This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1485636
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1485636
The answer to “Why?” is easy: greed.
(Follow the money.)
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The modern GOP, the pro-pollution party.
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We have two political parties, one that represents the rich, and one that represents everyone else.
The rich own the media and they own the judiciary as well as the police. Who would stop them?
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Heated had coverage of the climate parts of this corruption a couple days ago, and wasn’t nearly so circumspect in their headline:
Big Oil is quietly paying state legal officials to kill climate litigation
Honolulu’s climate lawsuit is an existential threat to Big Oil. So they’re buying Republican attorneys general to defend them in court.
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Why? Because Republicans don’t give a shit about people. It’s all greed and avarice all the time.
It’s also weird that so many of those Republican planet rapers call themselves Christians as they gleefully destroy the glory of God’s creation.
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A first principle of environmental law is that the polluter pays. That’s not a good principle if your business is polluting. So you need a judiciary that sees no right to a clean environment, that children that live with legacy of pollution and species loss have no standing, that environmental damage can be properly priced. The US, for example, appears to do much better at air quality than China or Pakistan. But as much as 30% of US carbon is embodied in imports due to offshoring of polluting activities, and typically not counted in the national carbon accounting. Moreover, as we lose the power to protect under NEPA, ESA, as well as gutting of agencies such as the EPA, we lose the mechanisms we created to preserve our natural legacy. The law serves multiple purposes. On one hand it has always enforced the rights of property-holders and sought to preserve the economic order, but it also is supposed to provide fairness. Greed and selfishness are motivators for bad behavior, but they would also be useful in getting the wide swath of humanity to embrace a green transition if it looked like most people would be richer on the other side. It doesn’t have to be money rich, but at least a much better quality of life. This is hard to see in the US as we deceive ourselves about the degradation we witness decade after decade.
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Because there’s money in it and they don’t give a shit about poor people.
Did I guess the article right?
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Plus the heads of the Corporations are of the age that makes them dead before it is to late.
It is up to their children and grandchildren to figure it out.
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Sadly, it really seems to be that our “democracy” no longer works. Almost all laws passed benefit the rich, mostly at the cost of the non-rich. We need an entirely new form of government (social democracy?) that acts as a leveler of society, and protects against the economic autocracy we now have. We can do this without stifling initiative by reasonably rewarding it, before it becomes part of a justly managed economy. Sadly however, this cannot be brought about without an uprising by the people.
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They only mystery is why anyone would suppose that the Ken Paxtons of the world are acting in the public interest in the first place.
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If you see the words RAGA or the name Paxton associated with any cause or lawsuit, rest assured it is part of an evil enterprise.
I have lived long enough to see the miracle of vaccines (I grew up when polio was everywhere) being vilified by ignorance and disinformation. I have also lived long enough to see the air in southern California at least made transparent again, but apparently that is too restrictive economically. I remember going on my first plane trip in the 60s when I was 10 and flying back into Los Angeles which you could not see from the air - it just looked like a giant, filthy grey cotton ball laying on the ground. We knew smog was bad, but that was the first time I had been outside of it looking in. According to Republicans, I guess those were the good old days.
I have come to believe that we will never overcome the pure destructive power of greed in our society - the fealty of RAGA to our polluting overlords is just one manifestation.
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Nailed it.
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It’s money, sure, but it’s also weakening the state protecting folks they don’t like; the poor, minorities, labor, and uppity women. The money ain’t a side benefit but it ain’t the heart of the matter either.
ETA: It’s why corporates and Christianist evangelicals get along so well (for now): they have mutual interests and mutually beneficial projects. In the case of corporates it’s obvious, in the case of Christianists, wanting America to become a ‘Christian country’ increases their market share and profit margin, something corporates understand quite well; what follows that is where things get dicey but they’ll all cross that bridge when they get to it, for now they’ve got a country to subjugate.
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Another cute trick of theirs was killing the excise tax that funded the cleanup of toxic waste sites (the Superfund). Now instead of polluters paying to clean up their mess, it has to come out of the general fund, i.e., our taxes.
It’s the standard corporate ploy: privatize the profits and externalize as many of the costs as possible.
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I graduated from high school in Riverside in 1972. You could only see the San Gabriel Mtns from my HS campus when the Santa Ana winds blew the smog out from under the inversion layer and out to sea. I’ve been back periodically since then. Seeing the San Gabriels isn’t a rare thing anymore. The CARB (California Air Resources Board) program has worked. It would be a shame if these ass hats succeed in killing it off.
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It’s a constant tension with progress. When things improve, it becomes the new normal and the subsequent generation doesn’t know what it was like before (beyond a mention in a textbook or a documentary), so there’s no perspective on how much of a difference the hard-won efforts actually made. It becomes easy to vilify something as “government overreach” and a drain on resources, despite the fact that they are the exact opposite, acting more like a shoring up of (or at least a finger in) the dike of a significant problem.
Only a comprehensive education that keeps everyone apprised of the past conditions can effectively combat it, hence the dual-pronged attacks on education alongside these efforts to rollback environmental protections. If the populace isn’t informed enough to know what they risk losing, it’s easier to buffalo them into permitting a relapse.
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We have two political parties, one that represents the rich, and one that represents everyone else.
Nice thought but the ‘other’ party, the one with a conscience, also represent the rich - just not as much or as obvious as the party w/o a conscience.
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Despite the responses noting the money (which is entirely accurate), the overall situation is more complicated than just that.
For one thing, the GOP defines itself not by who and what they are, but rather by what they oppose. The party lacks any hard policy positions other than to oppose the vast majority of what Democrats and other progressives support, and so they go after environmental regulations, marriage equality, women’s rights, progressive taxation, all existing and proposed parts of the social safety net, food safety, majority rule, you name it. And all of that feeds into a sick, performative need to be seen as owning the libs. They’re transactional, like Trump - they can’t believe they’ve won anything unless their opposition can be seen to have lost. Hence, cooperation across the aisle has become badge of shame.
And like the corporations, they simply do not look ahead beyond the immediate issue. For corporations, it’s the current and next quarter’s stock price; for GOP “luminaries”, it’s the next election. They simply don’t consider the long term consequences of anything at all - except their own long term plans to corrupt the judiciary and cement minority rule. The poisons aren’t obviously affecting them personally right now, therefore they never will. It’s an idiot’s perspective, but an entire political party has been weaned on it and they can’t let go.
Last, SCOTUS - one thing you mention about it needs addressing, IMO. The Supreme Court is not anti-environment; it is pro-corporation. Every new GOP-nominated member since and including Roberts has been a corporate flunky from long before their SCOTUS days (though I don’t yet know enough about Barrett to explicitly include her yet). I get the impression that they are not necessarily anti-environment, they just don’t consider it relevant to the agenda they were put on the Court to implement, whereas supporting corporations is not just relevant, it’s central. Perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference in the outcome, but we do nobody a favor by mischaracterizing the malign motives of SCOTUS’ right wing.
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EVs are taking over the rest of the world much faster than the US
UC Berkeley study confirms that yes, EVs do what they promise to do
A new study from UC Berkeley confirms what EV fans already know: EV adoption does, in fact, make the air cleaner. Perhaps even more importantly, the study offers some quantifiable, granular data about how much electric vehicles are impacting emission rates in the here and now, not just in the foreseeable future.
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