Tag: fracking

Hillary and the Earth Wreckers

nothing
Nothing to see here … move along

W.J. Astore

News that Hillary Clinton has selected Ken Salazar to head her transition team should give pause to anyone who believes Hillary’s claim that she’s a “Progressive.”  Assuming Hillary wins the presidency, Salazar will chair the team that helps her to fill more than 4000 appointments.

What do we know about Salazar?  According to a report at The Intercept,

As a senator, Salazar was widely considered a reliable friend to the oil, gas, ranching and mining industries. As interior secretary, he opened the Arctic Ocean for oil drilling, and oversaw the botched response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning to the private sector, he has been an ardent supporter of the TPP, while pushing back against curbs on fracking….

“We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar told the attendees, who included the vice president of BP America, another keynote speaker at the conference. “We need to make sure that story is told.”

Really, Mr. Salazar?  I lived in Pennsylvania for nine years, during the height of the fracking boom.  A friend of mine lost his family farm and land due to poisoned water caused by fracking.  Earthquakes have been traced to fracking.  Methane seepage and burn-off contributes to global warming.  Fracking chemicals are highly toxic and wastewater from fracking is radioactive.  And these are just a few of the dangers associated with fracking.

It’s one thing to argue that fracking is hazardous but that those hazards can be controlled through rigorous practices that emphasize environmental safety.  It’s a defensible position, though I believe the hazards are not fully known, therefore they can’t be fully controlled, let alone minimized.  But Salazar is arguing fracking has not caused a single environmental problem!  For anyone!

Yes, Hillary now claims she’s against fracking (when she led the State Department, she was strongly for it).  But how does that flip-flop square with her decision to appoint yet another earth wrecker to a key position in her government-to-be?  Just what the planet needs: a pro-fracking, pro-industry, corporate shill who will help to ensure that people like himself will occupy key positions of authority in a Clinton government.

I’ve witnessed enough earth wrecking.  Count me out of Hillary 2016.

The Winners of Putin’s Aggression: The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex and Big Oil

There's a bear in the woods ...
There’s a bear in the woods …

W.J. Astore

There’s a new bear in the woods and his name is Vladimir Putin. Remember that Reagan campaign ad from 1984 that showed a menacing, obviously Soviet, bear patrolling the woods, with ominous music in the background? Fast-forward thirty years and a bare-chested Putin is that new bear, marauding in the Crimea and threatening Ukraine.

Our mainstream media has entered a time warp and we’re back to 1984.  No, not the 1984 of George Orwell and of constant monitoring by Big Brother – our media is not concerned by that.  Instead, they’re concerned with a revived Soviet Union, a new Cold War, and the notion that America is unprepared and weak.

The big winner of this collective (and selective) exercise in time travel is obvious: the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex as well as Big Oil and Gas.  We can’t make significant cuts to “defense” spending now that the Russian bear is on the loose again.  Right?  And the best way to neutralize the bear’s threats of cutting off gas shipments to Europe is by surging oil and gas drilling in the U.S., chiefly by hydro-fracturing or fracking.  Right?

Never mind concerns about rising CO2 levels and global warming.  It’s 1984 again, not 2014.  We need to corral that Russian bear before he emasculates us.  Deploy our military!  Drill baby drill!  Show the Russkies who’s boss!  Before they go all “Red Dawn” on us.

red_dawn

And when was the cheesy “Red Dawn” originally released? You guessed it: 1984.

War Is Becoming Obsolete — In 1884

At least coins were more attractive in 1884 (Morgan silver dollar)
At least coins were more attractive in 1884 (Morgan silver dollar)

W.J. Astore

One of the occupational hazards of being a historian is reading old books.  The one in front of me is John Fiske’s The Destiny of Man (1884).  Fiske was an American philosopher and popular writer on Darwinism, Spencerism, and many other representative isms of his day.  Like many thinkers of the late 19th century, he believed in inevitable progress as well as the inherent superiority of men like himself.

From the vantage point of 2013, what is perhaps most striking about Fiske was his optimism that war was coming to an end.  In his words:

The nineteenth century, which has witnessed an unprecedented development of industrial civilization, with its attendant arts and sciences, has also witnessed an unprecedented diminution of the primeval spirit of militancy.  It is not that we have got rid of great wars, but that the relative proportion of human strength which has been employed in warfare has been remarkably less than in any previous age … In almost every case [of war since the Revolutionary War and Napoleon] the result has been to strengthen the pacific tendencies of modern society …[War] has now become narrowly confined in time and space, it no longer comes home to everybody’s door, and, in so far as it is still tolerated…it has become quite ancillary to the paramount needs of industrial civilization …the final extinction of warfare is only a question of time.

War was coming to an end, to be replaced by the reign of law, Fiske predicted in 1884.  Thirty years later, the horrors of World War I came to visit (in one way or another) almost everyone’s door, with World War II proving an even more persistent caller.  Today, the United States finds itself in a self-defined, and apparently endless, “war on terror.”  What happened to Fiske’s pacific progress?

We all have blind spots.  For Fiske one of those was the European imperialism of his day, which he didn’t treat as war since inferior brutes needed civilizing by Whites.  Another was his belief in inevitable progress and the perfectibility of man, as shown by “the pacific principle of federalism” and the “due process of law,” which he believed would settle future disputes without war.

Rather than bashing Fiske, it’s perhaps more useful to ask what our blind spots might be.  American exceptionalism is certainly one.  Just as Fiske believed that the White man was inherently superior – the culmination and fruition of evolution and civilization – many Americans seem to believe that the United States is the best nation in the world, the most technologically advanced, the most favored by God.  This belief that “When America does it, it’s OK; when another country does it, it’s wrong” is one that’s opened many a Pandora’s Box.  A second blind spot is our belief that more and better technology will solve the most intractable problems.  Consider global warming.  It’s most definitely happening, driven in part by unbridled consumption of goods and fossil fuels.  Our solution?  Deny the problem exists, or avoid responsibility even as our country goes whole hog into boosting production of new (and dirtier) sources of fossil fuels via hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Like Fiske, Americans by nature believe in their own exceptionalism.  Like Fiske, Americans by nature are generally optimistic.  But Fiske dismissed the horrors of imperialism even as he missed the looming disaster of mass industrialized killing in two world wars.

What are we dismissing?  What are we missing?  I’ve suggested we’re dismissing the blowback produced by our own exceptionalism even as we’re missing the peril we pose to the health of our planet.  I encourage you to add your thoughts below.