Fossilized Fools

What alternative universe do the Senate Republicans come from? Do they really think that they can undo economics, that if coal is priced out by gas and then by solar and wind, and oil, too, that they can somehow force the nation and the rest of the world to still love coal?
The Republican Senate has tried to pass what can only be called The Dirty Energy Bill, although its deceptive formal name is the Energy and Natural Resources Act of 2017. What it attempts to accomplish is to make fossil fuels cuddly enough that we’d want to use them instead of those new-fangled energy whizmos. Subsidies, free pollution rights, maybe freedom of liability for your workers, freedom from wage laws, those are the kinds of things the GOP seems to favor: anything that will resurrect the dying fossil fuels.
Do you know why? If you have investments in said fossil fuels, the economy of energy is not going to be any kinder to you than to the wheelwrights and millstone hewers of the 19th century. Luckily for the 19th century, money had already moved on to oil and coal. But now, in the 21st Century, the assets owned as fossil fuels by billionaires, energy companies and petro-states is probably the largest concentration of capital on the planet. In Trump, Pruitt, and Zinke and the denialist GOP, they have their representatives — in fighting to keep control over a dying resource.
Fossil fuels are the energy of the past, and hopefully only a short part of our future, since they are the chief engine in the climate change disaster that is unfolding before our eyes — if we should just look.
Here in High Falls, NY, wildflowers are blooming long before their normal times, birds are having a hard time adjusting to food sources already past by the time they’re ready to mate. They are our canaries in the coal mine. Global warming, aka climate change, is happening, and it’s happening faster than most people realize. I do feel it, and my poet wife, even more so, because we live in one place and spend a lot of time outdoors in every season. I notice the changes as a gardener (retired prof) and a beekeeper.
S 1460, the Energy and Natural Resources Act of 2017, would wed us to a quickly vanishing past, since solar and wind are already competitive with the cheapest of the fossil fuels (natural gas), and do not pollute.
Personal disclosure: I have a solar panel large enough to produce my heat and AC, as well as power.
The rest of the world will leave us behind, if we continue to mine and drill for these poisonous fossil fuels and think that they are the key to global power.
If this law were passed, it would chain us to an obsolescent energy system, when all the rest of the world (especially China) are rushing ahead on clean, renewable energy sources.
Say you’re interested in global politics. Say you want the US to continue to be the world’s hegemon, the greatest power on Earth. You probably know that the last century’s wars were won and lost on oil. That was why the Middle East was so important; it had oil.
Well, now, it turns out, we do, too — at the cost of ripping up our countryside and polluting our waters.
However, technological change is so fast, that fracked gas is cheaper than oil or coal, and wind and solar are getting cheaper by the minute, already competitive with gas in much of the nation.
The fuel of a future war will not be natural gas. It’s most likely to be solar/wind and super-batteries, so they’ll never have to be refueled. Ships could generate much of their own energy, too, the way electric cars re-charge when going downhill. Their fuel won’t explode, when hit, either.
The Dirty Energy Bill epitomizes the strategy of the extremely wealthy to maintain (or expand) the value of their assets: the coal, oil and gas they own, in the ground. What they realized decades ago (Exxon in the 1970’s?) was that the days of fossil fuels were numbered, but they had to ensure that their mines, pipelines, wells, appreciated in value, instead of becoming progressively worthless — like those huge old mill wheels they made here in the Shawangunks.
That’s what this whole dark money and the oligarchy behind the denialist GOP and Trump is all about: preserving their assets from worthlessness. I mean, just think how much their assets are worth now. Take a deep breath: think how much they’d be worth if all the world ran on solar and wind?
No wonder they spent millions on think tanks and all the rest. Only now, the fight is in earnest: the competition is real.
Dead dinosaurs or the sun?
