While Heather Wilson was losing her Senate bid to Martin Heinrich last year, her campaign team must have been drunk on PR from the Fossil Fuel lobby. The rhetoric tipped them off the bar stool.
She accused then Rep. Heinrich of being supported by not only “radical environmental groups,” but also by “the radical environmental industry” with their “extremist agenda.”
I wonder what a “radical environmental industry” might be. Does it sell camping gear and sleeping bags or manufacture trail mix? Does it produce energy without polluting ground water and without using taxpayer dollars to clean up its excreta? Does it actually believe in free enterprise without a governmental crutch?
Perhaps a “radical environmental industry” is one that could prosper in a business climate ruled by the tough first principle of a real green economy – Clean up your own mess, or go out of business.
Some industries would be dead on arrival. Fossil fuel corporations are almost completely subsidized by the taxpayer. They can’t make a profit without us. They can’t stay in business without our indulgence of their horrible stinks and leaks and dumps and unlined pits and constant traffic scarring the land. Indulgent regulation is their ace in the hole.
This is even truer of the nuclear energy and the uranium mining industries. The taxpayer actually indemnifies them. The government is their insurer. No insurance company would ever touch a nuclear reactor. And uranium mining companies are notorious for leaving their excrement behind to poison everything and everyone around it. Hundreds upon hundreds of open pit uranium mines and highly toxic mill tailing wastes contaminate New Mexico and other Western states. Most of the time, the companies have gone out of business, and chances are they never had a realistic clean-up line item in their budgets anyway.
So, to put the first principle of an actual free enterprise green economy in other words – Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it. If you can’t, your business is a failure, and you should go bankrupt.
And if the government has to subsidize your housebreaking, you should have to pay them back, bankrupt or not, corporate indulgences or not.
And if you’ve pulled the wool over taxpayers and stockholders eyes, lying about the very existence of, or danger of, your industrial or mining or drilling waste, you should go to jail.
Every extractive industry, and every operation with inherently dangerous waste, that hasn’t built into its business plan the finances and procedures to clean up after itself, and has gone out of business or changed names, should be tracked down and prosecuted.
But someone from a Right Wing persuasion might ask why the “radical environmental industry” isn’t included in this grim picture. Largely because its manufacturing processes and operations are so low waste, when compared to fossil fuel and nuclear companies, that none of them have a business plan that includes dumping their waste on the taxpayer.
It’s an apples and oranges situation to compare the climate alteration and habitat destruction of 60,000 to 70,000 oil and gas wells, and their spider web of roads traveled more or less constantly, in New Mexico, with even huge arrays of solar panels and massive wind farms. Solar and wind do not have mill tailings, do not pollute groundwater, do not cause smog, do not release mercury into the atmosphere, do not pollute lakes and streams, and do not help stimulate hurricanes and desertification.
When it comes to “incentives,” the fossil industry gets some 19 of them, according to CleanTechnica. It quotes long time Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Or) as saying “we subsidize oil injection extraction, exploration, drilling, injection, manufacturing, pricing, and inventory valuing by creating price floors, offsetting foreign taxes, providing generous credits and deductions, offering tax shelters, and allowing valuation of inventories at deeply discounted prices.”
And that’s what gets me -- the most babied and coddled energy industry imaginable calling its competition “radical” and with an “extremist agenda.”
“The idea that energy is a level playing field for which renewable energy and energy efficiency could compete in a transparent market is fantasy,” says Scott Sklar, president of the Stella Group. “Having many decades of subsidies give traditional energy sources market dominance which, in effect, keep out options,” especially “radical” ones.
“The issue with…oil and gas subsidies…is not that they exist for oil and gas, but that they exist for oil and gas and no one else. Even worse, subsidies for renewables expire (creating further investment uncertainty) while those for fossil fuels do not,” Sklar says
If the energy playing field was level, If you knew you had to pay for your clean up, knew the regulations were demanding, and that you might have to pay truly crushing fines, you and your stockholders might obsess about your waste and the contamination you might cause, and at the very least, do a lot less of it. Not soiling your nest would be a self-defense cost, vastly less punitive than having to pay for your own sloppiness and irresponsibility.
In a free enterprise system that punishes poor people for not getting rich, let’s penalize rich corporate persons for relying on poor people [we are all poor in relation to them] to subsidize them. When government pays for cleaning up corporate waste, it’s not “government” that’s doing it, of course, it’s us, you and me. We are.
Responses to “Housebreaking fossil fuels”