Amy Goodman: Global Warming, Warring and Warning

from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via CommonDreams:


Published on Thursday, January 11, 2007 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Global Warming, Warring and Warning
by Amy Goodman

We begin this year with many milestones. 2006 was among the hottest years in recorded history. In Britain, it was the hottest year since they started keeping records in 1659. Ten of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the past 12 years. Snow has yet to fall in New York's Central Park. This hasn't happened in more than 100 years. And other records have been broken. ExxonMobil profits were slated to be the greatest ever. On Dec. 31, the Pentagon announced another grim milestone: 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. It was a year of global warming, global warring and global warning.

ExxonMobil is the world's largest publicly traded company. It is also the most profitable corporation in history. The Union of Concerned Scientists just issued a report documenting how ExxonMobil has implemented tobacco-industry tactics in its efforts to fight the movement to accept global warming as truth and to require massive regulation to help slow its onset.

According to the UCS, ExxonMobil "manufactures uncertainty" with a sophisticated and well-funded campaign. They funded a network of 43 "grass-roots" organizations with $16 million, recruited scientists willing to publish non-peer-reviewed articles that challenge established science, and flooded the media with these "experts," creating the essential "echo chamber." A critical part of ExxonMobil's strategy involves lavish spending on electoral campaigns and lobbying to ensure that Congress and the White House follow the line on questioning human-caused climate change.

While the rest of the world accepts the reality of global warming, the U.S., the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, has been stymied by the disinformation campaigns of the oil industry. Let's hope the new 110th Congress shifts climate-change policy at a glacial pace -- the rapidly receding 21st-century glaciers, that is. Key committees will be chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich. Replacing chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who describes global warming as a hoax, Boxer is bullish on fighting greenhouse gases. Dingell, from the heart of the auto industry in Michigan, is less direct and hedges on his willingness, for example, to push for better fuel efficiency in cars.

The flip side of oil consumption is oil production. That is where the warring comes in. ......(more)

There rest of the column is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0111-28.htm

been a fan of hers on WBAI out of NYC for well over a decade.