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Thread: The Bizarre Experience of Watching Cable News in America on Earth Day

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    The Bizarre Experience of Watching Cable News in America on Earth Day

    The Bizarre Experience of Watching Cable News in America on Earth Day
    By Thom Hartmann
    AlterNet
    4-23-17

    Just exactly what the hell are they afraid of? Are the fossil fuel billionaires, corporations, and lobby really so strong that they can cow entire television networks and newspapers? Not to mention politicians?

    All day Saturday, Earth Day I’d been on-and-off watching CNN and MSNBC while working on a new book. And I’ve heard repeated dozens of times that Trump and his buddies like Scott Pruitt don’t want to “sacrifice jobs” on the altar of “climate regulations.”

    Never once has anybody pointed out that there’s another side to the story.

    It’s simple, but I haven’t heard it spoken out loud even once, from NPR to CBS: “There are huge profits to be made in poisoning us and our Earth, and the people profiting from that have and are funding politicians, ‘think tanks’ and PR firms, and television networks (via advertising), to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades. The people denying science are doing so because of the cash.”

    Why the hell won’t anybody say that out loud?

    ExxonMobil, we now know, has known about the damage their products were doing to our planet since at least the 1980s. Instead of changing their business plan, they began to directly and indirectly fund climate-change-denying groups in a big way. The Kochs aren’t idiots, yet their network of corporate and billionaire funders is one of the main sources of money to politicians like Pruitt and, presumably, Trump (in the largest sense).

    We are being poisoned for profits, and the scientists who are pointing this out are being shut down. And in the case of high-profile scientists like Michael Mann, even subject to extraordinary levels of harassment.

    The waste materials from fossil fuel use and production are killing our planet and us. From cancers and asthma, to global warming, to driving wars around the world, these poisons are fouling our politics as well as our air, water, and food supply.

    This is not a secret. Electronic and print media that don’t take large amounts of money from fossil fuel interests have documented this in excruciating detail over the years (“…Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business,” for example, by Frank Rich in The New York Times).

    But our TV media, and our politicians, both beholden to the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it produces, won’t even say it out loud.

    When Trump says that he won’t sacrifice jobs for the environment, this lazy media and the politicians it’s willing to put on the air won’t even point out the simple truth that a cleaner environment actually creates jobs.

    Trump repealed the streams rule, so that coal companies can dump poisonous waste directly into our rivers and streams. He said he was doing it to “protect jobs.” But that makes no sense: there’s a lot more work/jobs involved in designing, building, and implementing systems to prevent or clean up fossil fuel poisons than there is in hiring a guy with a dump truck to throw waste into the river.

    Doing away with President Obama’s rules that moved in the direction of cleaning up coal-fired power plants won’t “save jobs”: to the contrary, the people who designed smokestack scrubbers (for example), the companies that manufactured them, the people who maintain and clean them, will all lose their jobs.

    The only “new jobs” that will come from more poison in our air are in the medical field, as more cancers and lung diseases show up in our ERs. And if that’s his pitch, why doesn’t anybody in the media ask him to say it out loud?

    Our TV and radio “press” are not delivering actual news when they ignore the takeover of our body politic by petro-billionaires or, even worse, continue to give air-time to science deniers.

    And they’re not serving the interest of us or our world when they fail to point out that Trump’s and the GOP’s anti-science policies are actually killing people – and are only “helping” the “economy” of a few very, very rich fossil fuel empires.
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    http://www.vox.com/energy-and-enviro...olar-jobs-coal

    There are now twice as many solar jobs as coal jobs in the US



    Putting solar panels on rooftops and arrays is a labor-intensive process. You need people to design and manufacture the panels. Then people to market the panels to homes, businesses, and utilities. Then people to come and install them.

    It all adds up to a lot of jobs. Even though solar power still provides just a fraction of America’s electricity — about 1.3 percent — the industry now employs more than 260,000 people, according to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation. And it’s growing fast: Last year, the solar industry accounted for one of every 50 new jobs nationwide.

    To put this all in perspective: “Solar employs slightly more workers than natural gas, over twice as many as coal, over three times that of wind energy, and almost five times the number employed in nuclear energy,” the report notes. “Only oil/petroleum has more employment (by 38%) than solar.”

    Now, mind you, comparing solar and coal is a bit unfair. Solar is growing fast from a tiny base, which means there's a lot of installation work to be done right now, whereas no one is building new coal plants in the US anymore. (Quite the contrary: Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) So solar is in a particularly labor-intensive phase at the moment. Still, it’s worth thinking through what these numbers mean.
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    Any improvement in solar numbers is good news, of course. But the US is lagging far behind other countries like Germany or even China, for fucks sake.

    If the US path to solar energy had actually stayed on the path that Jimmy Carter established in the late 70s, we would be way ahead of everyone else in energy independence by now, nearly 40 years down the road. Instead, it was the first thing dismantled by the Reagan/BCE regime when they took over in 1981.

    And now with Cheeto and his three ring nazi circus in town, It's doubtful there will be any more meaningful growth in Solar or any other 21st century form of energy.

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