Elizabeth Warren Comes Down Hard Against Global Warming, Separates Herself From Hillary Clinton on Climate ChangeBy Eric Zuesse (about the author) |
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On
Friday, December 20th, Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren finally
separated herself clearly from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
regarding the issue of climate change and global warming. Here is the story:
TransCanada
Corporation wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry oil from Alberta
Canada's tar sands to two refineries owned by Koch Industries near the Texas
Gulf Coast, for export to Europe; and Hillary Clinton has helped to make that
happen, but Elizabeth Warren has now taken the opposite side.
Secretary
of State Clinton, whose friend and former staffer Paul Elliot is a lobbyist for
TransCanada, had worked behind the scenes to ease the way for commercial
exploitation of this, the world's highest-carbon-emitting oil, 53% of which oil is owned by America's Koch Brothers.
(Koch Industries owns 63% of the tar sands, and the Koch brothers own 86% of
Koch Industries; Elaine Marshall, who is the widow of the son of the deceased
Koch partner J. Howard Marshall, owns the remaining 14% of Koch Industries.)
David
Goldwyn, who "served
as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Special Envoy and Coordinator for
International Energy Affairs," is yet another lobbyist
for TransCanada. So,
TransCanada has two of Hillary's friends working for them. Misters Elliot and
Goldwyn thus worked intimately with Hillary's people to guide them on selecting
a petroleum-industry contractor (not an environmental firm, much less any
governmental agency) to prepare the required environmental-impact statement for
this proposed pipeline.
Hillary
Clinton as the Secretary of State had already displayed a record of carrying
out the policies that were being promoted by her lobbyist friends, when she did everything possible, early in President Obama's first term, to
support U.S. funding for the fascist junta in Honduras that perpetrated a coup
d'etat on 28 June 2009 overthrowing that nation's progressive democratically
elected President, and who then installed their own regime, and promptly placed
their country into a continuing violent terror that caused Honduras ever since
to be the nation with the highest murder rate in the world. Hillary's lobbyist
friend in that particular matter was Lanny Davis, who also is an occasional Fox
News contributor.
Secretary Clinton's State Department thus allowed the
environmental-impact statement on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to be
performed by a petroleum-industry contractor that was chosen by the company
that was proposing to build and own the pipeline, TransCanada. That contractor
had no climatologist, and their resulting report failed even at its basic job
of estimating the number of degrees by which the Earth's climate would be
additionally heated if this pipeline is built and operated. Their report ignored
that question, and instead evaluated the impact that climate change would have
on the pipeline, which was estimated to be none.
President
Obama himself is now trying to force the European Union to relax their
anti-global-warming regulations so
as to permit them to import the Kochs' dirty oil. His agent in this effort is
his new U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, from Wall Street.
But on
December 20th, Senator Warren signed onto a letter criticizing the Obama Administration's apparent
effort to force the European Union to agree to purchase this oil. As the
Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard reported, "Six senators and 16 House
members, all Democrats, wrote a letter to Froman on Friday asking him to
elaborate on his position on the matter. 'If these reports are accurate, USTR's
[the U.S. Trade Representative's] actions could undercut the EU's commendable
goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions in its transportation sectors,"
these 22 Democratic lawmakers wrote.
This
is, essentially, a rebellion by 22 progressive congressional Democrats against
the Clinton-Obama effort to provide a market for the Kochs' dirty oil. This
letter was actually written by Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse, and co-signed by Senators Barbara Boxer, Ed Markey, Dick Durbin,
Jeff Merkley, and Elizabeth Warren; and Representatives John Conyers, Jr.,
Barbara Lee, Raúl M. Grijalva, Rush Holt, Louise M. Slaughter, Jerrold Nadler,
Judy Chu, Peter DeFazio, Anna G. Eshoo, Sam Farr, Peter Welch, Alan Lowenthal,
Mark Pocan, and Steve Cohen.
What is
at issue in the Keystone XL and Alberta tar-sands matter is governmental
policies that will determine whether the tar-sands oil will undercut the
production-costs of normal oil. Right now, normal oil costs far less to mine,
process, and get to market (because tar sands oil is so dirty and so
land-locked). However, if the Kochs win, then the existing governmental
policies will change in ways that will eliminate this cost-advantage of normal
oil. The result of that would be increased sales and burning of the tar-sands
oil, and thus reduced sales and burning of cleaner oil. That would throw into
the atmosphere "more than
$70 billion in additional damages associated with climate change over 50
years." However, that added $70 billion would be the added harms to the
entire world, not to the owners of the tar sands.
The
benefits to Koch Industries, from this competitive re-alignment in favor of
tar-sands oil, have been estimated to be around $100 billion. This would add about $45 billion
to the net worth of David Koch, $45 billion to the net worth of Charles Koch,
and $15 billion to the net worth of Elaine Marshall. (David and Charles would
then become the two wealthiest individuals in the world.)
On
December 17th, the Republican House budget chief, Paul Ryan, threatened to drive the U.S. government into default unless
President Obama approves the Keystone XL Pipeline.
President
Obama holds the sole authority to approve or disapprove this project, because
it crosses the international border, but he has delayed this decision for
years, because he doesn't want to enrage the environmental community, and also
because his tipping his hand in that way would be almost entirely a waste if he
cannot first get Europe to weaken their environmental standards so as to allow
this oil to compete in Europe with normal oil as if it weren't far more
damaging to the climate than normal oil is --- just ignore that harm being added
to the entire planet.
Thus,
Senator Warren has now joined with the progressives on two big issues that
arouse intense opposition to her from the aristocrats who finance most
political campaigns: She opposes the taxpayer-handouts to Wall Street, and she
now also opposes the entire planet's, basically, environmental handouts, to the
owners of the most-harmfully polluting corporations, such as Koch Industries.
(The other owners of tar-sands oil are Conoco-Phillips, Exxon-Mobil, and
Chevron-Texaco.)
This
could be a turning-point in Warren's political career. She's no longer at war
against only the
financial-industry corruption that dominates the conservative, Clinton and
Obama, establishment within the Democratic Party (and all of the Republican
Party), but she is also
at war against their environmental corruption. For yet another example of that
corruption: On 2 October 2013, Joe Romm at Think Progress headlined "More
Bad News For Fracking: IPCC Warns Methane Traps Much More Heat," and he reported that, "The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that methane ... is
far more potent a greenhouse gas" than previously known, so bad it
"would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal." And then,
just five days after that, Jon Campbell in upstate New York headlined "In
Oneida County, Hillary Clinton Touts U.S. Oil-and-Gas Production," and he reported that at Hamilton College, Hillary Clinton praised
fracking for methane, by saying, "What that means for viable manufacturing
and industrialization in this country is enormous." However, if Warren
won't be able to get either Wall Street or the oil patch to finance her
political campaigns, then how can she even possibly rise within the
power-structure?
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