How conservatives and the right-wing media are literally destroying the planet

I'm really going to let fly on this one, so if you have sensitive "ears" you might want to skip this post. I didn't name this the Soapbox for nothing!

One of the things I was hoping would happen when Obama was elected was that we would finally get some serious environmental legislation. The folks in Congress should have had this written and ready to go when he hit office. People were actually starting to show some concern about environmental issues, especially after the success of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, about climate change and the state of the environment. Finally it was on people's radar screens! Not so now. Recently, in a poll of what the most important national issues were, the environment came in dead last.

We are now over a year and a half into this presidency and we have lost the advantage we had in the Senate to get things passed, now having to rely on a Republican or two to get anything done. The right-wing media played up what is now known as "Climategate," the controversy that started in November of 2009 when some e-mails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were hacked into and released on the Internet, with certain passages picked out and twisted to make it appear as though these scientists were deliberately manipulating their data. These e-mails were used by the right wing to convince people that climate change was a hoax and that the science to support human activity-caused global warming was not there.

We heard a lot about this when it happened. However, on July 7th of this year, after three separate and independent reviews into the situation, the University and its scientists were completely absolved of any manipulation of the data. The scientific concensus that global warming, a.k.a. climate change, was real and that it was caused in large part by human activity was upheld by the reviews. If you hadn't heard anything about this, it wouldn't surprise me, because the media barely mentioned it. I'm sure this had no airplay whatsoever on Fox News or at any Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlet.

The right-wing media outlets are masters at twisting the facts, and out-and-out lying. I've actually had people I work with, people who are otherwise intelligent folks, parrot back to me bullshit they heard on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or some other right-wing outlet. Because this is all they listen to, they know nothing about environmental issues. Case in point: I work with a guy who is pretty good with computers, who is a fanatic about eating healthy -- he won't even drink Coke -- but when I tried to talk to him about organic cotton he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. When I told him non-organic cotton has toxins like formaldehyde (yeah, the stuff they pickle you in to preserve the body after you die), he shrugged and said he would just wash the clothes first before he wore them. OMG - has anyone ever heard of permanent press? Does this wash out, or hello, isn't it called permanent?

Senator Kerry has written a climate change bill that includes caps on greenhouse gas emissions. However, this week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the bill was not passable due to lack of Republican support, and instead has introduced a much smaller bill that does not include any caps for greenhouse gases. The odds of even this bill passing, in my opinion, are slim and none. The only Republican who looked like a possible vote for a climate change bill, Lindsey Graham, is now saying that the science has changed, and that the warnings about it were "oversold." Whaaaat???? Did he miss the memo about the scientists at UEA being absolved of manipulating data while he was busy watching Fox News???

Let's face it -- the right wing doesn't give one cold, dead rat's ass about the environment. They are now and always have been on the side of big oil and big coal, and damn the environmental consequences. They're claiming that they don't want the bill because it "isn't paid for." That's bullshit, pure and simple. When they had the majority they didn't care that Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy weren't paid for. They didn't care that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (the war in Iraq, in particular, being a made-up and unnecessary one), weren't paid for. In fact, these two wars, which will cost us in the trillions of dollars, was kept out of the Republican Congress' budget completely! So don't give me this crap that saving the environment isn't paid for. The simple truth is that conservatives don't care. As I said in a previous post, the gasoline tax is long overdue for a raise. We could pay for this bill by doing just that, but as I also said in that post, Congress will never do it because it might mean they wouldn't get reelected. And what a tragedy that would be.

I would like to have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and I would like to have my food grown on land that is not full of chemicals, thank you. I would like to be able to look at the city skyline and not see brown. I would like for the glaciers to stop melting at alarming rates. I would like for future generations to be able to actually eat healthy fish out of the oceans. I would like for the polar bears and the caribou to be left the hell alone to live out their lives as nature intended them to. And I would like to not ever see high ozone level warnings on the local weather report. Call me crazy.

But will I ever be able to see those things? No. Not because it's not logical, not because it should be common sense, but because the Drill, Baby, Drill conservatives and the right wing care more about big oil and big coal making more and more money than they do about the health of our environment for ourselves and for future generations.

Which is not only unbelievably sad, but downright immoral. That's right, I consider anyone who cares more about making money than they care about the health of themselves, their children, wildlife and the environment in general to be as immoral as they come. That should be a logical conclusion for anyone, but greed is a powerful thing, and right now it's controlling all our lives in ways we will come to regret later -- when it's too late.

President Obama - please raise my taxes

I didn't mistype the heading. I really do think that we need to raise taxes on people who can afford it, particularly those very well-to-do people who got the lion's share of the tax cuts under the Bush administration. That isn't me, by the way! But I do make enough money that I can afford a small tax increase, and if we want to cut the deficit and still have Social Security available in the future -- and we had better have it available, considering employers are ditching their retirement plans faster than I can down a bag of M&M's -- then we need to raise taxes.

But politicians only talk about cutting taxes, not raising them. Why? Because cutting taxes gets them reelected. This isn't about what's best for the country in the long-term, this is about their jobs, which frankly is all they seem to care about. Look at the European countries who are doing the tough thing to balance their budgets, meaning cutting services and raising taxes. It is impossible to balance this budget, with the deficit we face due to so many years of Republican rule where the wealthy and large corporations made out like bandits, without raising taxes.

Yes, there are a lot of people out of work. But they won't be hit by tax increases. There are people who are struggling, but tax increases can be structured so they won't get hit, either. Think about these recent headlines: 1.7 million iPhone 4's were sold in three days. 1 million iPads were sold in 28 days. You can't tell me there aren't people out there with disposable income who could stand a little tax increase. By the way, the Bureau of Economic Analysis recently reported that we now have the lowest tax rate since 1950. The lowest tax rate in 60 years!!

First, you let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Then you look at increasing the gasoline tax, big time. The gasoline tax has been 17 cents a gallon since a gallon of gas was $1, which means it was 17%. Now that gas is $2.58 a gallon, what is the gas tax? 17 cents. That's 6.6%. We need to increase this by at least 25 cents a gallon. 17% would be 43 cents a gallon, so say we raise it 26 cents over the current 17 to make it 43 cents. That would make a gallon of gas $2.84, and that's still quite a lot below its high of well over $4.

Not only would raising the gas tax increase revenues, but it might finally push more people to get into fuel-efficient cars, particularly hybrids, thereby helping to forestall climate change. (By the way, if you could find a non-hybrid regular car that got 45+ mpg -- currently there is no such animal -- you would still be putting out more pollution than a hybrid car that gets the same gas mileage. That's why I think the government should do all it can to push for hybrids, plug-in hybrids, electric cars, and clean energy sources to power them.)

Make no mistake about it, Europe, China and Japan are going full-speed ahead with clean energy and more fuel efficient cars. China is investing 10 times the amount of money we are on clean energy research. We can either get with the program, or we can be left behind. Again.

So, Mr. President, reverse course and raise my taxes. But only after the Bush tax cuts, which never should have been passed in the first place, are allowed to expire.