Petro state

This chart pisses me off. The US recently pumped 10.25 million barrels of oil per day, a record.

While Europe and China are rapidly decreasing their reliance on fossil fuels by turning to clean alternatives, what is the US doing? Cracking open the foundation of the country to squeeze oil and gas out (AKA fracking). Opening up Alaskan and mainland coastal waters to drilling. Building pipelines to facilitate tar sands oil out of Canada.

I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. The damage CO2 is doing to our planet is no mystery. Ask the people in California and Texas who lost their homes to fires and flooding. Visit Puerto Rico. Or maybe talk with the 40 million people (not a typo) in South Asia who have been affected by flooding and landslides. But the profits of the oil and gas sector matter more than the victims of climate change.

I wrote a blog today for Preventable Surprises about this. It mainly faults large US investors for not joining ClimateAction100, a coalition of investors that will engage with the world’s largest polluters to force emissions down. There are 225 members of ClimateAction100. They include the largest investment firms in Europe but not America. I don’t fully understand the link between the chart above and the reticence of US investors to join the climate fight. But I think there is a link and I think we all will pay a very high price for the continued extraction of the fossil fuels that are slowly killing us.
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