Green rhetoric for greenbacks = greenhouse gas

Photo:Vlad Lazerian, Creative Commons, Flickr

Last years' political campaign managers marketed their products with the environmental green brand standard in industry, including even the weapons industry.  Most high profile, highly funded politicians' images now resemble that of oil giant British Petroleum, which rebranded itself as BP, Beyond Petroleum, with the bright yellow sun on a green background logo that now identifies every BP gas station all over the world. 

During the past two years, BP sold or outsourced most of its relatively minor rebranding investments in solar energy to get Back to Petroleum, but, it's still using its green brand solar logo, and, it's still BP. Not British Petroleum.  BP.

Similarly, H.R. 2454, the so-called Clean Energy Bill crafted by our freshly green branded politicians in D.C. actually favors dirty, fossil fuel energy over renewables, although both the coal and oil'n gas industries, with their their own elaborate green brands, keep complaining that it's just not fair, to them.  

The draft of H.R. 2454, which the Senate and House are likely to vote on in June, also creates a huge market for carbon trading credits, which the late great comedian George Carlin likened to "killing credits" that major military powers might exchange when one of them hadn't bumped off their globally tolerated quota of the world's people in any given year. 

In "Climate bill packed with protections for the coal industry," Ken Ward of the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette, in the heart of coal country, writes:

"Lawmakers have put off the most major pollution reductions until after 2020, have weakened carbon dioxide limits that would apply to specific coal-fired power plants, and are giving tens of billions of dollars in free pollution permits to coal-fired utilities."

Some say that H.R. 2454 will even hasten climate hell.

Also included in this year's government sponsored eco offenses are:

---the American Stimulus and Recovery Act of 2009's provision of $29 billion for highways and bridges, trumping $8.6 billion for public transit, with no immediate operating funds to stave off mass transit fare hikes, service cuts, and lay-offs all over the country. 

---Obama's new EPA's approval of 42 out of 48 new permits for mountaintop removal by the coal industry, in Appalachia.

---California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's sudden championship of new oil drilling off the Santa Barbara, California coast, despite his repeated promises to protect it, and,

---Both California Governor Schwarzenegger and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's championship of electric cars, rather than public transit as a response to global warming. 

On May 27th, the Green Party's San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi spoke for much of the outraged, desperate, environmental community, at a Greenpeace rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, when he railed against empty green political rhetoric, at every level of government, and called for local action and local control: 

Indeed.