On Friday, December 20th, Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren finally separated herself clearly from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, regarding the issue of climate change and global warming. Here is the story:
TransCanada Corporation wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to carry oil from Alberta Canada's tar sands to two refineries owned by Koch Industries near the Texas Gulf Coast, for export to Europe; and Hillary Clinton has helped to make that happen, but Elizabeth Warren has now taken the opposite side.
Secretary of State Clinton, whose friend and former staffer Paul Elliot is a lobbyist for TransCanada, had worked behind the scenes to ease the way for commercial exploitation of this, the world's highest-carbon-emitting oil, 53% of which oil is owned by America's Koch Brothers. (Koch Industries owns 63% of the tar sands, and the Koch brothers own 86% of Koch Industries; Elaine Marshall, who is the widow of the son of the deceased Koch partner J. Howard Marshall, owns the remaining 14% of Koch Iindustries.)
David Goldwyn, who "served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs," is yet another lobbyist for TransCanada. So, TransCanada has two of Hillary's friends working for them. Misters Elliot and Goldwyn thus worked intimately with Hillary's people to guide them on selecting a petroleum industry contractor (not an environmental firm, much less any governmental agency) to prepare the required environmental impact statement for this proposed pipeline.
Hillary Clinton as the Secretary of State had already displayed a record of carrying out the policies that were being promoted by her lobbyist friends, when she did everything possible, early in President Obama's first term, to support U.S. funding for the fascist junta in Honduras that perpetrated a coup d'etat on 28 June 2009 overthrowing that nation's popular progressive democratically elected President, and who then installed their own regime, and promptly placed their country into a continuing violent terror that caused Honduras ever since to be the nation with the highest murder rate in the world. Hillary's lobbyist friend in that particular matter was Lanny Davis, who also is an occasional Fox News contributor.
Secretary Clinton's State Department thus allowed the environmental impact statement on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to be performed by a petroleum industry contractor that was chosen by the company that was proposing to build and own the pipeline, TransCanada. That contractor had no climatologist, and their resulting report failed even at its basic job of estimating the number of degrees by which the Earth's climate would be additionally heated if this pipeline is built and operated. Their report ignored that question, and instead evaluated the impact that climate change would have on the pipeline, which was estimated to be none.
President Obama himself is now trying to force the European Union to relax their anti-global-warming regulations so as to permit them to import the Kochs' dirty oil. His agent in this effort is his new U.S. Trade Representative, Michael Froman, from Wall Street.
But on December 20th, Senator Warren signed onto a letter criticizing the Obama Administration's apparent effort to force the European Union to agree to purchase this oil. As the Huffington Post's Kate Sheppard reported, "Six senators and 16 House members, all Democrats, wrote a letter to Froman on Friday asking him to elaborate on his position on the matter. 'If these reports are accurate, USTR's [the U.S. Trade Representative's] actions could undercut the EU's commendable goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in its transportation sectors," these 22 Democratic lawmakers wrote.
This is, essentially, a rebellion by 22 progressive congressional Democrats against the Clinton-Obama effort to provide a market for the Kochs' dirty oil. This letter was actually written by Representative Henry Waxman and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and co-signed by Senators Barbara Boxer, Ed Markey, Dick Durbin, Jeff Merkley, and Elizabeth Warren; and Representatives John Conyers, Jr., Barbara Lee, Raúl M. Grijalva, Rush Holt, Louise M. Slaughter, Jerrold Nadler, Judy Chu, Peter DeFazio, Anna G. Eshoo, Sam Farr, Peter Welch, Alan Lowenthal, Mark Pocan, and Steve Cohen.
What is at issue in the Keystone XL and Alberta tar sands matter is governmental policies that will determine whether the tar-sands oil will undercut the production-costs of normal oil. Right now, normal oil costs far less to mine, process, and get to market (because tar sands oil is so dirty and so land-locked). However, if the Kochs win, then the existing governmental policies will change in ways that will eliminate this cost-advantage of normal oil. The result of that would be increased sales and and burning of the tar-sands oil, and thus reduced sales and burning of cleaner oil. That would throw into the atmosphere "more than $70 billion in additional damages associated with climate change over 50 years." However, that added $70 billion would be the added harms to the entire world, not to the owners of the tar sands.
The benefits to Koch Industries, from this competitive re-allignment in favor of tar-sands oil, have been estimated to be around $100 billion. This would add about $45 billion to the net worth of David Koch, $45 billion to the net worth of Charles Koch, and $15 billion to the net worth of Elaine Marshall. (David and Charles would then become the two wealthiest individuals in the world.)
On December 17th, the Republican House budget chief, Paul Ryan, threatened to drive the U.S. Government into default unless President Obama approves the Keystone XL Pipeline.
President Obama holds the sole authority to approve or disapprove this project, because it crosses the international border, but he has delayed this decision for years, because he doesn't want to enrage the environmental community, and also because his tipping his hand in that way would be almost entirely a waste if he cannot first get Europe to weaken their environmental standards so as to allow this oil to compete in Europe with normal oil as if it weren't far more damaging to the climate than normal oil is -- just ignore that harm being added to the entire planet.
Thus, Senator Warren has now joined with the progressives on two big issues that arouse intense opposition to her from the aristocrats who finance most political campaigns: She opposes the taxpayer-handouts to Wall Street, and she now also opposes the entire planet's, basically, environmental handouts, to the owners of the most-harmfully polluting corporations, such as Koch Industries. (The other owners of tar-sands oil are Conoco-Phillips, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron-Texaco.)
This could be a turning-point in Warren's political career. She's no longer at war against only the financial industry corruption that dominates the conservative, Clinton and Obama, establishment within the Democratic Party (and all of the Republican Party), but she is also at war against their environmental corruption. For yet another example of that corruption: On 2 October 2013, Joe Romm at Think Progress headlined "More Bad News For Fracking: IPCC Warns Methane Traps Much More Heat," and he reported that, "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that methane ... is far more potent a greenhouse gas" than previously known, so bad it "would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal." And then, just five days after that, Jon Campbell in upstate New York headlined "In Oneida County, Hillary Clinton Touts U.S. Oil-and-Gas Production," and he reported that at Hamilton College, Hillary Clinton praised fracking for methane, by saying, "What that means for viable manufacturing and industrialization in this country is enormous." However, if Warren won't be able to get either Wall Street or the oil patch to finance her political campaigns, then how can she even possibly rise within the power-structure?
Clinton's extensive Wall Street network is already busy behind the scenes, to discredit if not smear Elizabeth Warren. If Big Oil will now be donating to Wall Street's pro-Hillary campaign against Warren, then Warren will be lucky even to keep her Senate seat.
There is precedent for such a backstage effort to tear down a Democrat who poses a potential threat to Hillary Clinton's political ambitions. As Britain's Telegraph reported on 27 April 2011, "Birther Row Began with Hillary Clinton," but Clinton herself stayed above that fray, and she only tacitly encouraged this campaign to tear down her primary opponent. However, when Republicans started to attack Barack Obama for attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright's congregation, Clinton immediately told the Republican Richard Mellon-Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review,
Character assassination does lasting political harm, and it works best against candidates whose policy-prescriptions are the hardest to attack; and every major politician knows that this is so.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.