The Oil Industry and Global Warming
I just met a guy whose career was drilling for oil; he’d been active all over North America and the Middle East for about 40 years until he retired ten years ago.
Naturally, I asked him for his thoughts on our civilization’s phasing out fossil fuels in favor of low-carbon sources of energy. He responded, “If you’re asking me if I believe in global warming, the answer is that I don’t. If it exists at all, it will take at least a million years to do any real damage to human beings, and by then, we will probably have disappeared through some other means.”
Now, this got me thinking. It was clear that he honestly believed this; he isn’t getting paid by Big Oil to spread their propaganda. It looks like the line from the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer” that includes the line, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
If you try hard enough, you can still, to this day, find a few scientists who do not buy the almost universally accepted theory of anthropogenic global warming. It takes diligence, but it can be done, with enough motivation.
Don’t forget: we live in a country in which about half of our people approve of this, i.e., that the president can threaten to remove the citizenship of anyone he doesn’t like.
As the ancient Greeks used to say, “The only people worthy of power are those who have no desire for it.”
Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss Donald Trump’s shifting explanation of the Ukraine weapons pause and why, according to Rep. Vindman, it’s “dangerous” that our “Commander-in-Chief is the last to know.”
A few years ago, when I was lucky enough to run into and introduce myself to author, activist, and heavy-duty environmentalist 
I love this guy’s idea here, and I wish I had this thought when my kids were young.
Natalie has a point here, but I would submit that it’s really both, rather than one or the other. “Ignorant yokels” (to use her phrase) are the targets of Big Oil’s propaganda machine. Educated people who respect and understand science do not buy this crap.
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In response to the meme at left, it’s not “miserable” that these people believe what they do. Many of history’s most revered intellectuals have commented that intelligent people are far less capable of happiness than the common idiot. Check out Arthur Schopenhauer and Aldous Huxley.
To understand this, you have to put yourself in the mindset of the typical MAGA Trump supporter. These people believe that any amount of criminality and violence is justified if it keeps Trump in office, so as to protect the United States from the woke, radical left.
