Despoiling the Earth

The attack on America launched by oil interests centers on ANWR. As Sen. Bryon Dorgan has pointed out this morning on CSpan, there isn't a real reason for this being the target. Oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico are larger.

Incidentally, world shipping patterns are such that the oil that might be produced out of ANWR, like the present Alaska oil, would be headed to Russia. Talking about how the U.S. would have more oil out of ruining ANWR is purely false.

There is something about violating laws that really turns on the right wing.

In late January, Jim Sims, the president and CEO of the Western Business Roundtable, an industry trade group that represents mining and energy interests, told his colleagues to prepare for the worst: The polar bear was almost certain to receive "threatened" status under the Endangered Species Act. "The negative implications of this to business and industry [are] breathtaking," he wrote in an email, obtained by Mother Jones. But, he said, his and other groups had devised a plan to fight and "quite possibly reverse" the imminent ruling. Part of that strategy involved a legal challenge to the listing. On that score, Sims promised they had "secured a truly extraordinary plaintiff for this effort: one of America's most prominent civil rights leaders of the four past decades."

That prominent plaintiff was Roy Innis, the longtime chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. A civil rights group that dates back to the 1940s, CORE's agenda has taken a distinct rightward tilt under Innis' leadership, aligning itself with conservative activists opposed to the environmental movement.
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Since 2005, when the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species, a broad coalition of industry and conservative groups have watched, with increasing dread, as the petition slowly worked its way through the Interior Department, helped along by lawsuits filed by environmental groups. Almost since the ink dried on the ESA more than thirty years ago, conservatives have bridled at its strictures, viewing the law as an affront to free-market principles and an impediment to businesses seeking to develop land or extract natural resources. But, even in this context, the polar bear's possible ESA listing has elevated the debate to a fever pitch. "Compared to this decision, the Spotted Owl and Snail Darter cases were pimples on an elephant," Chuck Cushman, the founder of the American Land Rights Association, told recipients of his email list this winter in an "all out call to action" that implored supporters to "deluge the White House and Interior Department with calls, faxes and emails." By this he meant that, unlike typical ESA listings, protections for the polar bear could extend well beyond its natural habitat in the US, along the Beaufort and Chukchi seas of northern and western Alaska. Based on scientific studies showing that global warming is rapidly deteriorating the Arctic sea ice that polar bears call home, the CBD's endangered species petition was among the first to tie greenhouse gas emissions to the fate of a species.

The ruination of our world could appeal to no reasonable person, but it does attract the wingers. Why species created by their Flying Spaghetti Monster should be such anathema to the despoilers is, I admit, a mystery to me.

We can listen to the Senate debate today, where the wingers will be trying to convince their listeners that we should stop the nonsense of saving our planet so that we can have more petroleum products. All the possibilities of harnessing wind, tidal, plant energy will be despised, in the effort to promote the despoilation.

These people have no shame. They are all about profits for oil, and we know who is paying their expenses.

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