Postcard from the Newest Petrostate
Trump as President is but petroleum’s puppet.
PETROSTATE: A country where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a very few and whose institutions are corrupted and dominated by the oil industry.
While climate change may still seem a distant abstraction, telling incidents from the Trump Administration’s early days give chilling, concrete evidence of what’s to come.
Take, for one small example, the Senate hearings on Trump’s nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There’s no better illustration of America’s potentially catastrophic divisions — and the planetary catastrophe they foretell.
Hundreds of young people — air filter masks, inscribed “Stop Pruitt,” affixed to their faces — waited patiently in a long, long queue that looped back on itself outside the door to the committee hearings in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. For them, the future of the planet — and thus their generation’s future — is at risk. But, so far back in line, they would not be able to get into the hearing.
Well ahead of them in line were five, much older men dressed as pro-Pruitt coal miners, complete with hard hats. They had to be mighty committed to get up so early in the morning to be at the head of the line? No, “someone” had paid to hold their place in the queue. And when asked if they were “real” coal miners or just actors hired by “someone” to dress up and play the part, they only smiled.
Who is this “someone?” The answer is obvious. No doubt the same “someone” who funded Pruitt’s 14 lawsuits, while Oklahoma attorney general, against the EPA, the very target he now angles to head. The same “someone” who has sowed the seeds of climate-change denial over the last three decades.
The same “someone” — that collective of Big Oil rich white males — who’ll be dead and gone when future generations are left to clean up their mess.
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