Renewable Revolution

JUL 11, 2018TD ORIGINALS


By Paul Street

SNIPPET:

Billionaire climate-denying and planet-cooking savages like Donald Trump 🦀, the Kochs 🦖 and Harold Hamm 🦕 and their servants like Scott Pruitt 🐒 hardly invented our “ecological rift,” which is rooted in what John Bellamy Foster rightly calls “capitalism’s [longstanding] war on Earth.” With the U.S. in the oil-coal-and-gas-addicted, commons-plundering and poisoning lead, humanity has been steering madly toward the cliff of environmental self-extermination for decades. But with his determination to “deregulate energy”—to go full bore with the greenhouse gassing to death of life on earth (a crime destined to the make the Nazis look like small-time criminals)—Trump represents what Chomsky has called “almost a death knell for the species.” The Trump presidency’s extreme commitment to fossil fuels is no small part of why the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead by 30 seconds to two minutes to midnight.

A young mother with her baby in her arms confronted Pruitt at a Washington restaurant just days before his resignation. “Hi” she said, “I just wanted to urge you to resign because of what you’re doing to the environment and our country. This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks, for the benefit of big corporations.”

Pruitt took his two bodyguards and left in shame before the mother and her child could return to their seats.

He got off easy. The loss of a government job and public humiliation is a small price to pay for playing a leading role in the eco-exterminist destruction of livable ecology.

People like Pruitt should feel lucky to be able to walk freely and breathe fresh air, or what’s left of it on a planet he’s been trying to destroy.

Four terrible things are darkly noteworthy about Pruitt’s forced resignation last week. First, it was absurdly belated. The fact that he lasted as long as he did atop the EPA makes one wonder just how far one of Trump’s favorite petro-plutocratic swamp creatures has to sink before he can lose his job in Washington. Pruitt’s departure came after months of seemingly endless controversy surrounding his personal corruption. The Pruitt scandal timeline includes the following:

● April 12, 2017: The Washington Post revealed Pruitt requested and received an around-the-clock security detail at huge cost to taxpayers (nearly $3.5 million during his first year in office).

Full article:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/scott-pruitt-got-off-easy-ecocide-is-no-small-matter/