Mar 21, 2015

Whats Up With The GOP & Their Catering To Big Oil At The Cost Of The American People?

Background:




Jersey Ploys & Pardon the Corruption - New Jersey Governor Chris Christie negotiates a settlement that favors ExxonMobil, and Senator Bob Menendez is accused of taking campaign gifts from an ophthalmologist. (9:23)




Some other interesting stuff:

Note: The idea behind a subsidy is to help the poor or less fortunate to get a better chance at life. Surely multi-million and multi-billion dollar oil companies are not in need of any sort of subsidy at all.

2011: GOP votes to protect oil subsidies







(CBS News) WASHINGTON - Climbing gas prices have drivers looking for someone to blame. And politicians are looking to take advantage.
Senate Republicans Thursday shot down President Obama's plan to cut off oil companies' tax breaks.
The president says there's not much he can do to control gas prices. Nonetheless, he's working hard to appear to be trying.
He came to the White House rose garden Thursday to urge the Senate to repeal $4 billion in tax subsidies for big oil companies, even though no one thinks that would lower prices at the pump.


"They can either vote to spend billions of dollars on oil subsidies that keep us trapped in the past," said Mr. Obama, "or they can vote to end these taxpayer subsidies that aren't needed to boost oil production."

Seattle vs. Big Oil: Revolt over Shell dealAfter Shell secures a two-year lease to make the Port of Seattle its base for arctic drilling, the city fights back.


High oil supply lowers prices of crude - Republicans still tout their “drill baby drill” mentality despite oil prices dropping to a six year low. Ed Schultz and Bart Chilton discuss.




News Introduction:

The top Republican climate change denier just got a whole lot more powerful

Chris Hayes looks at a future where climate change denier Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is the chair of the Senate Committee of Environment and Public Works.

Colbert Report Introduction: The Republicans' Inspiring Message on Climate Change
Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe gears up to chair the Senate Environmental Committee despite literally writing the book on global warming denial. (4:41)
Rather than giving climate change deniers the normal; 3% of airtime they are creating false equivalency that the climate change debate is at 50-50 when it's really 97-3

In the following interview Steven Johnson says something interesting, that maybe climate scientists deniers simply don't want to deal with change...

Steven Johnson

"How We Got To Now" author Steven Johnson discusses the tremendous impact of six innovations, from clean drinking water to air conditioning. (5:44)
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It's a politicians job to serve the community by helping them cope with problems USING FACTS. So, we elected a crackpot, Jim Inhofe, to office. Now what? He has written a whole book (or more likely, had it ghost written by Bill O Reilly's writer) in which he claims that everything about Climate Change is a hoax.

In other words, Jim is claiming that 97% of scientist have gotten together to fool the American People. Fine. Normally when people talk of conspiracies they talk of events that can't be proven. In this case, climate scientists are easy to find and love to talk so we should hold hearings and call as many scientists as we can find who study climate change and interrogate them for ourselves on TV. Not like this false equivalency thing the media seems to be doing...

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Climate Change Debate (HBO) 
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What "Republicans" such as Jim seem to be counting on is their news echo chamber, created and pretty much run, by them.

Bogus story exposes risks of conservative ‘invented news’ - Rachel Maddow shows the right-wing hypocrisy on prostitution scandals when the political advantage is in their favor, and points out the danger of the conservative movement’s preference of their own version of news instead of real news.
Conservative media creates parallel universe
Rachel Maddow discusses how the conservative media has built a narrative based on what people want to hear, not on the facts, about President Obama’s nominee for Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
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BREAKING:


Perry Officials Censored Climate Change Report

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn't want you to know that climate change is causing sea level rise in Galveston Bay.


What Texas is expected to look like in about 30 years (i.e. Not much of Texas left!);
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On Climate Change Science 

Bill Moyers: Ending the Silence on Climate Change March 15, 2013

Remember climate change? The issue barely comes up with any substance in our current political dialogue. But bringing climate change back into our national conversation is as much a communications challenge as it is a scientific one. 

This week, in an encore broadcast, scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, joins Bill to describe his efforts to galvanize communities over what’s arguably the greatest single threat facing humanity. Leiserowitz, who specializes in the psychology of risk perception, knows better than anyone if people are willing to change their behavior to make a difference.

“[A] pervasive sense up to now has been that climate change is distant — distant in time, and distant in space,” Leiserowitz tells Bill. “And what we’re now beginning to see is that it’s not so distant. I have a nine-year-old son — he’s going to be my age in the year 2050. I don’t want him to live in the world that we’re currently hurtling towards.”

These are people from an archaic age compared to ours who happen to be around because of advances in Medicine.  Simply because he believes that God would never hoist Climate Change upon him because the thought is terrifying doesn't make it so. I'm sure people thought the same about Pearl Harbour & World War 2. We don't deal with problems by avoiding them or hoping they will go away. That's for idealists to do. For religious people in a dark age to pray on. Not for citizens of an Industrial Economy.

A politicians job isn't to have beliefs based in conjecture but to prepare for the worst - to protect it';s constituents - and hope for the best. By creating an echo chamber of lies to tell  their constitutes AND THEN claiming to be doing their constitutes will is betrayal on the verge of treason. If not actual treason. Listening to priests is the job of religious people. Let the religious people hope for no climate change. If that fantasy happens, good for them. It's not a politicians job to hope for the best while ignoring science and doing nothing.

Relevant Analogy for a degree rise in AVERAGE global temperature

The analogy here is that when you get a one degree fever, you are relatively OK to go to work. If you have a two degree fever, you are feeling sick and you have to take the day off. If your fever gets to 3 or 4 or 5 degrees then your brain begins to slip into a coma. IN the same way, as the average global temperature increases the earth begins to get a fever. If the temperature increases too much then the earth will go through convulsions. Some areas will get hotter, some may get cooler. But the fluctuations in weather will begin to get dangerous (more than the preliminary droughts and its resulting fires we are seeing - more than the floods we are seeing - kinda, there seems to be an international news block here in Oklahoma. I tried to get a proper international news channel - BBC UK - and ended up with BBC America which I have yet to see a news program on. So far they have been showing TV shows. Cancelled the cable package, of course).

Here are links to research I did for my website Instant Stress Management.com while I still had access to international TV news:











An interesting side note:
The following is an extract from my Intro 2 Economics blog:

Here is another example of gross inefficiency (money wasted by putting it into a project that was known to fail - a level of economic/financial inefficiency that really is impressive that I would never expect a Democrat to do & if it wasn't for their sheer cowardice Obama would probably have nixed this project cause it makes no sense... but, my theory is, it was Bush's baby so he let this through and the media dropped the story -obviously);

Daily Show: That Custom-Tailored Obama Scandal You Ordered Is Finally Here - Solyndra's failure doesn't discredit the entire idea of a green energy economy, but some might take it as a sign of the Obama administration's incompetence. (8:10): 

In Images

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More incredible economic inefficiencies...

Daily Show:
 Weather Blunderground - Barack Obama wants to create a green economy by weatherizing American homes. (5:19):

Reversing Climate Change



Policy #2 from Bernie's Plan:

2. Reversing Climate Change   The United States must lead the world in reversing climate change and make certain that this planet is habitable for our children and grandchildren. We must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energies. Millions of homes and buildings need to be weatherized, our transportation system needs to be energy efficient and we need to greatly accelerate the progress we are already seeing in wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and other forms of sustainable energy. Transforming our energy system will not only protect the environment, it will create good paying jobs.     
‘Do-Nothing’ Republicans refuse to act on climate change
The warmest year on record comes to a close as Republicans prepare to take over both chambers of Congress - and do nothing to fix climate change. Ed Schultz, Paul Douglas and Reese Halter discuss.

Thoughts:

The Republicans probably started saying "I'm not a scientist" as a compromise between outright lying/making-up-facts and keeping the public misinformed... after consulting with their lawyers.

Jim  Inhofe: 'we have people tied up in trying to prove this hoax is a reality'... hmmm, I'm guessing Jim has his life tied up in proving 97% of scientists - across the globe - wrong about something which he claims not to be an expert in. Whose the real conspiracy monger here?
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Moment Of Zen



Related post:

Introduction To Florida Governor Rick Scott's Role As Swing State Trouble Maker In The GOP (Jeb Bush's Successor)

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