Where do all these people come from who actually seem to root for the oil and gas industries? I mean, I like indoor lighting and heat as much as anyone. But my self-worth isn’t wrapped up in record corporate profits. And I find nothing threatening at all about taxing carbon as part of a comprehensive approach to combating climate change.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I don’t think it’s just the energy industries. The country is full of people who pretty much literally worship any big industry or company. They are the ones who feel completely dependent on powerful authoritarian figures for the largess that makes their lives possible. Government is seen as a threat to these godlings, and therefore to their worshipers — who are the same people who most loudly rant about their love of liberty.
Golly, I don’t know.
The economy of Alaska depends on oil drilling and pumping.
The economy of Texas has a large oil services sector and the headquarters of several major oil companies.
The economy of Oklahoma has the headquarters of yet another oil company and is still in the energy market, plus Kerr McGee was huge in the nuclear energy field and there might be folks associated with it still in Oklahoma and the Southwest.
Louisiana is a major refinery state. And there is major offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico with support establishments in Texas and Louisiana.
Alabama and Tennessee still have a little coal mining, Southwestern Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and all of West Virginia are still mining coal, often in non-union mines, there are coal mines in southeastern Ohio and central and western Pennsylvania and even union miners have been known to vote Republican.
North Dakota is a major coal producer and North Dakota and Montana have large oil shale deposits.
There are whole communities whose livelihood is perceived to be threatened by restrictions on carbon fuels. And the folks there are scared, their relatives are scared, the politicians are fanning the fears, and it is rapidly becoming another pachyderm paranoid frenzy.
It isn’t about self-worth, it’s about jobs. What are the transferable skills that would cause an employer to hire a miner or a roughneck or a refinery worker in this super-specialized job market? People in these industries feel trapped, just like rustbelt workers felt trapped a generation ago, and textile workers felt trapped two decades ago.
Until someone actually puts some “green jobs” in these areas–and jobs that pay better than what they are making now and are more stable–there is going to be this opposition.
And for all their free market talk, they don’t trust market mechanism to make the transition. That is why they see cap-and-trade and carbon taxes, two ways of pricing in the market, as socialist. But would be open to direct government investment in oil exploration, clean coal technology, and oil shale refining, which for some reason is not socialist.
This just reveals what the libertarian movement is really about: it’s about having taxes as small as possible. Just like the religious right hides behind “family values” in their opposition to gays and abortion, libertarians hide behind “freedom” and “the market.”
However, most libertarians I know, despite not supporting a carbon tax/cap and trade all support government investment into green energy, and the removal of oil subsidies. Although…most libertarians I know don’t believe in global warming.
Sure, I can understand people whose jobs are threatened, but most of these people are loafer-wearing Rich Lowry wannabes.
The loafer-wearers likely own stock in these industries… or expect to inherit wealth from their parents’ stocks… or expect to be rich enough some day to be shareholders…
And then there are the lower class wage slaves who want to protect the privileges of The Rich because any day now gawd is going to answer their prayers and miraculously make them rich. There are vast groups of people who self-identify with The Ruling Class who will never remotely be a part of it.
The political entrepreneurial class who wants to live at the government trough by pretending to help those whose jobs are threatened. Like Sarah Palin, it’s their gravy train.
It’s not that they’re rooting for them, it’s that they see green energy as part of the liberal agenda, and they find scientific subjects deeply threatening to their religious views.
Yes, even climate change threatens their religion, as this schmuck laid out in a congressional hearing:
Did you see the latest NSF report?
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/04/evolution-big-bang-polls-omitted.html
Our country isn’t just scientifically illiterate, we’re on theocratic proportions here. There are people in my engineering department who don’t believe in evolution; there’s not many, but they’re there. A few weeks ago while I was sitting inside the AOE lounge, some guy who is actually very intelligent was talking about how global warming isn’t real. Seeing as I’m fairly literate about this subject, and I know where to send people if there’s something I don’t know off of the top of my head, I decided to engage. After about a half hour I think I got him to accept that he was wrong, or at least needed to do more homework before he tried making his silly accusations.
I’m getting tired of having to engage these religious nutjobs. And people wonder why I hate organized religion with such a passion…
But you’re taking his religious protestations at face value. Those are meant for his constituents’ consumption. Check his bank account to see what Jesus he believes in.
“Where do all these people come from who actually seem to root for the oil and gas industries?”
Alternet recently had a piece about a couple of hyper rish right-wing Texas oilmen brothers by the name of Koche who have been funding right-wing causes since their father funded the founding of the John Birch Society. They spend millions each year churning out think tank experts and red faced protest groups for every issue of the moment.
And in before them there was the Hunt brothers and their dad H. L. Hunt before them. And H. L. was pushing anti-communism tract through local chambers of commerce in the 1950s and 1960s. All oil guys. All richer than any Bush. All behind the scenes.
And none of whom had done a damn useful thing to earn the huge rewards that they reaped. The Great American Lottery strikes again.
You also have to throw in people who think cap-and-trade is a lovely small problem solution, but that the volatility inherent in the trade part would not provide the price stability to allow for long term investment in other energy sources.
The cap-and-dividend solution seems to limit this volatility and would be very popular with the People, as the oil revenue checks are popular in Alaska.
I still think a cap-and-share solution would be best. Instead of pretending speculation can’t distort/destroy trade markets or buying votes with dividend checks while assuming they will somehow limit certain pollution indirectly, why not redistribute a small portion of energy sector revenue back to those producers who create/extract the value in such a manner that they reduce emissions year to year, relative to both themselves and their competitors. To me that sounds like a market solution that does the least to distort the energy market while providing a mechanism for directly rewarding the behavior we want.
In short, we shouldn’t increase the cost of dirty energy, but rather reduce the cost of clean energy.