US fossil fuel companies spent $2 billion to Make America Dirty Again—and won
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US energy providers love to spread horror stories of what it would cost to actually clean up America’s power supply and slow global warming. But they certainly don’t mind spending money when it comes to keeping American covered in soot, coal ash, mercuryUS fossil fuel companies spent $2 billion to Make America Dirty Again—and won
US energy providers love to spread horror stories of what it would cost to actually clean up America’s power supply and slow global warming. But they certainly don’t mind spending money when it comes to keeping American covered in soot, coal ash, mercury, and all the other byproducts of a dirty energy industry. As a new study shows, the fossil fuel industry has spent over $2 billion fighting to make sure that America stays dirty. That expenditure, coming in just the period since 2000, means that over 10 times as much was spent by fossil fuel companies lobbying Congress to resist making any changes to address climate change than by all science, health and environmental groups pressing to take action. Despite the introduction of several major bills to limit carbon emissions in the USA, none of them have been passed. None of them have passed not because there wasn’t evidence to back their actions, or popular support for addressing the issue. As the paper shows, legislators have tended to make a simple equation: More lobbying means a higher level of interest. And fossil fuel companies have poured money into making sure that their products can be burned with increasingly fewer restrictions. Even as scientific consensus was developing and the world waking up to the size of the threat, oil, gas, and coal companies worked diligently to make sure that no substantial action would be taken. And that’s true even of companies that were publicly mouthing belief in climate change, even as they were putting down their dollars to fight it. Companies didn’t “come to the table” to negotiate with environmental groups as a means of finding the best way to deal with global warming. They didn’t sit down to hear what those groups had to say. They came to those meetings for the same purpose that they lobbied Congress: To make sure nothing happened. Their apparent “support” for climate change, was just a feint designed to make the public think that these companies had at last agreed to take action. When they were really just sitting to the same table with environmental groups to weaken and slow reaction under the guise of being reasonable. Read more