- Joined
- Apr 18, 2013
- Messages
- 93,583
- Reaction score
- 81,661
- Location
- Barsoom
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
Republicans Propping Up the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Borderline Socialist
Technically it’s crony capitalism, but it’s closer to socialism than what Democrats want.
slate.com
12/28/20
Republicans have been remarkably successful in labeling Democrats as socialists. But Democratic proposals that get tagged as “socialism” amount to little more than expanding the safety net, bringing the United States closer to Sweden, Canada, or Germany, all prosperous, democratic, capitalist countries. By contrast, Republicans are the ones that are gumming up the gears of American capitalism, promoting policies to prop up aging, anachronistic industries and, worst of all, enabling the imposition of environmental harms far in excess of what it would cost to avoid them. Republicans say they are in favor of capitalism, but they are actually in favor of crony capitalism, which tips the scales in favor of their favorite industries. Capitalism can be a tough master: The point of capitalism is that competition causes some industries to fail. But protecting industries from failure in exchange for political benefit is far worse: It is a dangerously short step to socialism. And traditional socialism necessarily implies authoritarianism—how else is a country to undertake central economic planning except by an authoritarian government? That is actually where the Republican Party is taking us. Exhibit A: This past summer, 36 Republican senators and representatives singled out energy companies and wrote to President Donald Trump urging him to “prevent financial institutions from discriminating against America’s energy sector.” Discriminating?
Exhibit B: The Trump administration has spent more than $1 billion of taxpayer money trying to figure out how to capture the global-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, so as to be able to keep them running. That, despite the fact that not a single coal-fired power plant has been proposed for construction since 2017; even the plant that was proposed then was scrapped earlier this year. But that has not discouraged Republicans from trying to prop up coal. The essence of the Republican strategy boils down to favoring their patron industries, maintaining 100-year-old tax subsidies for fossil fuels, and pushing hard for environmental deregulation that allows companies to pollute and dump and accelerate our frightening rush toward climate change. Environmental harms from pollution are real costs that polluting industries should bear, just like their other costs of production. But thanks to Republican interventions, these costs are instead borne by the American public in the form of millions of avoidable illnesses and hundreds of thousands of lives lost annually to pollution from coal-fired power plants, harmful pesticides sprayed over millions of acres of crops, and toxic chemicals that are everywhere, even in the fabric of your living room sofa. In the Republican worldview, “liberty” and “freedom” are the unfettered ability of their political cronies to rob Americans of their health, well-being, and lives.
The GOP subsidization of fossil-fuel industries that bring ruin upon our environment and contribute mightily to climate warming has to stop.
I hope John Kerry is more than merely a figurehead climate czar.