Big Oil Cannot Be Weaned Off Fossil Fuels

 

Source

Public Ownership and Control is The Only Solution if We are to  Avoid  Climate Change Catastrophe.

 

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

8-1-21

 

The American Petroleum Institute (API) may have the “American” name to it but it’s important to understand which Americans are represented by that name in the title. It’s certainly not the US workers and middle class as the API is anything but friendly to us. The API is the largest lobbying group for the oil and gas industry in the US. In other words, it is, and always has been, the guardian and promoter of the interests of the owners and investors that control and profit from the fossil fuel industry in the US and the world.

 

The APL has spent billions over decades opposing any legislation that curbs the industry’s rapacious drive for profits regardless of the harm to both workers and the environment. It has, as the Wall Street Journal put it, used its “….financial muscle to fight almost every green initiative in its path.” In other words, it bribed politicians in the two capitalist parties to pass laws that defend its interests. It opposed any serious regulation of methane emissions and any “….financial penalty levied on all carbon-dioxide emissions.”

 

“Most prominently, it helped scuttle a 2009 bill known as Waxman-Markey, the last ambitious attempt by Congress to limit greenhouse gas emissions by levying a cost on emissions. “ (WSJ)

The US body politic is dominated by representatives of big capital from the two capitalist parties and alongside them are the hundreds of lobbyists whose job it is to grease the palms of various legislators in order to get the right bills passed and protect the corporations and their profits from the working public. Many of the lobbyists are Senators and other former legislators who move on from the US Congress in to law and lobbying firms, after all, they have the inside track. It is the Best Democracy Money Can Buy as Greg Palast titled his 2016 book on money, fraud and corporate influence in US politics.

 

As the catastrophe of climate change is revealing itself daily, this century old institution is facing pressure from the outside that has forced it to shift gears and the API has announced a new plan in response; the Climate Action Framework. Trent Lott, a former Republican Senator and majority leader who is now a lobbyist for a major Washington firm, points out that due to the combination of climate change activity and social pressure, fossil fuel companies are, “….being squeezed from all sides.”  Climate change, the API now argues, warrants “new approaches, new partners, new policies and continuous innovation.”  This is not a bad thing as climate change is the most critical issue facing humanity today.

 

This pressure is creating internal divisions within the organization, divisions between energy giants, Exxon, Shell BP, Total (already left the group) Chevron and others and the refiners and smaller players. It is having the same effect in Congress with many Republicans and right wing legislators warning of price rises and a loss of international competition for US firms as carbon prices are a tax. It is a “cop out approach to appease the radical left”, Garret Graves, a Republican who leads the House Select Climate Committee tells the Jpournal. Talk about the foxes guarding the henhouse.

 

On the other side, Garret’s “radical left”, basically environmental activists and, the legislators in the other capitalist party, do not trust the API given its historical defense of the fossil fuel industry at the expense of the environment and alternative energy sources. Sen. Ed Markey, a co-sponsor of the 2009 bill that the API scuttled when he was a Congressman claims that the API will simply do what it always does “....manipulate the pricing system in order to continue polluting”.

 

What the likes of Ed Markey are offering as an alternative I don’t know but whatever it is, this industry cannot be regulated in to decency and made in to a producer that can contribute to ending or reversing the looming catastrophe that awaits human society if the causes of climate change are not reversed. The horrific environmental disaster caused by the BP deepwater drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico was not simply an accident, it was a market driven disaster like most of them. The BP spill also cost the lives of 11 workers but it is important not to loose sight of the fact that the Obama Administration regulators allowed the energy industry to write its own rules, and in pencil believe it or not.

I commented at the time: The New York Times pointed out earlier in 2010 that an Interior Dept. investigation revealed that “Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week. The report said that investigators "could not discern if any fraudulent alterations were present on these forms." Another disaster brewing in the Gulf of Mexico   (10-20-2011)

 

The big oil companies are raking in the profits, “their highest profits since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic” the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. (WSJ 7-31-21) It is glaringly obvious that human society globally must shift energy production away from fossil fuels but for private energy companies, profits come first. We are now in a situation where we cannot talk of centuries but decades. In a matter of decades, whole swathes of this planet we live on will be uninhabitable. We have seen just in the past few weeks the effect of the heat wave on Salmon for example and the floods that are occurring around the world. The state I live in, California is on fire once again, pretty much an annual occurrence. I visited Paradise California after this community was destroyed by a fire a couple years ago. And it was like a nuclear war up there.

 

 

There must be a dismantling of the fossil fuel industry and a shift to the production of energy in a way that is in harmony with nature and all life on the planet as opposed to in conflict with it. This is not possible without the taking in to public ownership the entire industry and re-tooling or transforming how it functions. As a private for profit enterprise, profit comes first no matter what the apologists for this method of producing the necessities of life say. Whether they are conscious liars or not is irrelevant, the system of production itself is the problem. It is inherently a destructive and hostile form of production set in motion on the basis of private gain, not social need

 

It is not just the production of society’s energy that must be taken in to public ownership and set in motion based on need, but all the major industries that are crucial to the maintenance of life. The finance industry, banks and finance houses, the health industry that should provide all human beings with health care when we need it not when we can afford it. Food production, agriculture, mass transportation, and communication, these are all vital to what we yearn for, a civilized world.

 

The catastrophic consequences of climate change brought about by human activity, specifically the system of production we call capitalism, is the most pressing issue we face today; wages and benefits, sick leave or vacation days are all mute if we are unable to visit or live in half the places we’d like to and our children won’t be able to swim in the waters we once did or pet the animals we once did.

 

The US is the global giant, economically, militarily and as a user of the planet’s energy. Las Vegas alone must use as much energy as entire countries. While much of the industrial working class has shifted, with industrial production, to Asia and other regions of the world where labor power is cheaper and unions weaker or non existent, a democratic socialist world or global federation of democratic socialists states, is all the more unlikely, and will certainly be a more violent process, without the US working class settling accounts with the US Capitalism.