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by Harvey Wasserman
July 9, 2005
The horrific terrorist bombings in London are a pale reflection of the terror erupting from George W. Bush's energy plan, which will ultimately kill far more people and wreck far more planetary havoc than four bombs and fifty deaths on a single city's streets.
Amidst Thursday's awful carnage, Bush leapt to deliver his set sermon on good versus evil. But in the same breath he bullied the G-8 nations into groveling at the feet of Big Oil, on whose behalf he is slaughtering thousands in Iraq.
Bush is the Osama bin Laden of climate change. Even conservative Republicans on the American corporate right are growing nervous about the continued emission of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere, which has reached apocalyptic proportions.
Each day the doubters further diminish as robins find their way to Alaska and tropical diseases spread toward the poles. As the weather becomes unhinged, the world's biggest insurers join oil companies such as British Petroleum in escalating desperation. Even the Saudis have joined in, warning that their gargantuan reserves, the world's largest, may not meet demand ten years out.
Meanwhile rapid advances in wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, biomass and efficiency technologies are making fossil fuels all but obsolete. Today there is no cheaper, faster, cleaner or more reliable way to build a new electric power plant than to go with wind, now a $10 billion annual industry. Decentralized solar power is plummeting in price, along with wave power and crops for energy, among them hemp, which Bush still refuses to legalize.
These green technologies are proven and working, creating thousands of jobs along the way. All serious energy analysts understand that they are the future, not only for a sustainable planetary ecology but also for a stable global economy that yields both wealth and jobs.
In the face of this escalating revolution stands George W. Bush. His fossil fuel addiction has become a global plague. So has his marriage to atomic energy. Since 1953 the US has poured roughly a trillion dollars into a failed technology that has yet to find the most rudimentary solution to dealing with its infinitely toxic radioactive waste. Every commercial reactor---there are 103 in the US, about 440 worldwide---is a terrorist bull's eye, ready to spew apocalyptic quantities of death and disease all over the planet.
To build more of these indefensible lemons Bush wants another $10 billion in federal handouts to an industry that could never survive an actual free market. Though somehow spun as a global warming solution, in fact the production, operation and waste problems associated with nuke reactors cause enormous quantities of emissions.
After fifty years the industry is still unable to secure private insurance against a major catastrophe. And the hundreds of billions poured down the nuclear drain could long ago have brought us solar self-sufficiency.
From his nest in the fossil-nuke pocket, Bush has slashed away at renewable energy financing and wind production tax credits. He has also strong-armed the rest of the industrial world into a lethal stalemate on emerging green technologies that could fuel one of history's greatest economic transitions while saving the global ecology.
While posturing with Tony Blair on terrorism, Bush knifes him in the back on an issue Blair -- and the British public -- understand to be vital to human survival.
That the money the West spends on buying oil goes to fund terrorist bombings like 9/11 and London is already a given. That Bush's war for oil has turned Iraq into a terrorist recruiting and training center is also well known.
But in the larger, long-term reality, world poverty will worsen and millions will die because of what Bush is doing. Ten million solar collectors for cooking and electricity could do far more to solve African poverty than anything the G-8 is now proposing.
The industrial nations' acceptance of even the very moderate Kyoto Accords could spur a new economic take-off that would employ hundreds of millions and generate the untold wealth that always comes with transcending an obsolete fuel source and an outmoded paradigm.
Bush's fanatic fundamentalist corporate- and faith-based hostility to sound science and sensible economics puts us all at risk.
Climate chaos is the ultimate threat to human existence. To impede the very do-able movement to solve CO2 emissions is the ultimate terrorist act.
When it comes to spreading death and destruction, famine and pestilence, Osama bin Laden is a little leaguer compared to George W. Bush.
--
HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is available through www.harveywasserman.com, along with A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT: LOSING PARENTS, FINDING SPIRIT. He is co-editor, with Bob Fitrakis and Steve Rosenfeld, of DID GEORGE W. BUSH STEAL AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION? (www.freepress.org).
Amidst Thursday's awful carnage, Bush leapt to deliver his set sermon on good versus evil. But in the same breath he bullied the G-8 nations into groveling at the feet of Big Oil, on whose behalf he is slaughtering thousands in Iraq.
Bush is the Osama bin Laden of climate change. Even conservative Republicans on the American corporate right are growing nervous about the continued emission of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere, which has reached apocalyptic proportions.
Each day the doubters further diminish as robins find their way to Alaska and tropical diseases spread toward the poles. As the weather becomes unhinged, the world's biggest insurers join oil companies such as British Petroleum in escalating desperation. Even the Saudis have joined in, warning that their gargantuan reserves, the world's largest, may not meet demand ten years out.
Meanwhile rapid advances in wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, biomass and efficiency technologies are making fossil fuels all but obsolete. Today there is no cheaper, faster, cleaner or more reliable way to build a new electric power plant than to go with wind, now a $10 billion annual industry. Decentralized solar power is plummeting in price, along with wave power and crops for energy, among them hemp, which Bush still refuses to legalize.
These green technologies are proven and working, creating thousands of jobs along the way. All serious energy analysts understand that they are the future, not only for a sustainable planetary ecology but also for a stable global economy that yields both wealth and jobs.
In the face of this escalating revolution stands George W. Bush. His fossil fuel addiction has become a global plague. So has his marriage to atomic energy. Since 1953 the US has poured roughly a trillion dollars into a failed technology that has yet to find the most rudimentary solution to dealing with its infinitely toxic radioactive waste. Every commercial reactor---there are 103 in the US, about 440 worldwide---is a terrorist bull's eye, ready to spew apocalyptic quantities of death and disease all over the planet.
To build more of these indefensible lemons Bush wants another $10 billion in federal handouts to an industry that could never survive an actual free market. Though somehow spun as a global warming solution, in fact the production, operation and waste problems associated with nuke reactors cause enormous quantities of emissions.
After fifty years the industry is still unable to secure private insurance against a major catastrophe. And the hundreds of billions poured down the nuclear drain could long ago have brought us solar self-sufficiency.
From his nest in the fossil-nuke pocket, Bush has slashed away at renewable energy financing and wind production tax credits. He has also strong-armed the rest of the industrial world into a lethal stalemate on emerging green technologies that could fuel one of history's greatest economic transitions while saving the global ecology.
While posturing with Tony Blair on terrorism, Bush knifes him in the back on an issue Blair -- and the British public -- understand to be vital to human survival.
That the money the West spends on buying oil goes to fund terrorist bombings like 9/11 and London is already a given. That Bush's war for oil has turned Iraq into a terrorist recruiting and training center is also well known.
But in the larger, long-term reality, world poverty will worsen and millions will die because of what Bush is doing. Ten million solar collectors for cooking and electricity could do far more to solve African poverty than anything the G-8 is now proposing.
The industrial nations' acceptance of even the very moderate Kyoto Accords could spur a new economic take-off that would employ hundreds of millions and generate the untold wealth that always comes with transcending an obsolete fuel source and an outmoded paradigm.
Bush's fanatic fundamentalist corporate- and faith-based hostility to sound science and sensible economics puts us all at risk.
Climate chaos is the ultimate threat to human existence. To impede the very do-able movement to solve CO2 emissions is the ultimate terrorist act.
When it comes to spreading death and destruction, famine and pestilence, Osama bin Laden is a little leaguer compared to George W. Bush.
--
HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is available through www.harveywasserman.com, along with A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT: LOSING PARENTS, FINDING SPIRIT. He is co-editor, with Bob Fitrakis and Steve Rosenfeld, of DID GEORGE W. BUSH STEAL AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION? (www.freepress.org).