Toxic swamp

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This article was published 05/08/2017 (2994 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dick Russell paints a revolting picture of powerful Americans with minds so diseased by ambition and greed you’d expect to find them in a petri dish.

In Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the well-regarded environmental writer says this dangerous and influential multitude knows full well that global warming is destroying the planet. He accuses them of denying it and being opposed to doing anything about it because they are connected to major polluters of our world, and are seeking personal and political gain.

To Russell, these corrupt men — located in the highest echelons of both United States business and Donald Trump’s government — sit atop a mountain of flabbergasting hypocrisy and an unending downpour of cheating and lying, in which they willingly sacrifice our planet, and even the future of their own children and grandchildren, to keep fattening their dirty pockets and hold on to their power. And they do this, says Russell, knowing that the world is irrefutably heating up and for certain will become unlivable unless we stop it. This isn’t white-collar crime, infers Russell. This is murder.

Russell, an American author and environmental journalist, pulls no punches condemning the immorality of those he names the enemies of Earth. His book is disturbing because there’s now a man in the White House who feels even stronger than most of these men, if that’s possible, that climate change is a hoax and environmental protection is unnecessary. And the president’s views doubtlessly embolden his fellow travellers in the oil, gas and coal industries and his appointees from their ranks.

Take Trump’s secretary of state — the U.S. government’s top diplomat, Rex Tillerson. As the former head of ExxonMobil, the world’s richest fossil fuels corporation, Russell says Tillerson and others sponsored a massive disinformation campaign to discredit environmental protection and purposely confuse and complicate the issue of climate change, in the hopes people will just give up in frustration and walk away from it.

If Russell is right, what’s even more disturbing is what he says is Exxon’s newfound enthusiasm (buoyed by Trump’s win) to fully develop the Alberta tarsands thanks to the new Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S., which Trump has now approved. Russell says this future mining will release 5,000 gigatons of carbon into the environment. (One gigaton is a billion tons.)

The problem, says Russell, is that a few years ago scientists determined that maybe, just maybe, the release of only another 900 gigatons will put the world on a one-way street to annihilation.

Then there’s Scott Pruitt, Trump’s appointee to head up the country’s Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). Russell says he’s a liar who has been described as “the most hostile EPA administrator in history towards clean air and safe drinking water.” Astonishingly, after he joined the EPA Pruitt told an audience that if it were to continue to operate like it did under Obama, it should be eliminated.

Pruitt’s friend, Harold Hamm, is the richest man in Oklahoma. The U.S. has 137,000 fracking wells and Hamm is the biggest player of all. (Fracking is using water to extract oil and gas from shale.)

Hamm — who turned down Trump’s offer of a cabinet job — says overpopulation, not pollution, is the chief cause of climate change. That, notes Russell, doesn’t explain the alarming rise in earthquakes caused by fracking.

And, says Russell, science concluded in 2011 that fracking wells could cause more global warming than coal mining.

Then there’s the Koch brothers. They’re worth US$50 billion apiece.

They’re the world’s largest exporter of oil from the tarsands, and have spent a fortune over the years trying to block climate-change reforms. Russell says they tell people climate change is good for the earth.

And Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, no less than the head of the U.S. Senate’s environmental committee, is a man whom Russell says gets more campaign money from oil and gas interests than anyone else in politics. He believes global warming is the “greatest hoax” ever perpetrated on the American people.

Russell concludes a blizzard of facts — undeniable and irrefutable — proves the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is killing our planet.

Yet, he warns, the world’s richest democracy is being lulled into believing everything is OK thanks to corrupt and deceitful leaders of industry, a docile government headed by an inept president and his amateur advisors, all kinds of politicians for sale and government appointees with outrageous conflicts of interest.

The message in Russell’s book is simple: Let us pray.

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.