emissions are also hidden in a table (on page 142 in a 236-page document).

Shocking as this sounds, the U.S. government is — by its own admission — willing to kill up to 1,600 Americans a year, and still more Americans in other ways it doesn’t own up to. Since pollution crosses national borders, they will kill people outside the U.S. as well.

Why? The same reason as on Blair Mountain: to benefit the coal industry.

A combination of cheap natural gas, falling renewable prices, and state policies have battered the coal industry. Unable to compete, the industry has turned to the government for help.

Coal billionaires such as Robert Murray, of Murray Energy, and Joseph Craft, of Alliance Resource Partners, have bribed the president (or to sugarcoat reality, given him “campaign contributions“), handed memos with policy prescriptions to the president’s minions, and schmoozed with them at basketball games.

Unsurprisingly, one of the policy prescriptions from Murray was to deregulate emissions from coal-fired power plants. Trump and his team have obliged.

The government claims its motive is to help coal miners. Trump evidently loves photo-ops with them, so he went to West Virginia to promote his coal-deregulation plan.

The propaganda doesn’t match with reality. While many in the audience were supportive, a sizable number weren’t buying it. “Will coal ever be what it was? Hell, no,” a maintenance worker named Charles Busby told E&E News. Busby’s father has black lung.

Indeed, black lung cases among U.S. coal miners have been growing since 2000, even as the industry tries to reduce its responsibility to miners suffering from the debilitating illness. Even after all those photo-ops with miners, Trump hasn’t gone to bat for them.

Trump and his cronies aren’t on the miners’ side — they’re on the side of their bosses. And the U.S. government is willing to kill its own citizens to enrich these billionaires.

This is class war. Unlike in 1921, it’s not being waged with machine guns and aircraft, but it’s just as deadly. Understanding this assault is key for us to organize and fight back.

Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Basav Sen: Ruthless coal baron helps set Trump energy and environment policuy

Removing the top of a mountain to mine for coal in Appalachia.

Via OtherWords.org

It’s common knowledge that our political system is awash with money. And that money, despite some flimsy legal barriers, comes with strings attached.

One coal baron’s efforts to set an entire administration’s energy agenda are the perfect case study.

His name is Robert Murray, and he heads Murray Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the United States. Murray contributed $300,000 to President Trump’s inauguration — and clearly wants a return on his investment.

The details are laid out in some memos Murray wrote to Vice President Mike Pence and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, which were reported on by The New York Times and In These Times magazine.

The memos recommend a detailed (and horrifying) energy agenda. And the administration is following it almost to a T.

Murray recommended that the administration get rid of greenhouse gas regulation. Status? Check. The White House is trying to get rid of the Clean Power Plan, the prior administration’s most significant effort to regulate greenhouse gases.

Murray recommended that ozone regulation be gutted. While the administration hasn’t succeeded in doing that yet, it’s not for lack of trying. The Trump EPA tried to delay the rule by a year, and it took the threat of a lawsuit by 15 states to compel the administration to reverse its decision.

Murray recommended that the EPA’s staff be cut by more than half. They’re well on their way, thanks to a combination of buyouts, retirements, and resignations that have brought the agency down to 1989 staffing levels.

Meanwhile, to reinforce the message to EPA employees that they aren’t wanted, the agency has censored their work and spied on them.

There’s more. Murray also recommended a convoluted idea for more regulation of energy markets — and higher costs for utility ratepayers. To justify them, he cited made-up concerns about the reliability of an electric grid that relies increasingly on renewables.

Cutting though the jargon, Murray wants you and me to pay higher energy bills to bail out the coal industry.

Career experts at the Energy Department  concluded that the alleged threat to the electric grid from solar and wind was “fake news.” But under Perry’s leadership, the department still tried to get the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to approve a scheme very much like the one Murray proposed.

Thankfully, FERC, which is an independent agency, overruled the idea unanimously.

So while Murray’s agenda has hit a roadblock, it’s not because the Trump administration hasn’t tried to implement it. (Indeed, one Energy Department staffer said he was fired after leaking a photo of Perry literally giving Murray a big hug.)

When a wealthy person gives a politician a large sum of money, and a detailed policy agenda that benefits his business interests, and the politician goes about implementing this policy agenda almost to the letter, the logical thing to call it is bribery.

Our politicized courts think that it’s “free speech.”

What’s a good way to describe a country where the formal structures of democracy don’t make the government accountable to the public interest? And instead, where a small wealthy oligarchy bribes politicians to do their bidding?

The old term for that was a banana republic. But perhaps a more “presidential” term would be a s—hole country.

Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.