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Cheney’s Fund Manager Attacks … Cheney (& US energy policy)
Brett Arends, The Street
The oil-based energy policies usually associated with Vice President Dick Cheney have just come under scathing attack. There’s nothing remarkable about that, of course — except the person doing the attacking.
Step forward, Jeremy Grantham — Cheney’s own investment manager. “What were we thinking?’ Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.
Titled “While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data,” Grantham’s philippic adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.
What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined.
“Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change,” he writes, “and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain.”
Yet “there is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures,” he writes. “The U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well-funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company).”
That’s Exxon Mobil (XOM) .
(5 Feb 2007)
From Afghanistan to Iraq: Connecting the Dots with Oil
Richard W. Behan, AlterNet
An in-depth look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events leading up to them, and the players who made them possible.
In the Caspian Basin and beneath the deserts of Iraq, as many as 783 billion barrels of oil are waiting to be pumped. Anyone controlling that much oil stands a good chance of breaking OPEC’s stranglehold overnight, and any nation seeking to dominate the world would have to go after it.
The long-held suspicions about George Bush’s wars are well-placed. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not prompted by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They were not waged to spread democracy in the Middle East or enhance security at home. They were conceived and planned in secret long before September 11, 2001 and they were undertaken to control petroleum resources.
(5 Feb 2007)
Submitter Bill Henderson says: “R.W. Dick Behan is a revered, legendary voice of forestry reform.”
Going For Broke On Climate Change
David Roberts, TomPaine
It’s 2009. Democratic majorities have expanded in the House and become filibuster-proof in the Senate. Astride the executive branch stands the only American ever to win a Nobel Peace Price prior to being elected president: Al Gore. The star of 2006’s Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” is known the world over as a prophet on the subject of global warming. (Vice President Barack Obama boasts merely a Grammy.)
Gore and Obama won the race with a simple two-part message. They promised to draw down American forces from Iraq and Iran and leave behind no permanent bases. And they promised New Strength: a domestic renewal program driven by investment in clean energy infrastructure, a stiff tax on carbon, and a national crash program of energy efficiency and conservation.
Fantasy? Not any more, not completely. It is a measure of the tectonic changes in recent American politics that this scenario recently drifted out of the Fantastical and into the Merely Improbable.
David Roberts is a staff writer at Grist and contributes frequently to their blog, Gristmill.
(6 Feb 2007)
Bright Lines: An introduction
Ken Ward, Gristmill
…I’d like to offer for comment an alternative “bright lines” framework for climate action …
Our goal, put starkly and simply, is to prevent the planned investment of $20 trillion over the next 25 years to increase fossil fuel supply, substituting in its place a crash global program — capitalized at the same level — to cut emissions, improve efficiencies, and develop renewables.
…The image of change we should carry in our minds is not Cape Wind or Toyota Prius, but the Berlin Wall crashing down.
No significant steps to taper off fossil fuel will be taken in the near term — not because reasonable people do not want to avert cataclysm, but because they can’t. No matter how committed its leaders, BP cannot go against its nature and swim away from the other fish of its kind. BP must aggressively expand its oil and gas exploration and extractions, even as it rolls out ad campaigns on carbon footprints and stands with U.S. environmentalists to call for action in Congress. Likewise, no matter how enlightened its bureaucrats, China cannot, on its own initiative, stop building coal-fired generators.
If there remains a small window of opportunity, it will be in that moment when things are thrown off kilter — when climate change impacts have started to wreck, rather than merely damage, the structures of civilization. It is not difficult to imagine how abruptly U.S. politics would be changed if Florida were hit by two Katrina-size hurricanes in one season, for example. When the prospect that nation states may be shaken loose from their moorings becomes real, then the world will turn in earnest to a crash program of response.
What form that last effort takes, and whether it will come too late, depends largely on what role the U.S. plays. No functional global solution is possible without the leadership, capital, power, and enterprise of the world’s only superpower. It may not now be possible to move the U.S. into such a course of action, but it is essential that a vision of America mobilized to save the world be framed beforehand.
(X Feb 2007)
Ken Ward “… served as Executive Director of NJPIRG and RIPIRG, Deputy Executive Director, Greenpeace USA, cofounder of a number of successful organizations, including Green Corps (Senior Trainer)…”
