Just speculating, but I wonder how mindful this administration is of the predictable and assured chain of events, where whenever Biden speaks, it's almost immediately shoehorned into more "proof" propaganda by the usual suspects.
thack45 wrote:
Just speculating, but I wonder how mindful this administration is of the predictable and assured chain of events, where whenever Biden speaks, it's almost immediately shoehorned into more "proof" propaganda by the usual suspects.
Does it really matter? The "usual suspects" no longer are even striving for a fig leaf of truth, either domestic or abroad. Biden's words will be parsed and repackaged by enemies regardless of what he says so he might as well say the truth.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) lambasted Donald Trump’s praise of the Russian invasion of Ukraine last week, saying history was watching despite the former president’s repeated comments about Vladimir Putin being a “genius” who had been “smart” about the ruthless assault.
“How can anyone with any understanding of the world call Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine ‘genius’ and ‘very savvy’ as we watch him unite the rest of the world against Russia in nearly an instant?” Christie asked Monday on Twitter. He went on to say that Putin has two choices now: an “unwinnable occupation of Ukraine” or a “humiliating retreat.”
“Yeah, that’s ‘genius’ and ‘very savvy’ alright”
How anybody in this country, which loves freedom, can side with Vladimir Putin, who is an oppressor, a dictator, he kills people, he imprisons his political opponents, he has been an adversary of America at every chance he’s had, it’s unthinkable to me, it’s almost treasonous,
I voted for many Republicans. I don’t see how I’ll ever get back to that. They’ve just totally disappointed me and their support of Vladimir Putin, the praise they heap on him. Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin. This guy is a f*cking animal.
Biden could have taken some visible response to Putin's rather explicit and direct threats to our country and the alerting of his nuclear strike forces that soon followed it. So far he has done nothing.
Biden could have taken some swift action to remove the restrictions he foolishly placed on our domestic production of oil & gas. Petroleum exports are Russia's main source of foreign income. Under Biden's watch, we have gone swiftly from a net exporter of these vital commodities, to now to a significant importer of Putin's oil.
The sanctions Biden proposed have been significantly expanded at the initiative of our European allies. The rather spontaneous changes in national policy taken by the new Chancellor of Germany have had much more beneficial effect in this area than did the rather lukewarm actions taken by Biden.
As to Biden's supposed "tireless work" in this area, I'm a bit skeptical. He spent this last weekend home in Delaware.
Nostalgia for empire is what seems to drive Vladimir Putin — that and a desire to overcome the shame of punishing economic shock therapy imposed on Russia at the end of the Cold War. Nostalgia for American “greatness” is part of what drives the movement Donald Trump still leads — that and a desire to overcome the shame of having to face the villainy of white supremacy that shaped the founding of the United States and mutilates it still. Nostalgia is also what animates the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month, wielding their red-and-white flags like a conquering army, evoking a simpler time when their consciences were undisturbed by thoughts of the bodies of Indigenous children, whose remains are still being discovered on the grounds of those genocidal institutions that once dared to call themselves “schools.”
This is not the warm and cozy nostalgia of fuzzily remembered childhood pleasures; it’s an enraged and annihilating nostalgia that clings to false memories of past glories against all mitigating evidence.
All these nostalgia-based movements and figures share a longing for something else, something which may seem unrelated but is not. A nostalgia for a time when fossil fuels could be extracted from the earth without uneasy thoughts of mass extinction, or children demanding their right to a future, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, like the one just released yesterday, that reads, in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, like an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” Putin, of course, leads a petrostate, one that has defiantly refused to diversify its economic dependence on oil and gas, despite the devastating effect of the commodity roller coaster on its people and despite the reality of climate change. Trump is obsessed with the easy money that fossil fuels offer and as president made climate denial a signature policy.
The Canadian truckers, for their part, not only chose idling 18-wheelers and smuggled jerry cans as their protest symbols, but the leadership of the movement is also deeply rooted in the extra-dirty oil of the Alberta tar sands. Before it was the “freedom convoy,” many of these same players staged the dress rehearsal known as United We Roll, a 2019 convoy that combined a zealous defense of oil pipelines, opposition to carbon pricing, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and explicit nostalgia for a white, Christian Canada.
(...)
Given their common cosmologies, it should come as no surprise that Putin, Trump, and the “freedom convoys” are reaching toward one another across disparate geographies and wildly different circumstances. So Trump praises Canada’s “peaceful movement of patriotic truckers, workers, and families protesting for their most basic rights and liberties”; Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon cheer on Putin while the truckers sport their MAGA hats; Randy Hillier, a member of the Ontario Legislature who is one of the convoy’s loudest supporters, declares on Twitter that “Far more people have & will die from this shot [the Covid vaccines], than in the Russia/Ukraine war.” And how about the Ontario restaurant that last week put on its daily specials board the announcement that Putin “is not occupying Ukraine” but standing up to the Great Reset, the Satanists, and “fighting against the enslavement of humanity.”
(...)
The Green New Deal [...] happens to be the best way to cut off the petrodollars flowing to people like Putin, since green economies that have beat the addiction to endless growth don’t need imported oil and gas. And it’s also how we cut off the oxygen to the pseudo-populism of Trump/Carlson/Bannon, whose bases are expanding because they are far better at harnessing the rage directed at Davos elites than the Democrats, whose leaders, for the most part, are those elites.
Russia’s invasion underlines the urgency of this kind of green transformation, but it also throws up new challenges. Before Russia’s tanks started rolling, we were already hearing that the best way to stop Putin’s aggression is to ramp up fossil fuel production in North America. Within hours of the invasion, every planet-torching project that the climate justice movement had managed to block over the past decade was being frantically rushed back onto the table by right-wing politicians and industry-friendly pundits: every canceled oil pipeline, every nixed gas export terminal, every protected fracking field, every Arctic drilling dream. Since Putin’s war machine is funded with petrodollars, the solution we are told, is to drill, frack, and ship more of our own.
(...)
But here is a secret our movements often keep even from themselves: Since the price of oil plummeted in 2015, we have been fighting an industry with one hand tied behind its back. That’s because the cheaper, easier-to-access oil and gas is mostly depleted in North America, so the pitched battles over new projects have primarily been over unconventional, costlier to extract sources: fossil fuels trapped in shale rock, or under the seabed in the deep ocean, or under Arctic ice, or the semi-solid sludge of the Alberta tar sands. Many of these new fossil fuel frontiers only became profitable after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, which sent oil prices soaring. Suddenly, it made economic sense to make those multibillion-dollar investments to extract oil from the deep ocean or to turn Alberta’s muddy bitumen into refined oil. The boom years were upon us, with the Financial Times describing the frenzy in tar sands as “north America’s biggest resources boom since the Klondike gold rush.”
However, when the price of oil collapsed in 2015, industry’s determination to keep growing at such a frenetic pace wavered. In some cases, investors weren’t sure they would earn their money back, which led some majors to pull back from the Arctic and the tar sands. And with profits and stock prices down, divestment organizers were suddenly able to make the case that fossil fuel stocks weren’t just immoral, they were a lousy investment, even on capitalism’s own terms.
Well, Putin’s actions have untied the hand behind Big Oil’s back and turned it into a fist.
This explains the recent wave of attacks on the climate movement and on the handful of Democratic politicians who have advanced science-based climate action. Rep. Tom Reed, a Republican from New York, claimed last week, “The United States has the energy resources to knock Russia out of the oil and gas market entirely, but we don’t use those resources because of President Biden’s partisan pandering to the environmental extremists of the Democratic party.”
The precise opposite is true. If governments, many of whom ran promising Green New Deal-like policies over the past decade and half, had actually implemented them, Putin would not be able to flout international law and opinion as he has been doing so flagrantly, secure in the belief that he will still have customers for his increasingly profitable hydrocarbons. The underlying crisis we face is not that North American and Western European countries have failed to build out the fossil fuel infrastructure that would allow it to displace Russian oil and gas; it is that all of us — the U.S., Canada, Germany, Japan — are still consuming obscene and untenable amounts of oil and gas, and indeed of energy, period.
(...)
It’s worth pausing over some of the implications. If Germany can abandon an $11 billion pipeline because it’s suddenly seen as immoral (it always was), then all fossil fuel infrastructure that violates our right to a stable climate should also be up for debate. If BP can walk away from a 20 percent stake in a Russian oil major, what investment cannot be abandoned if it is premised on the destruction of a habitable planet? And if public money can be announced to build gas terminals in the blink of an eye, then it’s not too late to fight for far more solar and wind.
As Bill McKibben wrote in his excellent newsletter last week, Biden could help in this transformation, using powers only available during times of emergency, by invoking the Defense Production Act to build large numbers of electric heat pumps and shipping them to Europe to mitigate the pain of losing Russian gas. That is the creative spirit we need in this moment. Because if we are building new energy infrastructure — and we must — surely it should be the infrastructure of the future, not more toxic nostalgia.
(...)
War is reshaping our world, but so too is the climate emergency. The question is: Will we harness wartime levels of urgency and action to catalyze climate action, making us all safer for decades to come, or will we allow war to add more fuel to a planet already on fire? That challenge was put most sharply recently by Svitlana Krakovska, a Ukrainian scientist who is part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that produced this week’s report. Even as her country was under the Kremlin’s attack, she reportedly told her scientific colleagues in a virtual meeting that “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots, fossil fuels, and our dependence on them.”
Russia’s outrages in Ukraine should remind us that the corrupting influence of oil and gas lies at the root of virtually every force that is destabilizing our planet. Putin’s smug swagger? Brought to you by oil, gas, and nukes. The trucks that occupied Ottawa for a month, harassing residents and filling the air with fumes and inspiring copycat convoys around the word? One of the occupation’s leaders showed up in court a few days ago wearing an “I ♥ Oil and Gas” sweatshirt. She knows who her sponsors are. Covid-denialism and surging conspiracy culture? Hey, once you have denied climate breakdown, denying pandemics, elections, or pretty much any form of objective reality is a light lift.
At this late stage in the debate, much of this is well understood. The climate justice movement has won all the arguments for transformational action. What we risk losing, in the fog of war, is our nerve. Because nothing changes the subject like extreme violence, even violence that is being actively subsidized by the soaring price of oil. To prevent that from happening, we could do far worse than to take inspiration from Krakovska, who apparently told her colleagues at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in that closed-door meeting, “We will not surrender in Ukraine. And we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate-resilient future.” Her words so moved her Russian counterpart, eye witnesses reported, that he broke ranks and apologized for the actions of his government — a brief glimpse of a world looking forward, not back.
