The Climate Killers Part Three - Senator and CEO Villains
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Welcome back for part three of an eco-friendly look into the controversial Rolling Stone story by political columnist Tim Dickinson aptly titled “The Climate Killers: Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming”. In this series we hoped to try and ask a few question and weigh public perception vs. the findings of the list, however in some cases the facts speak for themselves. Those named in this article are just as significant as any who were mentioned in my previous posts on the topic.
First up Jack Gerard, President of American Petroleum Institute (API). For this person a mere quote from Dickinson’s article says it all, “Gerard serves as the front man for the nation’s oil and gas industry, including energy giants like Exxon, Shell, BP and Halliburton. Although API now claims to back the move to a “carbon-constrained economy,” Gerard has been working behind the scenes to scuttle climate legislation. According to an internal memo leaked in August, Gerard directed API’s nearly 400 member companies to mobilize their employees to attend “Energy Citizen” rallies in 20 states to protest a cap on carbon pollution. To ensure the success of the fake grassroots protests, Gerard bragged that he had also enlisted a bevy of polluting allies — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. “Please treat this information as sensitive,” Gerard cautioned in the memo. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan.” It’s impossible to find an eco-friendly redeeming quality when you’re encouraging protests to prevent a cap on carbon pollution. Jack Gerard, grab a mirror and you’ll find shame looking back at you.
Moving on to Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, this is someone who you might think ‘well, sure they would make the list’. In fact he seems to be an eco-friendly saboteur. Though he has conceded that greenhouse gases affect climate change, something some may call a miracle coming from the CEO of a gas company. We’ll close this entry with a fact from the article “in 2007, spending $100 million on ads, Exxon boasted about its investments in renewable energy — even though such deals totaled only $10 million that year.”
Here is an eco-friendly conundrum. Is there such a thing as pro-pollution, pro-big oil, anti-environmental democrat? Well according to Rolling Stone, Sen. Mary Landrieu, a democrat from Louisiana is just that. A dishonorable mention goes to Marc Morano who Dickenson says left a job in politics to “set up shop as the Matt Drudge of climate denial.” Also on the list is Morano’s former boss, Republican Senator from Oklahoma James Inhofe, who “calls global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,”[and] insists that carbon dioxide is not “a real pollutant,” and doesn’t worry about rising sea levels, because, if all else fails, “God’s still up there.” FYI - he was the “former chairman and ranking Republican of the Senate environment committee.”
One last name on the list for this article is David Ratcliffe, CEO Southern Company, the article says he was“the head of America’s second-dirtiest electric utility, has assembled an army of 63 lobbyists — almost twice as many as any other company — to defeat climate legislation.” Not to sound horribly cliché but an eco-friendly future is in the best interest of anyone who hopes that the human species will continue for many generations to come. It is both disheartening and disappointing to think that those in a position of power do not understand that the world has changed and this is a new era of doing business in every sense. The environmental movement is the largest grassroots effort ever, and they need to try and adapt to this new landscape.
